Nature - Page 2

Healing Haida Hummers

Hale diminutive warm-blooded hummingbirds,
Joyful, bathing, fearless, 80kph speedsters,
Heard before seen, iridescent metallics.
Brush-tipped tongues French kiss flowers,
One thousand to two thousand sexy daily osculations.

Rolling shoulder joints, wingtip figure eights,
Two hundred beats per second, the perfect hoverer.
Altering wing angle, forward, backward, sideways,
Enthralling upside-down airborne acrobatics, finesse.
Practise. Forty million years. Stupendous!


Highest animal oxygen requirements,
Nine thin-walled air sacs,
Supreme lung gas volume.
Three hundred breaths per minute rest,
Five hundred breaths per minute flight.

Copious nectar rich water, 160 per cent body weight, daily.
Gnats, flies, aphids, beetles,
Delectable spider silk-wrapped prey, proteinaceous insects!
Overnight food cache, crop satiates caloric needs,
Autumn gorge doubles body weight.
Sailing a twenty-seven hundred kilometre-migration!

Fulltime Pacific Northwest residents, Anna’s.
Unexampled Arctic climate storms frostbiting, deadly.
Lifeless looking miraculously still alive!
Urban rescuers warm feeders thrice daily,
Recipe in hand: one thumb sugar, four fingers water.
Blest be ye fine feathered friends!

©2022 ReeseHalter.com

Agitate. Disrupt. Defend.

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Reese Halter

Reese Halter is a bees/trees/seas defender.
His latest book is GenZ Emergency.
Email: HalterBooks@gmail.com for your autographed copy.
In Australia, order from the Bob Brown Foundation by emailing: Contact@BobBrown.org.au

Going Vegan

Gobsmacking Globetrotters

O greatest long distance earthly wanderers,
Travelling limits of seemingly limitless seas.
Superlative endurance, Olympians of the sky,
Extreme in size, Royal’s tip-to-tip 3.5 metres.
Hale wise airborne centurions!

Light as a feather, lifetime at sea,
Furthermost range, pure gliders, windiest oceans.
Lifting force to air resistance astoundingly 40:1.
One hundred and twenty-thousand kilometres annually,
Eleven million eight-hundred thousand kilometres lifespan!

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Glorious Gray Kin

Mysterious adventurers, epic long-distance voyagers,
We landlubbers marvel at your Royal Highnesses.
Marbled gray, sleek tapered head, streamlined robust body,
A dozen knuckles supporting eighty thousand pounds,
Barnacles, sea lice, ecosystems within gray’s ecosystem. Hallelujah!

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Vale Silver Superfish

O pinnacle of piscine evolution,
Pointed snout, plump middle, crescent caudal,
The ultimate predator, bluefin tuna.
Counter-shaded, dark topside, light below,
Blue, green, silver befitting only the regal.

Olympians inhaling ramjet oxygen-loaded seawater,
Travelling a distance equal to length each second.
Sampson-like heart 10X other’s size.
Gracefully cruising 46 knots, top-end 55 knots!
Night schooling, slower, musing, bunched.

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Smart, Screaming, Carnivorous Bees, Kith and Kin

MEXICO CITY – Our comrades, the bees, are intriguing wee creatures and vital to a healthy natural world.

Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch (1886-1982) was the first to discover that the elaborate language of honeybees revolves around complex dances. In addition to deciphering their communications, von Frisch was also able to train honeybees to arrive at feeding stations in three, four and five separate periods within 24 hours. The fact that bees possess a memory for time is astonishing.

The waggle dance is one of the most extraordinary forms of communication in the animal kingdom. The dance conveys precise information about food, water and tree resin location, including its direction and distance from the hive as far as 13 kilometres (8mi). See my book, The Incomparable Honeybee for a detailed explanation of the waggle dance and the angle of the sun. Credit: Yemin Deng

Years later, my colleagues from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama showed that social bees have a bigger brain area for both learning and memory compared to solitary bees. And like people, bees show the effects of aging. For example, honeybees’ memories fade and their ability to learn decreases. One way we both can slow down aging is by getting restorative sleep.

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Terrified Asian honeybees, just like us, other primates, birds and meerkats, shriek when faced with a life-threatening situation. When giant Asian hornets attack the hive, honeybees release a “rallying call for collective defence”. It eerily sounds like bloodcurdling human screams. When these colossal merciless hornets storm the colony, they feast on larvae, decapitate adult bees and feed severed body parts to their young.

