When a 65-year-old oak tree in Steve Parker’s yard died from fungal disease, he did not cut it into firewood or haul it away. He did not erase it. He cut the tree into disks and then turned them into records that play birdsong –– a touching tribute to the years that the tree was house and home to birds and all manners of creatures.

Parker, a Texas-based sound artist known online as @parkerstevesounds played the disks of wood on a Victrola-style turntable, and from the it the wooden records emit layered avian soundscapes, transforming dead wood into a living archive. He called the project Funeral for a Tree.

I once worked on a similar project in clay. I created a series of vessels designed to hold seeds. While shaping each one, I spoke to it — prayers, fragments of thought, small conversations with the material itself. I recorded my voice and the surrounding landscape of sound into the walls of the ceramic. Today’s machines cannot retrieve those recordings. But future instruments — capable of hearing at finer scales — may. The vessels are simply waiting for the right ears.

Trees are not neutral objects. Their rings hold records of rainfall, drought, heat, and cold. Their fibers contain chemical traces of stress, recovery, and time. In scientific terms, trees are environmental witnesses. In Parker’s hands, they become storytellers.

The project was later exhibited at Ivester Contemporary in East Austin, Texas where visitors encountered both the wooden records and the physical remains of the tree itself. The installation did not explain the tree. It allowed people to sit with it.

In a time when climate loss is reported in numbers — hectares, parts per million, extinction rates — Funeral for a Tree insists on intimacy. It is easy to talk about forests. It is harder to mourn a single trunk. It’s like people fighting for Gaza or Iran or places thousands of miles beyond their city limits, but they don’t have time to call their grandmother or check on the sick boy down the street.

Parker’s work invites us to create rituals and intimacy with objects and meaning close to our homes and hearts.

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1. Call It Quits is for smokers wishing to quit and quitters who could use some added support.  It provides cessation tips, motivations and coaching access to helpline pros. It also enables you, using your phone contacts, to build a trusted support group and then keep that support group with you in the palm of your hand. This ought to be basic software on all smartphones sold in tobacco-loving Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. (Free.)
2. Locavore uses your phone’s GPS to make searching for in-season, local foods a breeze.  It pinpoints the nearest farms and farmer’s markets.  Use it to find that specific local fruit you’ve been craving, or to check out what’s in-season.
3. BirdsEye guides you to your best birding opportunities by sharing the collective wisdom of thousands of birding experts who contribute to eBird,  the enormous, real-time bird observation system run by the bird brains at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Take this when hiking any of Jordan’s six nature reserves. ($19.99)
4. Fooducate from Israel lets you scan the barcodes on packaged items in your grocery store to see each product’s good and bad highlights, allow you to compare with similar products and best of all, select healthier alternatives.  It’s like having a dietician on speed dial. (Free.)
5. The Night Sky enables you to identify stars, planets, galaxies, constellations and even satellites in real time as you see them.  Stand anywhere and hold your smartphone or tablet up to the sky and The Night Sky will display the names of everything you see.  Perfect for camping with the Bedouin beneath Wadi Rum’s pristine night skies. ($0.99)
6. Springredients allows you to select one key ingredient and then spin the dial to view three established flavor combinations. It’s a cool tool that helps you to discover an endless array of flavor combinations.  Less likely to waste food if you see more ways to use random ingredients.($1.99)
7. Seafood Watch was created by the Monterey Bay Aquarium with the aim to promote responsible purchasing of wild and farmed seafood. Shopping sustainably is made easy, as this app ranks seafood items as “Best Choice”, “Good Alternative” or “Avoid” rankings. (Free.)
8. Ease into 5K with a running coach app perfect for those who are new to racing world.  The 8-week regimen guides you through 30 minute sessions, each designed to improve your endurance. I’ll be using this one to prep for April’s Dead Sea fun run. ($2.99)
9. Wild Edibles Full offers a massive compendium of foraging knowledge suitable for beginners and experts alike.  Use this app as a quick home reference, or in the field as a replacement for hefty field guides.  This app takes edible plants to a whole new level of accessibility. ($7.99)
10. Don’t Eat That lets you conduct an instant food “health check” right in the store just by entering its name.  Find out if an ingredient causes allergies or drug interactions, is carcinogenic, banned in other countries, bad for kids or pregnant women, or genetically modified. ($1.99)

As with all apps, you’ll need to do a check on the product websites to ensure these are geared up to work on your specific device, and in your slice of the globe.

