Category: Uncategorized

Yes, the official opening date of the Natural History Museum in London was April 18, 1881, when the iconic building it still occupies saw its first visitors.  But the exhibits in the museum have a history that starts considerably before the official opening.

The famed British Museum opened in 1753 when the eclectic collections of Sir Hans Sloane were transferred to the British government upon his death.  Sloane’s collection included a little more than 70,000 items, from architectural remnants to fossils to biological specimens.  It was a broad and idiosyncratic compilation, but suited well to the appetites of curious aristocrats at the time.

But as time went on and the British Museum’s collections grew in scope and scientific value, space became tight and an organizing rationale was needed.  In 1856, Richard Owen, a renowned paleontologist, signed on to curate the natural history portion of the museum.  He quickly convinced the directors that a separate natural history building would relieve the space crunch and provide a proper status for exploring the natural world.

A few years later, architect Alfred Waterhouse took up the project, designing the building that became the Natural History Museum.  When the new museum opened on April 18, 1881, it was an architectural and exhibition masterpiece.  The sprawling building is covered in terra cotta tiles, used because they were resistant to the harsh air quality of Victorian London.  The Romanesque structure dominates the landscape, with blocky spires at the corners and a soaring central tower.  Waterhouse designed “a cathedral for nature,” as revealed by the interior.  The central hall rises to a dizzying height, with walls of windows at the ends that resemble those of a church nave.  Arched galleries like chapels line the side walls, topped by a higher floor of more intricate three-arched openings.  At the end of the building, where an altar or statue of Jesus would adorn a cathedral, a broad staircase rises to an out-sized alabaster statue of Charles Darwin.

But then come the natural history details.  The columns that border doorways to adjacent hallways are sculpted to resemble the main stems of both living and fossil plants. The columns are inhabited with climbing monkeys, perching birds, crouching frogs  and trailing flowers.  The ceiling is covered with tiles showing 162 plants representing the world’s flora—many of which were imported to England through the great voyages of exploration of that time.

The museum remained part of the British Museum until 1963, when it was separately chartered.  The current name—the Natural History Museum, without a “British” or “London” modifier—arrived in 1992.  From those early specimens has grown one of the largest natural history museums in the world.  Today the museum houses 80 million specimens, representing the flora and fauna, both living and prehistoric, of the entire globe, along with mineral and other geological specimens.

Most museums in Victorian times were expensive to visit, but Owen insisted that the Natural History Museum be free and open to all.  It remains so to this day, along with its parent, the British Museum.  Consequently, it is the third most visited attraction in London, hosting more than 4.6 million enthralled visitors in the past year (the record was 5.6 million in 2013-2014).

They go to see astounding displays.  For four decades, the central hall held a Diplodocus skeleton that visitors fondly named “Dippy.”  It has been replaced by a hanging blue whale skeleton to represent the living biodiversity of the earth.  A wildlife garden adjoins the west side of the museum, a quiet refuge from the crowds. The newest addition is the Darwin Centre, which holds glass-walled laboratories for the museum’s 200 scientists where visitors can watch and participate in scientific work.  The dinosaur displays are considered the finest in the world.  My favorite area, however, is the “Treasures of the Museum” exhibit that shows a series of remarkable objects—an original copy of The Origin of Species, a collection of butterflies made by Alfred Russel Wallace, and many other priceless specimens.

References:

Pavid, Katie.  2018.  Indexing Earth’s wonders:  a history of the Museum.  Natural History Museum, 17 April 2018.  Available at:  http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/indexing-earths-wonders.html.  Accessed April 17, 2018.

Natural History Museum.  History and architecture.  Available at:  http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/history-and-architecture.html.  Accessed April 17, 2018.

If April 16, 1972, was a day on which Panda-Monium broke out in the U.S. because of the appearance of giant pandas, April 17 was a day of pandemonium  for another kind of beast—the Ford Mustang.

The 1964 ½ Ford Mustang could be purchased for the first time on April 17, 1964.  Car fans awaited the day with great anticipation.  Simultaneous ads ran on April 16 on the three major television networks, and the car was officially introduced at the New York World’s Fair.   Although we think of it as being named after a wild horse, the name actually comes from the World War II “Mustang” fighter plane.

The Ford Mustang was the “working man’s Thunderbird,” a sports car that could seat four and cost a modest $2300.  It could be plain and minimally powered, using parts re-tooled from the economy Ford Falcon, or it could be souped up in style and power.  A buying frenzy broke out on April 17—22,000 Mustangs were bought on that one day.  More than 400,000 were bought in the first year, and more than 9 million have been bought since then.

A friend during my freshman year at the University of Illinois in 1966 brought his Mustang down to school one weekend (freshmen couldn’t have cars on campus in those days).  He let me drive the cherry red convertible around campus.  Heads turned as I cruised up and down Green Street, and for the one and only time I felt like the BMOC.

