Daydreaming of Islands, Day 2

Though it is officially spring in the Hudson Valley, my mind is still wandering to the Caribbean. I spend a lot of time with maps and atlases, mostly studying places I don't yet know. I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time tracing fingers up and down the Caribbean islands, trying to find one that somehow has previously escaped notice, one that hasn't been completely consumed (and overrun) by its nearest neighbors. It's tricky. My fingers, and memory, keep taking me back to St. John, specifically to a hideaway of white canvas tents hidden deep in the green. Given its history of wildness, the ...

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Posted in at sea

Bluefin Ban Voted Down

If you are a sushi lover with a preference for bluefin tuna, my advice is to eat up during the next couple years because the ocean’s most iconic fish is destined for extinction. (The World Wildlife Fund predicts all bluefin will be gone by 2012; currently we – mostly the Japanese – take 1 million of the big fish each year, out of a total population of 3.75 million, impossible numbers for the fish to adequately reproduce.) There had been ...

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Posted in overfishing

I Dream of Islands, Day 1

Given the spring rain and winds still hammering the Hudson Valley of New York, I find myself lapsing into non-stop daydreaming about living life in one tropical paradise or another, as a variety of my very smart friends do. Specifically I’ve been letting my mind wander to the Caribbean, which I don’t know all that well – silly, given that many of its islands are a solitary non-stop away – and specifically to St. John, where I’ve been just twice. Looking out the window at storm-whipped skies, I’m imagining instead the trees overlooking Little Maho Bay, which are filled ...

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Posted in Environment

All Black Penguins?

Two years ago on the Antarctic Peninsula we stopped off at a Chilean science base on a wet, muddy afternoon. We stopped purposely searching for an all-white penguin we’d heard about from scientists on King George Island. It took a couple hours, but we found it. Devoid of pigmentation, something like an albino, the penguin was rare though the soldiers stationed at the base for the summer months told us there were three of them scattered around the island. Now comes a report, by National Geographic reporter Andrew Evans, of an all-black penguin. He spotted and photographed the ...

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Posted in Antarctica