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Australia Greenlights Two More Giant Fracking Mines, Armageddon

ALICE SPRINGS – Are you fed-up with the worst, least qualified and most unscrupulous citizens, the world’s leaders, lying about reducing emissions and failing to address the climate emergency? 

Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison just greenlit two humongous fracking mines in the Northern Territory (NT) and Western Australia (WA). Morrison blatantly disregarded the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) warning that there can be NO more new coal, oil and gas extractions if we are to limit temperature increases to below the critical threshold of 1.5 degrees. 

Morrison’s most recent planetary destructive fracking decision followed on the heels of U.S. President Joe Biden’s move to auction off oil and gas leases across 32.4  million hectares (80M ac) of the Gulf of Mexico. Old boys business as usual.

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A Football Field of Native Forests Annihilated Every Second

MELBOURNE – Native forests need wildlife to thrive. We “wise apes” need native forests to save us from the man-made climate crisis. If we lose those forests, we die.

Destruction of Native Forests
Our beloved oxygen-makers, carbon storehouses, intercontinental rain-makers, cloud-makers, climate stabilisers, medicine chests, wildlife-rich glorious native forests are unique to planet Earth. Credit: Fancis Eatherington

At the recent twenty-sixth climate talks in Glasgow, the world’s leaders refused pleas by environmental groups and forest biologists to protect earth’s best climate stabilisers, its native forests. Instead, the world’s negotiators delayed an agreement greenlighting another decade of forest plunder.

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Gen Zs Deplasticising Oceans

Almost 400 million metric tons, or, the equivalent weight of the human population, of subsidised petroleum-based plastics are manufactured annually. Thirteen million metric tons of those plastics are entering the oceans and poisoning everything.

About 12 per cent of the world’s petroleum {12 million barrels daily (mbd)} is poured into plastics. By mid-century, unless corrective action is taken, that figure is predicted to grow to be almost 18 mbd.

The shale gas industry has been trying to build demand for fossil fuels from its fracked oil and gas wells by promoting the construction of a new petrochemical corridor in America’s Rust Belt and expanding the corridor on the Gulf Coast. Credit: Desmog.com

Meanwhile, petrochemicals are expected to account for more than one-third of global oil demand growth by 2030 and approximately half of demand growth by 2050, according to the world’s energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency (IEA). At the current pace of consumption, plastic could surpass coal’s emissions by 2030.

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The Great Forest, A Wonderful Book

The Great Forest is a stunning book that is loaded with intriguing information and many beautiful images.

Ecologist David Lindenmayer along with photographers Chris Taylor, Sarah Rees and Steven Kuiter have presented the finest tabletop forest book that I have ever read.

These skilled Aussie forest defenders help us understand the mesmerising wet forests of Victoria’s ancient Central Highlands, and that the Indigenous Peoples are the rightful caretakers of these lands. This exquisite book showcases the majestic oxygen-making mountain ash, the world’s tallest flowering trees and many of its unique animals.

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COP26: Heal the Natural World, Protect All Old-Growth Forests

GLASGOW – Old-growth forests are the planet’s largest and most carbon-rich biodiverse assemblages. Protecting these earthly temples is central to the survival of all life.

As the twenty-sixth United Nations climate talks get underway, the only issue that matters to Mother Earth and the two million known species is, how to slow down the infernal man-made climate heat, climate droughts, climate fires, climate floods and strengthening climate hurricanes and climate cyclones?

The answer is really quite simple. Reduce combustion emissions immediately. Dovetail all industries to produce a zero-combustion global economy by 2035. And end all fossil fuel subsidies, $5.9 trillion annually, without any further delay.

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Heal The Oceans, Protect All Fish

LONDON – Each year, fisheries are annihilating as many as one hundred trillion creatures. Additionally, fisheries’ bottom-trawlers are destroying the ocean floor, accelerating the man-driven Sixth Mass Extinction and unlocking the largest planetary carbon storehouse to cook everything alive.

This terrible hatred of marine life must come to an end otherwise all life is doomed. Thankfully, there is a salubrious alternative.

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American Bumblebee, Dead Buzz

CHICAGO – Since 2000, the American bumblebee population has crashed and burned by 89 percent. These handsome, big, black and yellow bees are abandoning Earth en masse. Scandalous.

