This week in birds - #597

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment: 

My little backyard goldfish pond is home - in addition to the goldfish - to little green frogs, a garter snake, and, occasionally a bullfrog like this one. It is an endless source of entertainment for me.

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The main environmental story at the moment is the incredible heat that is blanketing the northern hemisphere. The planet is heating even faster than climate scientists had predicted, leaving them somewhat baffled by its pace. Even the Arctic region is baking in unprecedented high temperatures. The question is, how close is the planet to a tipping point from which it will be impossible to recover? 

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The heat is warming Earth's rivers which is creating yet another set of problems for those who depend on the fish from those rivers.

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It is believed that changing water levels and erosion are what have led to the collapse of the famed double arch over the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

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Here's a hopeful note: Wind power has beaten coal for electricity generation in this country for two months in a row. We can hope that trend will continue and eventually entirely supplant coal.

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There is also hope for the future of red wolves - in fact, that they may have one.

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A humpback whale first photographed in 1972 is still swimming in the waters off Alaska.

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Invasive blue crabs are overtaking Italy's marine ecosystem.

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The iceberg designated as A23a split away from Antarctica in 1986 and it is still out there spinning around in the Southern Ocean.

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There are few records of polar bears attacking humans but last week two bears killed a worker at a remote radar site in the Canadian Arctic.

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Tigers in the wild are in trouble and extinction has seemed possible, but there is hope.

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Climate change affects everything on Earth, including the evolution of butterflies.

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Fire is a part of the life of a boreal forest but it becomes a problem when wildfires burn the forest faster than it has time to regrow.

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It turns out that the altar stone at Stonehenge may actually have come from Scotland rather than from Wales as had long been believed.

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I was entranced by the Epic of Gilgamesh when I first became acquainted with it in my freshman literature class. It still fascinates me and now Artificial Intelligence is being called into use in service of piecing fragments of the story together.

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The Brown Noddy, a resident of rocks, islets, and islands in tropical oceans around the world is the American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week.

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A twelve-foot-long dead oarfish was found floating in the waters off San Diego. Only twenty of the creatures had washed up on California beaches in the last century.

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A new study postulates that the asteroid that slammed into Earth off Chicxulub in present-day Mexico some 66 million years ago originated in a family of asteroids that formed beyond the orbit of Jupiter.

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An Indigenous Brazilian author has written a book that offers ancestral answers to today's environmental crises.

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Fan mussels have suffered a series of mass mortality events but hope is kindled for their survival as there is a thriving population of them in Greece.

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New discoveries continue to be made at the ancient site of the city of Pompeii.

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There is hope for the survival and thriving of clones from the iconic Washington, D.C. cherry tree known as Stumpy.

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Scientists have found an indication of water on Mars which renews the hope of finding life there.

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Wasps may be on the wane in some places but they are certainly thriving in my backyard.