And that’s the way Americans have always felt about their cars.  When I speak around the country about the BP oil spill, I tell audiences that the cause of the spill wasn’t the greed or disregard of the oil companies.  No, it is American addiction to oil.  We love our cars and, so, we have organized our society around driving the wonderful, beautiful things.  Around the neighborhood, around town, around the country.  From gas station to gas station.

Consequently, America—along with Canada, which also loves its cars—uses more oil than anywhere in the world.  With 4.5% of the world’s population, the U.S. uses 20% of the world’s petroleum.  With about 18% of the world’s population, China uses about 12% of its petroleum.  On a per person basis, the U.S. uses about 12 gallons per person per day, while China uses about 2 gallons per person per day—so, each American uses 6 times more petroleum each day to get by than a Chinese person does.

And where do we get that fuel for our cars?   From everywhere is the answer.  The U.S. produces about 80% of the oil we consume, a recent turn-around from decades of large and increasing oil imports.  That percentage of domestic production—the highest since 1964—has  grown recently with technologies that allow the exploitation of so-called “tight oil” (technologies like fracking, horizontal drilling and seismic imaging).  The U.S. imports the remainder from 84 different countries.  Most comes from Canada (40%), Saudia Arabia (9%), Mexico (9%), Venezuela (7%) and Iraq (6%).

Oil consumption in the U.S. peaked in 2004, after a rising trend that has lasted, except for short disruptions, since oil became widely available at the start of the 20^th Century.  Projections used to anticipate much higher oil consumption, but now projections suggest a stable consumption well into the future.  The lack of increasing consumption has occurred for two reasons.  First, people are driving less—vehicle miles traveled has declined, because fuel prices have risen and because the baby-boomers are driving less.  Second, rising fuel economy—getting more miles per gallon—has made driving more efficient.

So, there is good news for our oil addiction.  We seem to be laying off the sauce, at least a little bit.  If we keep it going, perhaps we might just have a chance to save the atmosphere and assure a sustainable planet.

And if we can convert all those classic Ford Mustangs into electric cars, what a wonderful world it will be!

References:

Classic Pony Cars.  History of the Ford Mustang.  Available at:  http://classicponycars.com/history.html.  Accessed April 16, 2018.

Cox, Lydia.  2015.  The surprising decline in US petroleum consumption.  World Economic Forum, 10 Jul 2015.  Available at:  https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/07/the-surprising-decline-in-us-petroleum-consumption/.  Accessed April 16, 2018.

Energy Information Administration.  How much oil consumed by the United States comes from foreign countries?  Available at:  https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=32&t=6.  Accessed April 16, 2018.

History.com.  Ford Mustang debuts at World’s Fair.  This Day In History, April 17.  Available at:  https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ford-mustang-debuts-at-worlds-fair.  Accessed April 16, 2018.

When President Richard Nixon met with Mao Zedong in Beijing in February, 1972, the summit opened up relations between the countries that had been closed since just after the end of World War Two.  But the real détente began when two much more cuddly ambassadors from China hit America’s shores.

Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, two juvenile giant pandas, arrived in Washington, DC, on April 16, 1972.  Reportedly, at a dinner during the Chinese meeting, Mrs. Nixon told the Chinese premier how much she loved giant pandas.  He replied, “I’ll give you some.”  The two pandas were flow to the U.S. in their own plane and transported secretly at dawn to the National Zoo in Washington “under security measures as tight as if they had been Chairman Mao,” according to the New York Times.

Americans instantly adopted them in an outpouring of affection called “Panda-Monium!”  On the animals first day at the zoo, 20,000 admirers visited them.  The next Sunday, 75,000 people came, lined up for over a quarter-mile to glimpse something they had never seen—live giant pandas.   President Nixon reciprocated for the gift by sending China a pair of musk ox, named Milton and Mathilda (reports indicate that visitors to the Peking Zoo were disappointed by the animals, especially because a skin infection had caused them to shed their woolly coats; one died in 1975, the other by 1980).

The gift of pandas to the U.S. continued a long tradition of “panda diplomacy” by China.  Reports go back to the 600s, when the Tang Dynasty sent pandas to Japan.  China actually sent a pair of giant pandas to the Bronx Zoo in 1941, thanking the U.S. for humanitarian aid.  In the 1950s, China sent one panda, named Ping Ping, to Moscow and another to North Korea.  England got theirs in 1974.

Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing delighted American zoo visitors for many years.  But they frustrated zoo scientists who hoped to breed the pair (Ling-Ling was a female, and Hsing-Hsing a male).  Through many breeding cycles, both natural and artificial, Ling-Ling gave birth five times, but all five cubs died almost immediately after birth.  Ling-Ling died of heart failure in 1992, at age 23.  Hsing-Hsing, however, set the longevity record for a captive panda, living to the ripe old age of 28 (he died in 1999).

In more recent years, China has been spreading giant pandas around the world with greater frequency—but with one difference from the earlier gifts.  Since 1982, China has loaned giant pandas for a limited amount of time, usually 10-15 years, at a cost of $1 million per year.  Any cubs born of the loaned animals belong to China.  The National Zoo in Washington got its second pair in 2000, named Mei Xiang and Tian Tian.  They remain at the National Zoo, their loan periods having been re-negotiated twice.  They produced a male cub successfully in 2015, named Bei Bei, that returned to China in 2017.

But along with the joy that seeing giant pandas has brought to the American public, the conservation benefit has been exceptional.  Since 1972, Smithsonian scientists have been able to study all aspects of panda biology, including their behavior, reproduction and general health.  More recently, zoo scientists have worked collaboratively with the China Wildlife Conservation Association on projects related to habitat conservation in China, including creating corridors between isolated populations.

The consequence of these studies and other conservation initiatives undertaken in China has been improving trends for giant pandas.  Previously listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List, the status was upgraded in 2016 to vulnerable.  The earlier decline in abundance has been halted, and population numbers are increasing.  The latest estimate is that about 2,000 giant pandas now live in the wild, all within habitat preserves in the mountains of south central China.

So, it is true:  Diplomacy works!

References:

Bihanil, Shipra.  2017.  China’s ‘panda diplomacy’:  All you need to know.  Times of India, Jul 10, 2017.  Available at:  https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/chinas-panda-diplomacy-all-you-need-to-know/articleshow/59522759.cms.  Accessed April 16, 2018.

Burns, Alexander.  2016.  When Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing Arrived in the U.S.  The New York Times, Feb. 4, 2016.  Available at:  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/nyregion/the-pandas-richard-nixon-obtained-for-the-us.html.  Accessed April 15, 2018.

Holland, Brynn.  2017.  Panda Diplomacy:  The World’s Cutest Ambassaddors.  History.com, March 16, 2017.  Available at:  https://www.history.com/news/panda-diplomacy-the-worlds-cutest-ambassadors.  Accessed April 15, 2018.

IUCN.  Red List:  Ailuropoda melanoleuca.  Available at:  http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/712/0.  Accessed April 16, 2018.

Jorgensen, Dolly.  2014.  Panda for muskox.  The Return of Native Nordic Fauna, March 1, 2014.  Available at:  http://dolly.jorgensenweb.net/nordicnature/?p=1466.  Accessed April 16, 2018.

Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute.  A Brief History of Giant Pandas at the Zoo.  Available at:  https://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/brief-history-giant-pandas-zoo.  Accessed April 15, 2018.

Calling Nikolaas Tinbergen an animal behaviorist is a little like calling the Grand Canyon a little hole in the ground.  Tinbergen, along with his colleague Konrad Lorenz, established the modern field of animal ethology, now an essential element of ecology and conservation.

Niko Tinbergen was born in The Hague, Netherlands, on April 15, 1907 (died 1988).  The son of two school teachers, he would have been expected to be an academically talented student himself.  But that wasn’t the case.  “I was not much interest in school,” he wrote in his Nobel Prize biography.  “…Wise teachers allowed me plenty of freedom to engage in my hobbies of camping, bird watching, skating and games….”

Nature was Tinbergen’s muse.  He spent his free time observing birds, insects and fish.  He tended aquariums in his backyard and school room, noting the next building and guarding behavior of sticklebacks.  He watched Herring Gulls along the shore, and carefully observed the comings and goings of solitary wasps on the beach.  He took careful notes and drew illustrations of what he saw.

His immersion in nature and the behavior of animals in their natural habitats became the trademark of his academic pursuit of ethology.  At school, he “scraped through, with as little effort as I judged possible without failing.”  But he kept moving forward in school, eventually receiving a doctorate with a 32-page dissertation on the behavior of the bee wolf, a solitary tunnel-making wasp with remarkable homing capabilities.  It is one of the shortest dissertations of its kind, finished in a rush.  He graduated on April 12, 1932, was married on April 14 and within a few weeks began his first great adventure.

He finished his dissertation fast because he was eager to begin an assignment in Greenland as part of the 1932-1933 International Polar Year.  He and his new wife, Lies, spent two summers and a winter living with Eskimos in an isolated settlement, chronicling their culture and amassing anthropological objects for the national museum.  While there, he continued his behavioral observations of birds.