Once upon a time, their range encompassed southern Canada, much of continental United States and northern Mexico. Today, American bumblebees have died out in Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, Idaho, North Dakota, Oregon and Wyoming.

In New York State their population has plummeted by 99 percent.  In nineteen other states across the Southwest and Midwest populations of American bumblebees have plunged by more than 50 percent.

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Oslo Murders 575 Planet-Saving Whales

OSLO – Over the previous four months, subsidised Norwegian whalers slowly and methodically tortured and eventually killed 575 minke whales.

A fleet of fourteen vessels equipped with rocket launching harpoons tipped with penthrite grenades and state of the art satellite technology mercilessly hunted our brethren and sistren, the filter feeding whales. Perhaps as many as three-quarters (~430) of the defenceless whales were pregnant.

Whaling in Norway
Norway is one of the world’s largest exporters of oil. They are looters and polluters of the North Sea. Hiss. Credit: Scanasia

Norway’s government is as crooked and cruel as the day is long. This well-to-do miniscule nation of less than six million citizens makes its living from killing, poisoning and cooking the Earth alive.

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Giant Sequoias Homage

O cinnamon mighty fire-resistant trunked-ones,
Your tree kingdom royal highnesses,
Gargantuan beings beyond perception of immense!
Rare Cali’ Sierran glorious mountaineers,
Deep rich soils, disease and pest free.
Heavenly.

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Superb Palm Oil Exposé, Planet Palm

SAN FRANCISCO – Mother Earth defender and author, Jocelyn Zuckerman, has penned an excellent detailed account in Planet Palm of the insidious and ubiquitous palm oil trade. Victress.

Zuckerman journeyed to four continents and witnessed firsthand this planetary destructive, crafty industry. It’s a riveting read.

If ever there was one farmed crop that begged the United Nations (UN) to enact a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, palm oil is it.

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Support companies that do not use palm oil as an ingredient in their hand-soaps

A West African tropical palm, Elaeis guineensis, produces bunches of fruits the size of plums, which yields copious pulp and kernel oils that are loaded with saturated fats. 

Today, those oils are the backbone of processed everything, from personal care products to deep fried foods and pastries to instant noodles. Humans also burn a shit ton of it, one-third of all biofuels annually are palm oil. They emit four times more planet-cooking gases per unit than diesel fuel.

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Manmade Noise Uproots Sea Grasses, Hastens Climate Catastrophe

WASHINGTON (DC) – About 72 species of sea grasses are nature’s protective chainmail that filter land runoff, boost water quality, recharge aquifers and provide habitat for thousands of species. Yet they, too, are being assaulted and plundered by man.

Climate and Sea Grass
The world’s sea grasses are highlighted in green. Credit: United Nations Environment Programme

Sea grasses in mesmerising meadows occupy the coasts of every continent except Antarctica. Although their total ocean area is about 0.1%, sea grasses hold an astonishing 11% of the ocean’s carbon (sometimes referred to as ‘blue carbon’).

Climate and Sea Grass
Each year, sea grass meadows drawdown 83 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (the equivalent emissions of 18 million automobiles). Credit: Christoffer Bostrom

Some of my colleagues affectionately call the sea grasses ‘the lungs of the sea’. And for a good reason, one square metre of a sea grass meadow releases 10 litres of oxygen each day of the year. Bonanza!

Each year, Mediterranean sea grass meadows are helping to protect the deep North Atlantic ocean and all life therein by sieving 900 million pieces of pernicious petroleum-based plastics.

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Almighty GDP Supersedes Climate Code Red, Not For Long

SAN FRANCISCO – This week the United Nations (UN) climate body, the IPCC, issued its sternest warning a ‘climate code red.’ Yet every IPCC decarbonising scenario has GDPs (Gross Domestic Product) rising not falling. The jarring reality is that it’s not possible for civilisation to grow enough food with increasing, intensifying and longer lasting ferocious heatwaves.

Combustion heat from fossil fuels and wood pellets has supercharged the oceans by adding the equivalent heat of detonating 10 Hiroshima atomic bombs every second of the year. The oceans drive the climate, which is becoming terrifyingly unstable.

Climate Change and GDP

Climate fires are raging all over the globe. Siberia is one giant firestorm with untold losses of our brethren and sistren, the animals. Over 40 million acres are charred across Russia’s Northern Asia. For the first time in recorded history the North Pole is blanketed with thick choking climate smoke.

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