FERN’s Friday Feed: For the birds (and the farmers)
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
In California, farmers helping birds and birds helping farmers
FERN and KQED’s California Report
In California, farmers are building nesting houses for birds, attracting swallows, Western blue birds, and barn owls to combat pests, rather than relying on pesticides, as Lisa Morehouse explains in FERN’s latest story. Pesticide use and habitat loss shrunk the bird population in North America by almost 3 billion since 1970. That’s nearly a 30 percent drop. The whole ecosystem feels that loss, since birds pollinate plants, and, like on this farm, control pest insects.
Are crabs actually crabby?
Nautilus
“Humans are expert at projecting our desires and fears onto each other and onto other beings, and we have a long tradition of developing myth, fable, parable and more from our observations of animal behavior,” writes Cynthia Chris. “Maybe those stories reveal kernels of truth here and there. Maybe they are convenient, embellished tales that cast the crab in roles she wasn’t really born to play. As Maryland waterman Grant Corbin told William Warner, author of a classic book about blue crabs called Beautiful Swimmers, ‘nobody knows nothing about crabs . . . Might think they do, but they don’t.’”
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How cities can help solve the biodiversity crisis
Yale Environment 360
“Urban areas … have long been deemed to be devoid of biodiversity, especially by Americans, who glorify wilderness and believe that nature can flourish only where cities do not exist,” writes Janet Marinelli. But “a raft of recent studies has found that … the planet’s cities were important refuges for an array of plants and animals, in some cases even threatened and endangered species … [R]esearchers are increasingly working with city planners, landscape architects and urban wildlife managers to make cities part of the solution to the global biodiversity crisis.”
Welcome to McDonald’s. We’re now a food bank.
The Washington Post
“In December 2019, the McDonald’s was on the verge of shuttering when its employees took the keys and occupied it,” write Rick Noack and Sandra Mehl. “Months later, as the coronavirus overwhelmed Europe, the building became the unlikely hub of an impromptu aid-distribution effort. Still illegally occupied, it has become a symbol of the social and economic rifts that the pandemic has deepened in France.”
Her family owned slaves. How can she make amends?
The New York Times
“Stacie Marshall, who inherited a farm in the northwest corner of Georgia, learned that her ancestors kept enslaved people. She is trying to bring that history to light and help heal her community. For almost three years now,” writes Kim Severson, “with the fervor of the newly converted, Ms. Marshall has been on a quest that from the outside may seem quixotic and even naïve. She is diving into her family’s past and trying to chip away at racism in the Deep South, where every white family with roots here benefited from slavery and almost every Black family had enslaved ancestors.”