Towheeblog

Or course, every day is Earth Day for the natural world. Soil, water, rocks and air–without those, no life. Click on any image for full screen.

That’s our cherry tree, finally in bloom. Most of the other flowers now at Deepwood Garden, Salem, where fawn lily season is peaking.

Lee French video of gray fox in Ashland–click here.

Gone soon:

Ankeny NWR, Marion, Oregon, US
Apr 22, 2023
30 species

Cackling Goose  2000
Canada Goose  X
Northern Shoveler  X
Gadwall  X
Mallard  X
Green-winged Teal  X
Lesser Scaup  2
Bufflehead  40
Pied-billed Grebe  1
American Coot  50
Long-billed Dowitcher  20
Greater Yellowlegs  1
Great Blue Heron  2
Turkey Vulture  2
Bald Eagle  2
Red-tailed Hawk  4
Northern Flicker  3
American Kestrel  1
Black Phoebe  1
California Scrub-Jay  4
American Crow  X
Tree Swallow  200
Bushtit  1
European Starling  X
Song Sparrow  2
Western Meadowlark  X
Red-winged Blackbird  X
Brewer’s Blackbird  X
Orange-crowned Warbler  7
Yellow-rumped Warbler  20

Heather Cox Richardson writes wisely on Earth Day, 2023. Click here for link. She traces the origin back to Rachel Carson, who died before the world reacted to her expose of DDT. Among the bird species DDT was going to drive to extinction: Bald Eagle, Brown Pelican, Osprey, Peregrine.

Rachel Carson in 1964: “Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”

Those words are even more urgently relevant now than they were sixty years ago.