watching it rise

Botanical Otology: on Alex Metcalf’s Tree Listening Installation.

Humber; Or, Life in the Woods

It seems that some Toronto taggers are no longer content to scrawl their own names on blank concrete canvases around the city and are trying instead to make more of a cultural statement. Last year, references to composer Gustav Mahler popped up in several places around town. This year, a more cryptic stencil has appeared on the Humber Bay Arch Bridge, boldly proclaiming “ISBN 486-28495-6″ for all to see and ponder. This International Standard Book Number turns out to be a paperback edition of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; Or, Life in the Woods.
– Val Dodge

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Smile you’re on ele-vision

[John Downer] fixed webcams to four elephants. One carried a “trunk-cam” - a device resembling a huge log concealing a camera which could be held in its trunk and dangled close to the ground.

Another had a “tusk-cam” hooked over its tusk. The elephants moved so steadily that the images are pin-sharp. Other log-cams were left on the forest floor.
– Olinka Koster and Nigel Blundell

Whales are ‘cheetahs of the deep’

Super-fast pilot whales have been observed sprinting after prey, likely to include giant squid.

The rapid pursuit has brought comparisons with the fleet-footed land predator, the cheetah.

The cetaceans even use the same, highly specialised hunting strategy that cheetahs use, scientists report in the Journal of Animal Ecology.
– Matt Walker

Neptune’s Navy

One afternoon last winter, two ships lined up side by side in a field of pack ice at the mouth of the Ross Sea, off the coast of Antarctica. They belonged to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a vigilante organization founded by Paul Watson, thirty years ago, to protect the world’s marine life from the destructive habits and the voracious appetites of humankind. Watson and a crew of fifty-two volunteers had sailed the ships—the Farley Mowat, from Australia, and the Robert Hunter, from Scotland—to the Ross Sea with the intention of saving whales in one of their principal habitats. A century ago, when Ernest Shackleton and his crew sailed into the Ross Sea, they discovered so many whales “spouting all around” that they named part of it the Bay of Whales. (“A veritable playground for these monsters,” Shackleton wrote.) During much of the twentieth century, though, whales were intensively hunted in the area, and a Japanese fleet still sails into Antarctic waters every winter to catch minke whales and endangered fin whales. Watson believes in coercive conservation, and for several decades he has been using his private navy to ram whaling and fishing vessels on the high seas. Ramming is his signature tactic, and it is what he and his crew intended to do to the Japanese fleet, if they could find it.
– Raffi Khatchadourian

Stung: Elizabeth Kolbert writes about beekeeping and the recent disappearance of a large percentage of the worlds bees.

Not long ago, I found myself sitting at the edge of a field with a bear and thirty or forty thousand very angry bees. The bear was there because of the bees. The bees were there because of me, and why I was there was a question I found myself unable to answer precisely.
– Elizabeth Kolbert

Diane Varner’s photoblog Daily Walks is well worth a look. This is one of my favorites.