Close-up of a smartphone by Shutterstock

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Sick of reading about Cyprus songbirds killed and pickled for snacks?  Weary of wild killing sprees like Egypt’s sanctioned bird hunt ? Or maybe the downed flamingos in Kuwait ruffled your feathers?

BirdLife International has created a fund to underwrite environmental preservation projects in one of the world’s top biodiversity hotspots: the Mediterranean Basin. Check out their new website to learn more about the group and their work.  Especially nice is a link where you can enter your country and see which species are at risk and find resources to get involved locally.  A search on Jordan, as example, leads to The Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature, BirdLife’s partner in Jordan, which in turn will advise on in-kingdom conservation.

This five-year conservation investment aims to preserve regional biodiversity by engaging with and developing existing civil society organizations, said Ibrahim Khader, Regional Director of BirdLife International’s Middle East Division.

“The Mediterranean Basin is the world’s second largest global biodiversity hotspot, covering more than two million square kilometers spanning 34 countries and territories. It stretches from Portugal to Jordan and from northern Italy to Cape Verde,” Khader told The Jordan Times. A biodiversity hotspot is any place that boasts a large number of diverse species under threat of human interference.

“The Mediterranean Basin is one of the biological wonders of the world and is the third richest biological hotspot in the world, with more than 13,000 endemic species found nowhere else on Earth,” he added. “The primary threat is habitat loss due to increasing pressure on water resources, agricultural intensification, land abandonment, and infrastructure and residential development.”

Twice a year, BirdLife International will invite proposals for small grants worth up to $20,000 and large grants of up to $1 million, according to the Regional Director.  The money will support conservation at a local level, especially vital given economies struggling in the wake of the Arab Spring.

Their website describes the organizations as “a partnership of 117 national conservation organization and the world leader in bird conservation.”

“NGOs, community groups, universities, private enterprises and individuals may apply for funding from all countries eligible for the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) support,”  Khader added.

CEPF is a joint conservation initiative that seeks to engage civil society in biodiversity conservation. CEPF Program Leader at BirdLife International’s Middle East Division Mohammed Yousef said that the grants will work towards safeguarding globally threatened species and critical sites in Middle East and European nations surrounding the Mediterranean Basin.

Yousef said, “The investments will promote innovative partnerships… to enhance conservation and connectivity in five landscape corridors in the basin and conserve globally threatened species through systematic planning and action.”

Image of birds over Istanbul by Shutterstock

The post Seed Money Available to Protect Mediterranean Basin Birds appeared first on Green Prophet.

Birds accustomed to breeding and rearing their young in healthy wetlands are being pushed out as lakes dry up and agricultural and industrial activity take precedence. And reptiles. And mammals.

Even humans are being displaced as accelerated drought and fire sweep through Israel, rain floods Brisbane, Australia, and snow suffocates the UK and North America. In the last thirty years, 1/3 of all species have already gone extinct. And according to a Professor of Biology Ankara’s Hacettepe University, 70% of Turkey’s birds may be heading down the same devastating path.According to Mr. İlhami Kiziroğlu, who also heads the University’s Environmental Education and Bird Research Center, roughly 502 bird species have been observed in Turkey.

Of those, only 437 are observed regularly, while the others are either migratory species or difficult to spot. Mr. Kiziroğlu estimates that in the past twenty years, many species have lost fifty percent of their populations while others may have lost as much as seventy five percent.

The Oriental Darter that used to breed near Lake Amik in Hatay, which dried up in the 1960s, have not been seen since. They’ve disappeared. While bred in captivity by the Environment and Forestry Ministry, the Bald Ibis has not been seen in Turkey’s wild since 1988, World Bulletin News reports.

The White-headed Duck was displaced by industrial waste near Lake Burdur in the country’s Mediterranean region, and raptor birds, such as the majestic Imperial Eagle, are also at risk.

Migratory, mountain, island, wetland, Arctic, Antarctic and seabirds are expected to suffer most from the effects of climate change, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) since they have a narrow environmental range. Birds that can survive in a variety of conditions will be more resilient as weather patterns continue to alter their habitat.

Birds are not the only species vulnerable to extinction. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) announced that up to 35% of birds, 52% of amphibians, and 71% of reef-building corals have traits that are likely to make them particularly susceptible to climate change.

Although extinction continues despite expanded protection, species have responded favorably to conservation efforts that now deserve to be redoubled.

:: World Bulletin

More on bird conservation efforts in the Middle East:
Birds Help Jordan, Israel, And Palestine Flock Together
Iran And Qatar Make Bio-lateral Ties For Birds
Dubai Is For The Birds (And The People Who Love Them)

Image via es.treknature

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