The fishing cat is up and running! We have 90 days to raise the first round of funds for the CAT in WATER expedition. Check out our Kickstarter project and watch the short video. You can also learn about all the paybacks in store for our supporters. Who wouldn’t want a care package from Thailand and the knowledge they are helping a gorgeous, wild animal in need?
Finally, an idea to show the progress of conservation. My first contribution to Nature Needs Half goes live. Watch the trailer and find out how Nature Needs Half could apply to your home.We can reach the goal, one piece at a time.
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Go on a virtual travel adventure for conservation with images (one of them is mine!) from the RAVE Retrospective by the International League of Conservation Photographer’s. RAVEs, or Rapid Assessment Visual Expeditions, consist of teams of professional iLCP photographers who explore a region facing imminent environmental threat to document as much of its nature, culture and environmental impacts as possible in a short amount of time, usually a few weeks at most.
The select images featured on Discovery.com’s “Planet Green” will give you the 4-1-1 on all the RAVEs that have taken place to date, including ones in Bioko, the Yucatan, Great Bear Rainforest, Canada’s Flathead wilderness and the Chesapeake Bay.
Better yet, you can check out these and other amazing photographs at the G2 Gallery in Venice, Cali., from January 4 – February 13.
iLCP RAVE list (so far!):
In the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco, abandonment of religious beliefs is transforming the wild.
High Atlas Mountains, Morocco (Photo/Jerzy Strzelecki)
For Morocco’s Amazig people, who long looked to their saints for guidance on how to manage their land, a loss of religion spells big changes for nature. Locals are shifting from a communal outlook to a more self-serving one, a switch that bears consequences for people and ecosystems alike, according to a new study in the journal Human Ecology. The study indicates that when people manage the land for themselves rather than the good of all, what’s here today could be gone, or at least different, tomorrow.
Historically, beliefs in local Islamic Saints encouraged a communal mindset when it came to managing resources in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. For instance, in spring, the Amazig would often set some pastures off-limits, saving them for harder times, a practice known as Agdal.
But as the Amazig abandon tradition, a new environment begins to take shape. Pablo Dominguez from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain and his colleagues observed and interviewed families from 80 households in Warzazt, Morocco, from 2003 to 2008. They found a close relationship between the loss of traditional religious beliefs and expansion of farmland and introduction of new sheep species.
The impacts of these practices are not yet fully understood, but one thing’s for certain, this study takes a fresh tack on natural resource management, emphasizing the ways religion plays a pivotal role in how cultures use and change their environment.
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At the risk of sounding arrogant, I have to say that I have one of the coolest jobs in the world. I work as the science writer for CIRES, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. My job doesn’t stop at writing about science. Being a photographer and multimedia producer play equal parts.
In this instance, I got to hit the trail with Jimmy McCutchan and Tommy Detmer, a couple of CIRES scientists studying the effects of fish introductions on formerly fishless lakes of Rocky Mountain National Park. Fish were introduced to support fly fishing from the 1800s until the 1960s. Now the National Park Service is working with CIRES to find out what’s happened to those lakes, knowledge that may help guide future management.
Their study also isn’t a bad way to work a little fly fishing into your science.
You can learn more about CIRES science at cires.colorado.edu, or check out the CIRESvideos channel on YouTube.com.
Along the Yucatan Peninsula, in a land of heat and drenching humidity thrives a rare mangrove ecosystem, important for coastal life and home to jaguarundi, hundreds of bird species and, yes, maybe a mosquito or two. I hope you enjoy this short jaunt into the mangroves, sans the mosquitoes, near Celestun in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. One afternoon doesn’t do a place like this justice, but it is a glimpse into this vulnerable ecosystem that is increasingly under threat from climate change, deforestation, pollution and coral reef degradation.
When my parents first told me they’d bought a tugboat, I thought, “Who buys tugboats, I mean, for fun?”
Let my education begin. Turns out, there are legions of tugboat enthusiasts. (A good place to start learning about them is at the Tugboat Enthusiasts Society of the Americas.) And the one my parents bought — a vintage Nordic tug and the first of its kind — makes them rather popular at tugboat get-togethers.
My firsthand experience came with a trip back to Washington State to visit my family late last September. We went out for a day on Puget Sound for what was to be one of the best and coolest family outings I’ve ever experienced. Not only did we all have a blast, but we saw more than our fair share of wildlife including seals and killer whales. And the tugs mellow pace, a cool 9 knots or less, gave us ample opportunity to soak in the view. There’s something to be said for slowing down.
After seeing how much fun my parents were having, especially my dad, a retired Navy commander, I’m no longer hard-pressed to understand why people fall in love with tugs.
You can tell when someone puts their heart into something. And young conservation photographer Hunter Nichols is one of those people. The camera is but a tool to help save a place that he loves, Alabama’s Cahaba River, an ecosystem falling apart under the stress of increasing urbanization.
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Conservation photography goes beyond iconic beauty shots of nature, connecting us with these places and their struggles for survival. Nichols not only takes us through a dream-scape river echoing with a cacophony of birds and wildlife, but shows us the active clear-cutting, new neighborhoods and environmental consequences of rapid urban sprawl. As Nichols says in his video, “we never miss something we never knew, but we suffer from what we’ve lost.”
Then again because of people like Nichols, we not only learn of the unknown places, but just might get to one-day experience them for ourselves. Watch this short video to see what Hunter is trying to protect, and learn a little something about conservation photography.
You can view more of Nichols’s work at hunternichols.tripod.com.
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For you naturephiles out there, there’s nothing like finding that local wildlife hotspot you can explore whenever the fancy takes you. For me, that place is Sawhill Ponds, a series of 18 reclaimed gravel pits that now support a wealth of interconnected habitats from meadow to woodlands and marshes. This busy microcosm offers more than a peaceful place to take a walk, no matter the season. There is an abundance of wildlife to enjoy, including owls, coyotes, waterfowl and frogs, and it’s all within a stone’s throw of downtown Boulder, Colo.
These images are part of a project documenting this wildlife refuge and its inhabitants through the year. Stay tuned in a couple of weeks for Sawhill Ponds: Winter.
A black-tailed prairie dog shouts the all clear from its burrow in a suburban Boulder neighborhood of Colorado.
On a visit to National Geographic.com today, I couldn’t believe my eyes as I looked at the Photo of the Day pick. There, featured in the little window was a thumbnail of an all too familiar prairie dog. I photographed him a few months back while hanging out along Boulder Creek Trail, and submitted the pic to National Geographic’s Your Shot.
Needless to say I’m jumping and pointing and wanting everyone to see, “make it your wallpaper!” But bottomline, it’s a reminder to me to enjoy local wildlife. Just because a species seems ubiquitous doesn’t mean it is, (the black-tailed prairie dog is being considered for endangered species listing). And even if an animal is common, isn’t it just as cool that we get see them?
Why not head out to take some pics of your own local wildlife? If you get any you like, feel free to shoot me an email, and with your permission and credit, I’ll post some on The Nature Files. Or better yet, submit it to Your Shot, you never know where it could end up!
To see more photos from moheimphotography, click the name.
You can support an expedition to find endangered fishing cats!
The Nature Files 