Island Press Field Notes

It’s not exactly safe to be a wolf in Colorado. If you cross paths with the wrong human, you could end up dead. Indeed, for one year those of us working on the High Lonesome Ranch, a privately-owned, mixed-use property managed for conservation, referred to these peripatetic members of the dog family, who were naturally returning to this landscape after being extirpated 80 years earlier, as "visitors from the north." That phrase was our code to protect the wolves.

I recently attended the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the theme was global warming. Eminent ecologists presented models that projected climate change into a bleak future where species that require unique habitat may be unable to persist.

Then: Southern California burns, 2008

Here's a quiz for the birdwatchers out there: Which country has experienced the greatest loss of bird species over the past quarter century? (And by "greatest loss," I mean global extinctions). The answer is not Brazil, Indonesia, Colombia, or some other developing country—it's the United States. By my calculation, nine species of birds have vanished from the US since 1980 (see Wilcove, D.S. 2005. "Rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker." Science 308: 1422-1423), by far the largest number of any nation during this time period.