Earth

Two brown pelicans, watching the surf for fish to scoop up. Spent maybe an hour watching the pelicans dive bomb the water. These two kept re-setting right back here after every catch. Got about five feet from them.

Snowy Egret, watching for lunch along a channel

Blue heron watching for fishies. Look closely, it’s right foot is missing at what I would assume is its ankle. Its is most likely human caused via fishing line. It happens pretty often sadly.

Smaller shore bird, the Willet. here it was darting around, looking for minnows and small crabs among the rocks.

It's a gothic petunia.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/72564

The Trump administration is moving to reverse a decades-old rule that protected 45 million acres of forest lands from logging and construction, in what the Center for Biological Diversity called the "largest evisceration of public lands protection in American history."

On Tuesday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced that the US Forest Service had filed a proposed rule to fully rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, enacted under former President Bill Clinton, which had prevented road building and commercial logging on about 30% of all national forest land.

Rollins described the "roadless rule" as a barrier to government wildfire prevention efforts. "Across the country, we’ve watched preventable conditions—overgrown stands, insect outbreaks, and disease—turn healthy landscapes into tinderboxes,” she said. "For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our communities."

But conservation groups argue that the administration's reversal of the roadless rule has little to do with wildfire prevention and everything to do with opening up protected lands to logging interests and other extractive industries, which have long pushed for the rule to be weakened.

Increasing logging on federal lands has been a major goal of Trump's second term, and repealing the roadless rule is part of that effort. An executive order signed in March 2025 calling for the "immediate expansion" of timber production said that federal policies had made the country unable to "fully exploit our domestic timber supply."

In June2025, when the US Department of Agriculture first announced plans to rescind the roadless rule, it said that increasing timber production would be one of the benefits. The USDA said the rule hurt “jobs and economic development” and that repealing it aligned with Trump's goal to eliminate "barriers that hamper American business and innovation."

Earthjustice has argued that, contrary to what the administration says, repealing the roadless rule will actually lead to more wildfires, not fewer.

It points to findings from the Forest Service that 9 in 10 wildfires are caused by human activity, including throwing cigarettes out of windows, leaving campfires abandoned, and driving cars on grassy areas, causing them to ignite.

A peer-reviewed study published in January in the journal Fire Ecology by researchers with The Wilderness Society found that fires are about four times as likely to start near a road as in roadless forests.

Another study by the Forest Service in 2020, during the first Trump administration, examined two decades of data and found that roadless forests actually received more fuel-reduction treatments per square kilometer than areas elsewhere in the National Forest System.

"Speculation that eliminating road prohibitions would improve forest health is not supported by nearly 20 years of monitoring data," the study concluded.

Josh Hicks, director of conservation campaigns at the Wilderness Society, said Tuesday, "Opening our backcountry forests to more roads and development, and therefore more ignitions, is... not a wildfire solution, and never will be."

While doing little to curb the recent increases in wildfires exacerbated by climate change, conservationists argue that repealing the roadless rule will pose other harms to communities and wildlife across the country.

“Roadless forests supply clean drinking water for tens of millions of Americans, are home to irreplaceable wildlife, and store enormous amounts of carbon,” said Gabrielle Berthel, forest advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Repealing the Roadless Area Conservation Rule would allow for the fragmentation of some of the last intact forest ecosystems in the country, with irreversible consequences for the communities that rely on these forests and the people who seek out these special places for recreation."

The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) noted that these forests serve as habitats for numerous threatened species that risk being disrupted, including American wolverines, Canada lynx, grizzly bears, and northern spotted owls.

Randi Spivak, the public lands policy director at the CBD, emphasized that "these are some of the last truly wild forests left in the country... Once you start bulldozing roads for commercial logging and industrial development, there’s no getting them back."

More than 625,000 public comments have been submitted to the Forest Service since plans to rescind the roadless rule were announced last June. The USDA will accept public comments on the proposal until September 21, after which the administration is expected to move toward a final rule later this year.

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

There's gold in them-there hills

Idk where shit is on the world map, so I didn't know the fun fact that they had coral reefs.

Everything smelling like sage and rain. Deserts are lovely.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/71834

PÁRAMO EL ALMORZADERO, Colombia — Doris Torres is a sheepherder who grew up seeing Andean condors as enemies. In this remote village high in the Colombian Andes, the birds were blamed for livestock losses and often killed through poisoning or shooting — persecution that helped push their population to the brink. But as Torres learned more about the condor and its importance to the Andean ecosystem, her relationship with the species began to change. She became an unlikely conservationist and is now at the heart of a grassroots effort helping bring condors back to these mountains. Working with Fernando Castro, from the Parque Jaime Duque Foundation, Torres and other villagers have transformed a long-standing conflict into a model of coexistence. Former enemies of the condor have become its protectors, creating a rare safe haven for one of Colombia’s most threatened birds of prey. Today, condors are once again soaring over the páramo. And the community is preparing for the next step: welcoming young condors bred in captivity by Castro and his team in Bogotá. Using artificial incubation and condor-shaped hand puppets to raise the chicks without accustoming them to humans, the team hopes to release at least three juveniles into the wild by the end of 2027. Mongabay’s Video Team wants to cover questions and topics that matter to you. Are there any inspiring people, urgent issues, or local stories that you’d like us to cover? We want to hear from you. Be a part of our reporting process—get in…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via This RSS Feed.

Possibly a hoary bat? I couldn't get close enough to see its face properly but the colour matches.

If you zoom in, you can see its proboscis that is the length of the moth, maybe 10-12cm.

Just an excuse to tell people I found out there's an animal called the shame-faced crab, named so because it covers its face with its claws.

Cute thread at Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/nome.bsky.social/post/3msw6izwpcc2c

The collegiate peaks in Colorado

Left to Right: Lost Mountain, Mount Shavano, Jones Peak, Mount White, Mount Princeton, and Mount Columbia.

It is cold and there are cacti everywhere and I just want one good rock.

'munch munch, ahh that hit the spot, munch munch'

source

Utah transportation: “ Good news we could all use: the Parley's Wildlife Overpass is working.”

Thanks Blake Ledbetter (@blakethy) and @usuaggielife for leading the study.

(https://www.tumblr.com/bovineblogger/824571720563294208?source=share)

Today I learned of the existence of bee flies. I also learned that I love bee flies. Specifically this species (Toratsuriabu, AKA Anastoechus nitidulus) found here in Japan, mostly in the southern area (Wakayama Prefecture and such).

More photos - https://imgur.com/gallery/bee-fly-GfDsU

Sorry for the sorta boring photo, there isn't a whole lot going on here. Out beachcombing this weekend and found a spot where a sea turtle came ashore to lay eggs. You can see the shell drag marks and the flipper marks in the sand.

There also happened to be an American Badger in there, rooting around and feasting on green turtle eggs. I could hear something grunting and making eating noises. So I got a little closer and a little badger stuck its little badger head out of the hole, sorta looked at me a second and then went back to breakfast.

I hollered at it to get away from those turtles like it understood English, got a photo for gps data and left to flag down a park ranger.

The ranger I stopped said that while badgers do get egg caches from time to time, actually getting to see one doing it is pretty rare so that's pretty cool I guess.

I'm not sure of the species name. Bee flies are important pollinators as well as parasitic nesters preying on our solitary bee nests.