He returned to begin a career as a university lecturer and researcher at the University of Leiden, Netherlands.  There he began to establish himself as a leading experimentalist in animal behavior, developing elegant experiments with animals in field conditions.  In 1936, he met Konrad Lorenz at a conference, and a lifelong friendship and collaboration began.  Lorenz was the brilliant and effervescent idea-man, developing broad theories of why and how animals behaved.  Tinbergen took those ideas into the field and laboratory, testing them in experiments that lent ecological veracity to Lorenz’s theories

Their work was interrupted during World War II when Tinbergen was interred in a Nazi camp for most of the war.  Lorenz was captured and detained as a prisoner of war by the Russians.   After the war, Tinbergen became a full professor and pursued his leadership of the emerging field of animal ethology.  He held to the idea that the science of ethology should stick to examing the physiology of behavior and avoid the psychology of it, refusing to ascribe human-like motivations to birds and insects.  In 1952, he published The Study of Instinct, the first ethology textbook and often considered the birth of the discipline.

Tinbergen moved to Oxford University in England in 1949, where he worked for the remainder of his career.  He established a large field-based team, mentoring many students who became the second-generation of experimental ethologists.  He published the book, The Herring Gull’s World, in 1953, the work that he always considered his best.  He began moving to more popular works after that, including Bird Life in 1954 and Curious Naturalists in 1958.  Later, he turned to filmmaking, producing the award-winning documentary, Signals for Survival, about Herring Gull behavior.

But his impact on biology and conservation had been cemented by that time.  He shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973 with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, all for their work in animal behavior, and he received myriad other awards around the world.

His role in conservation is also momentous.  Understanding how animals act in nature is crucial to assuring their survival in a world where wild animals must increasingly interact with humans.  For examples, methods for raising animals in captivity and then releasing them into the wild are based largely around the foundational ideas of Tinbergen and Lorenz.  He helped found the Serengeti Research Institute (now the Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute), which conducts research aimed at understanding and conserving the great wildlife populations and their migrations across the Serengeti Plains.

References:

Encyclopedia.com.  Tinbergen, Nikolaas (Niko).  Available at:  https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/science-and-technology/zoology-biographies/nikolaas-tinbergen.  Accessed April 14, 2018.

Tinbergen, Nikolaas.  1973.  Nikolaas Tinbergen – Biographical.  Nobel Prize, authobriography by the recipient.  Available at:  https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1973/tinbergen-bio.html.  Accessed April 14, 2018.

For the drought-stricken residents of the Great Plains, Palm Sunday of 1935 seemed like a fresh start.  The winds had stopped, the temperature had warmed and the sun was out.  It was spring, and perhaps the start of a year when rains would return and life could be normal again.

But by late afternoon, everything had changed.  The temperature started falling, 30 degrees in some places. The sun was covered in thick clouds.  The wind began blowing, growing in fury by the minute, steady at 60 miles per hour in some locales.  And the dust began to blow.  A huge dust cloud, hundreds of feet high, hundreds of miles long and black as night descended from the Dakotas to the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas.

Residents thought the world was ending.  Literally.  They thought the biblical prediction of Armageddon was upon them.  In minutes, the daylight turned to darkness as though it were midnight.  You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.  People went blind from the blown dirt.  In time, the day—April 14, 1935—became known as Black Sunday, the day of the worst dust storm in the history of the country, perhaps the world.  The next day, a reporter wrote an article in which he referred to the area as the “dust bowl,” the name we now associate with a decade-long natural resource disaster.

Black Sunday was the result of a particular set of weather conditions that made it extraordinarily bad, but the general situation had become commonplace.  Similar storms, but never as bad, had occurred often—14 in 1932, and 38 in 1933. The cause?  The Great Plains had been suffering since 1930 in the longest extended drought in its history.  Poor farming practices, spurred on by needs to grow more wheat to support the war effort during WW1 and later by land speculation, had reduced the formerly lush prairie to dry, dusty, barren fields.

The result was soil erosion on an unprecedented scale.  On Black Sunday alone, 300,000 tons of soil were picked up and blown across the continent.  By the end of the decade, 35 million acres of farmland had been totally destroyed and another 125 million acres had been severely impaired.  The landscape and its economy were in shreds.  More than 2.5 million residents of the Great Plains states abandoned their homes, farms and businesses.

Less than two weeks after Black Sunday, on April 27, 1935, Congress acted to counteract the damage.  Congress established the Soil Conservation Service, noting that “the wastage of soil and moisture resources on farm, grazing, and forest lands … is a menace to the national welfare.”  Since then, the agency, now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), has implemented programs designed to protect soil and retain moisture through restoration programs, watershed management projects and technical assistance and cost-sharing to landowners (see the entry for April 27 for more on the NRCS).

The Dust Bowl had a profound effect on the character of the United States.  One of the nation’s greatest novels, The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, chronicled the story of farmers displaced by the disaster and the Great Depression.  His novel was published on April 14, 1939, exactly four years after Black Sunday.  Steinbeck felt his book would not be widely popular, saying, “I’ve done by damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags.”

Dorothea Lange was hired as a photographer to chronicle the devastation of the region, a now famous portfolio of documentary photographic art. The great folk song writer and singer, Woody Gutherie, was 22 when the Black Sunday storm rolled through his home in Pampa, Texas.  He wrote the song, “So Long, It’s Been Good To Know Yuh,’” about the storm.  His lyrics include the following:

“A dust storm hit, an’ it hit like thunder;
It dusted us over, an’ it covered us under;
Blocked out the traffic an’ blocked out the sun,
Straight for home all the people did run,
Singin’:

So long, it’s been good to know yuh;
So long, it’s been good to know yuh;
So long, it’s been good to know yuh.
This dusty old dust is a-getting’ my home,
And I got to be driftin’ along.”

References:

Blakemore, Erin.  2017.  Black Sunday:  The Storm That Gave Us the Dust Bowl.  Mental Floss, January 18, 2017.  Available at:  http://mentalfloss.com/article/63098/black-sunday-storm-gave-us-dust-bowl.  Accessed April 11, 2018.

DeMott, Robert.  2009.  Grapes of Wrath, a classic for today?  BBC News, 14 April 2009.  Available at:  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7992942.stm.  Accessed April 11, 2018.

Greenspan, Jesse.  2015.  Remembering Black Sunday, 80 Years Later.  History.com, April 14, 2009.  Available at:  https://www.history.com/news/remembering-black-sunday-80-years-later.

National Weather Service.  The Black Sunday Dust Storm of April 14, 1935.  Available at:  https://www.weather.gov/oun/events-19350414.  Accessed April 11, 2018.

Natural Resources Conservation Service.  More Than 80 Years Helping People Help the Land:  A Brief History of NRCS.  Available at:  https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/national/about/history/?cid=nrcs143_021392.  Accessed April 11, 2018.

We often talk about the elephant in the room—or not talk about it, as the saying goes.  But what about the elephant in the country, the first one in the country?

It had to happen sometime, and that time was April 13, 1796.  America’s first elephant arrived from Asia, aboard the merchant ship America!  She was a two-year old female.  The ship’s captain, Jacob Crowninshield, bought the elephant in Calcutta, India, for $450, expecting to be able to sell it for $5000 in New York.  He underestimated the value—the sale brought $10,000.

The new owner (and no one is quite sure who that was) displayed his prize possession throughout the east coast, as far south as Asheboro, North Carolina, over the next several years.  Then the story gets even hazier.  Perhaps this first elephant, but perhaps a second elephant, ended up in the ownership of Hackaliah Bailey, who named her “Old Bet” and toured around the country with her for several years.  His troupe include four wagons, a trained dog, a horse, pigs and one elephant!  And, yes this is the first of a line of Bailey’s that became part of the famous Barnum and Bailey Circus.

Old Bet died when she was about 20 years old, murdered by a farmer in New England who didn’t think people should pay to see an animal displayed.  Bailey returned to his hometown in Somers, New York, built a hotel called The Elephant Hotel and erected a statue to its namesake.  The Elephant Hotel eventually became the town hall, but it still sports the elephant memorial on a tall column on the front lawn.

I write about the first elephant imported into the U.S. partially because nothing else of note seems to have happened in conservation on April 13.  But I also write to explore the market in importing and exporting live wild animals.  Well before the first elephant made it to U.S. shores, animals and plants were transported around the world, for many reasons.  Explorers sought and brought back species to establish farms for new crops of food and fiber.  Colonists brought animals and plants with them to make their exotic new homes more like their old environs.

We often talk about poaching and other illegal trade in wild organisms, but there is also a worldwide legal trade.  The legal market for wild organisms is monitored by a group called TRAFFIC.  TRAFFIC’s mission “is to ensure that trade in wild plants and animals is not a threat to the conservation of nature.”  They have a big job.

Trade in wild organisms is big business.  People buy and sell wild plants and animals for food, fuel, clothing and ornaments, sport, medicine, religion, research, exhibition and plain old collecting.  We all participate when we eat seafood captured from the wild or use wood taken from natural forests.  Thousands of species are involved.  Trade that flows between countries—that is, exports and imports—was valued at $323 billion in 2009; it probably exceeds $400 billion annually by now.

Then there is the illegal component.  Poaching and black market trade in wild organisms is a major element of international crime—only trades in illegal drugs and arms are larger.  The value is hard to estimate, obviously, but TRAFFIC suggests that illegal fishing is valued at up to $23 billion per year, illegal timber trade at $7 billion and illegal wildlife trade at up to 10 billion.  Of course, the rarer the species, the higher the value, making illegal trade a fundamental danger to endangered species and, hence, ecosystems.

And that’s the real elephant in the room.

References:

American Heritage.  1974.  Setting The Record Straight On Old Bet.  American Heritage, volume25, issue 3.  Available at:  http://www.americanheritage.com/content/setting-record-straight-old-bet.  Accessed April 10, 2018.

Atlas Obscura.  Memorial to America’s First Circus Elephant.  Available at:  https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/memorial-to-americas-first-circus-elephant.  Accessed April 10, 2018.

Goodwin, George G.  1951.  The Crowninshield Elephant.  Natural History, October 1951.  Available at:  http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/editors_pick/1928_05-06_pick.html?page=2.  Accessed April 10, 2018.

The Daily Dose.  April 13, 1976:  First Elephant Arrives in America.  Available at:  http://www.awb.com/dailydose/?p=1097.  Accessed April 10, 2018.

TRAFFIC.  Wildlife trade:  what is it?  Available at:  http://www.traffic.org/trade/.  Accessed April 10, 2018.

Arches National Monument was created by President Herbert Hoover on April 12, 1929.  It remained a national monument until 1971, when the U.S. Congress passed and President Richard Nixon signed a law to change the status to a national park.

Arches National Park lies in the east-central Utah, near the city of Moab.  Arches is the farthest east and north of the five great national parks in Utah (Canyonlands, Capital Reef, Zion and Bryce Canyon are the others).  Among the geological beauty and grandeur of these parks, Arches stands out with more than 2000 arches, the highest concentration of such features anywhere in the world.

A Hungarian immigrant, Alexander Ringhoffer, was the first early proponent of creating a park.  He had seen the land first in 1922, naming an area of arches and spires “Devil’s Garden” (now in the northern part of the park).  He brought the area to the attention of the nearby railroad, convinced that advertising the uniqueness and raw beauty could enhance tourism—and railroad fares.  The idea caught on, despite misgivings by some locals who wanted the government land open for mining and grazing.

When President Hoover created Arches National Monument, it included a mere 4,520 acres in two separate tracts.  Franklin Roosevelt increased it to 29,000 acres in 1938, and several other expansions led to its current size of about 77,000 acres.  The Presidential Proclamation created the park acclaimed that “these areas contain extraordinary examples of wind erosion in the shape of gigantic arches, natural bridges, ‘windows,’ spires, balanced rocks, and other unique wind-worn sandstone formations, the preservation of which is desirable because of their educational and scenic value.”

Hoover was correct—people now flock to Arches and its neighboring national parks.  From the 500 people who visited in 1929, annual visitation now is over 1.5 million per year and growing rapidly.  Visitation has doubled since 2000.  It is particularly attractive because many of the most outstanding geologic features are visible from the road or accessible via easy hikes.

References:

Firmage, Richard A.  2016.  Arches National Monument.  Utah Historical Quarterly, August 29, 2016.  Available at:  https://heritage.utah.gov/history/uhg-arches-national-monument.  Accessed April 10, 2018.

National Park Service.  Arches National Park, Management.  Available at:  https://www.nps.gov/arch/learn/management/index.htm.  Accessed April 10, 2018.

Dian Fossey is the name we associate with mountain gorillas, but working alongside her and continuing her work to this day was the most active and honored conservationists of modern times.

Ian Redmond was born in Malaysia on April 11, 1954.  As a boy, he returned with his mother to the Yorkshire region of England, where he learned to love nature and animals in particular.  He completed a university degree in biology in 1976.

Then his life changed.  He went to Africa to join the research team studying mountain gorillas.  He recalled, “As a newly graduated biologist, it had been my great good fortune to be taken on as Dr. Dian Fossey’s research assistant. The work involved tracking the gorillas each day to make observations on their behaviour and ecology ….”  He was also interested in their parasites, a curiosity that earned him the nickname “Worm Boy” (later, he published several papers about parasites of apes and other animals).  In 1978, he famously guided David Attenborough who came to Fossey’s research center to film a documentary on mountain gorillas.

Then his life changed again.  Later that year, he came upon the body of one of their gorilla subjects, Digit.  Digit had been killed by poachers, who cut off his head and hands to sell.  Traumatized by the event, Redmond decided to focus on protecting animals more than on studying them.  A decade later, that resolve was reinforced when the elephants he was monitoring in Kenya were killed by ivory poachers.

Since then, he has been a tireless advocate for anti-poaching enforcement, conservation and environmental education.  He has led field patrols to stop poaching and once went undercover to pose as a gorilla buyer to expose poaching in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  He has assisted on more than 100 conservation documentary films for the BBC, National Geographic, Discovery and others.  He taught Sigourney Weaver to grunt like a gorilla for the film “Gorillas in the Mist.”

In order to help coordinate conservation efforts, he formed the Ape Alliance in 1996, a consortium of 95 primate conservation groups.  He has led similar efforts for elephants (the African Ele-Fund) and rhinoceros (the UK Rhino Group).  He worked with the UN Great Apes Survival Partnership (GRASP) for a decade and is a regular consultant with the UNEP and FAO on conservation matters.  Since 2010, he has been an Ambassador for the UNEP Convention on Migratory Species.  In 2006, Queen Elizabeth bestowed the Order of the British Empire on Redmond.  His list of major conservation awards is long, including one—The Ian Redmond Award of GRASP—named in his honor.

He is a conservationist who understands the importance of protecting nature at all levels—ecosystems, populations and individual animals.  He summarized his philosophy recently in this way:

“I am a naturalist by birth, a biologist by training, and a conservationist by necessity. But conservation for me isn’t just about saving species. On a larger scale, the planet needs us to save functioning eco-systems; on a smaller scale, we must also recognise that species are made up of individual animals. For me, it became personal when I had the privilege of getting to know individual wild animals in the wild… I can truthfully say that some of my best friends are gorillas, and I care passionately about them and the future of all life on Earth.”

 References:

Animal Hero Awards.  Winners 2017 – Ian Redmond.  Available at:  http://www.animalheroawards.co.uk/next-generation-award-2017.  Accessed April 10, 2018.

Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals.  Ian Redmond.  Available at:  http://www.cms.int/en/page/ian-redmond.  Accessed April 10, 2018.

National Georgraphic.  Ian Redmond, OBE.  Available at:  https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/author/iredmond/.  Accessed April 10, 2018.

 Redmond, Ian.  2016.  What happened to the gorillas who met David Attenborough?  BBC Earth, 12 May 2016.  Available at:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20160508-what-happened-to-the-gorillas-who-met-david-attenborough.  Accessed April 10, 2018.

Arbor Day is a tree-planting rite of spring in all fifty states and in many countries around the world.  The date of celebration varies according to the ideal time to plant new trees, but the first Arbor Day was celebrated on April 10, 1872

J. Sterling Morton (born in 1832), a journalist and nature lover, moved to the Nebraska Territory from Michigan in 1854. He and his wife, Carrie, missed the abundant trees of their earlier home, so they planted their 160 acres of grassland with trees, bushes and flowers.  Morton became the editor of a newspaper in Nebraska City, and later Secretary of the Nebraska Territory.  He used his prominent position to promote interest in agriculture and the environment, especially tree planting.

Nebraska became a state in 1867, and Morton was named to the state board of agriculture.  He convinced his colleagues to create a day to encourage Nebraskans to plant trees.  The board wanted to call it Sylan Day, emphasizing forests, but Morton held out for Arbor Day, to recognize that trees everywhere, not just in forests, had great value.  Morton won, and the first Arbor Day was celebrated on April 10, 1872.  Participants across the state planted more than one million trees!

Just like the trees they planted, Arbor Day kept growing.  By 1882, schools across the country were participating, and by 1892, every state except Delaware had created its own Arbor Day (today, all fifty states celebrate Arbor Day).  Countries around the world began their own Arbor Day celebration, with Japan leading the way in 1883.  The Arbor Day website lists 33 countries with national celebrations.

J. Sterling Morton’s status grew along with his tree planting holiday. He became U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under Grover Cleveland, from 1893-1897.  As secretary, he was influential in creating the first national forest preserves.  Later, his son created the Morton Arboretum, outside Chicago, now one of the world’s foremost botanical reserves and research institutions.  In 1970, President Nixon created National Arbor Day, celebrated on the last Friday in April.

On the 100th anniversary of the first Arbor Day, the Arbor Day Foundation was established to continue and expand the work of tree planting and conservation around the U.S. and the globe.  The foundation has more than one million members and donors.  The group gives out more than 4 million seedlings each year as part of Arbor Day ceremonies.  It engages in a series of projects, to encourage tree plantings in cities, re-establish forests, improve the condition of street trees, teach students about trees and nature, and develop disease-resistant hybrids of imperiled species.  They are currently deeply involved in genetic crossing and testing of hazelnut cultivars, seeking those that are blight resistant and adaptable to a wide range of environmental conditions.

Arbor Day, according to its founder, is not like other holidays:  “Each of those reposes on the past, while Arbor Day proposes the future.” So, be on the lookout for Arbor Day celebrations in your state and community, and remember the motto of the Morton family:  “Plant Trees!”

References:

Arbor Day Foundation.  2017.  2017 Annual Report.  Available at:  https://www.arborday.org/generalinfo/annualreport/documents/2017-annual-report.pdf.  Accessed April 9, 2018.

Arbor Day Foundation.  The History of Arbor Day.  Available at:  https://www.arborday.org/celebrate/history.cfm.  Accessed April 9, 2018.

History.com.  History of Arbor Day.  Available at:  https://www.history.com/topics/the-history-of-arbor-day.  Accessed April 9, 2018.

Nebraskastudies.org.  J. Sterling Morton.  Available at:  http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0500/frameset_reset.html?http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0500/stories/0506_0100.html.  Accessed April 9, 2018.

The Morton Arboretum.  Arbor Day History.  Available at:  http://www.mortonarb.org/visit-explore/about-arboretum/mission-and-history/arbor-day-history.  Accessed April 9, 2018

For those of us of a certain age (that is, old), the name Jim Fowler is synonymous with animal adventures.  Fowler was the co-host, with Marlin Perkins, of the television program, Wild Kingdom.  Perkins was the star; Fowler did the dirty work.  We all wanted to be Jim Fowler.

Fowler was born on April 9, 1932, near Albany, New York.  He grew up on a farm and learned to love nature and animals in particular.  He went to Earlham College in Indiana, earning a degree in zoology and geology (later, the college also gave him an honorary doctorate).  He kicked around the animal rehabilitation and trade world a bit, and started a graduate degree studying the Harpy, a large South American eagle.

Graduate school took a back seat when Fowler was invited to appear on The Today Show in 1961, to talk about his work with eagles.  Marlin Perkins saw him on the show and signed him to co-host the new television show, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.  And for the next two decades, they were America’s favorite wildlife conservationists.  Wild Kingdom took viewers around the world, as Perkins described the behavior of animals and Fowler wrestled with them—collecting animals for zoos and conservation efforts.

Fowler downplayed the difference between the work of Perkins and him on the show.  “Marlin was just as active,” he said, “but the camera cutting back and forth between us gave viewers a false impression.”  Everyone I know had that false impression.  At 6’6” tall and a former college athlete, he was a gentle giant.  Fowler wrestled with snakes and alligators, jumped onto animals from helicopters, ran away from angry beasts, while Perkins told us about how the need for animals to defend their territories showed why we needed homeowner’s insurance.  “I once went behind a giant termite mound in Zambia,” Fowler recalled. “It was sort of a cold day, and I walked away from camp further than I should have. I was going to lie up against the mound because it was in the sun. I started to walk around the edges, and all of a sudden, five feet in front of me was a big male lion, which I woke up. They told me later that I roared louder than the lion did!”  That’s the Jim Fowler I remember.

Fowler’s close encounters carried him to fame on other television shows.  He became a regular on The Tonight Show, with Johnny Carson.  He appeared more than 100 times, always with an animal or two that created hilarious scenes with Carson.

Some people objected to those appearances, but Fowler believes that it was a form of education that was needed.  He believes that people must get familiar with animals and learn to like them before they will act to conserve them and their habitats.  He contends that his work helps change public attitudes so people will protect the environment.  He has said, “The continued existence of wildlife and wilderness is important to the quality of life of humans. The challenge of the future is that we realize we are very much a part of the Earth’s ecosystem and learn to respect and live according to the basic biological laws of nature.”

Although Wild Kingdom ended as a television show in the late 1980s, Fowler has not slowed down.  He is president of the Fowler Center for Wildlife Education, which he founded to carry forward his mission to educate on the importance of conserving nature, and executive director of Mutual of Omaha’s Wildlife Heritage Center, dedicated to the same purpose.  “All these adventures I’ve had, I’ve injected myself into the jungles of this world. I understand how it all works, and it’s my job to influence other people now. It’s a bit of an emergency.”

References:

Animal Planet.  Jim Fowler.  Available at:  http://www.animalplanet.com/tv-shows/wild-kingdom/experts/magnificent-moments-jim-fowler-jim-fowler/.  Accessed April 8, 2018.

Burridge, Grace F.  2013.  Jim Fowler (b. 193o).  New Georgia Encyclopedia.  Available at:   https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/geography-environment/jim-fowler-b-1930.  Accessed April 8, 2018 (note:  the title reference to his birth date is an error; he was born in 1932).

Catarevas, Michael.  2015.  ‘Mutual of Omasha’s Wild Kingdom’ Star Jim Fowler is Still Dedicate to Protecting Nature.  Connecticut Magazine, Mary 1, 2015.  Available at:  http://www.connecticutmag.com/the-connecticut-story/mutual-of-omaha-s-wild-kingdom-star-jim-fowler-is/article_5fe17765-7f3e-55bb-8e32-d0ec3c4a9021.html.  Accessed April 8, 2018.