Category: Coast Environments
Birth of a Common Tern
A sequence (on Flickr) of photos of a Common Tern (Sterna hirundo) hatching from its egg. Shot in 1981 when I was a volunteer on a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tern banding project on Falkner Island, off Guilford, Connecticut, U.S.A.
Disruptive camouflage
When you look at a Killdeer (Charadrius vociferus) in isolation it looks boldly-striped—the antithesis of what you'd expect from an animal trying to blend into its background. But in natural settings the black-and-white stripes work very effectively to break up the silhouette of the bird, making it surprisingly hard to spot against the background. At Hammonsasset ...
Wood Duck (Aix sponsa)
Wood Duck family (Aix sponsa). Photoshop painting. Available as a limited edition print.
The dangers of ‘ghost gear’
Discarded monofilament line and other fishing gear can be incredibly persistent and deadly in the environment. Experts estimate that modern monofilament line will take as much as 600 years to fully degrade in marine conditions. That's 600 years of deadly entanglements and thousands of dead or maimed animals. This Great Black-backed Gull's foot is entangled ...
“Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy—these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: ...
This Fine Piece of Water
Tom Anderson's book This Fine Piece of Water: An Environmental History of Long Island Sound is a well-written and enormously useful resource on the human and biology history of the Sound, as well as an examination of the many serious environmental threats facing Long Island Sound and its coastlines. One of the few book-length explorations ...
Great Blue Heron
“Your sigh, I am told, is like the sound of rain driven against tower bells. You smell like wild ginger. When you lift your foot from the river, water doesn't run off it to spoil the transparent surface of the shallows. The water hesitates to offend you.” —Barry Lopez, The Search for the Heron, River ...
Long toes
Now you know why their toes are so long. Little Blue Heron (Egretta caerulea), Green Cay Wetlands, Boynton Beach, Florida.
Small tuna
I love the bold colors of these small tuna species. They're like little Word War II fighters. Frigate Mackerel (Auxis thazard), and Little Tunny (Euthynnus alletteratus). Photoshop paintings ©Copyright 2013, by Patrick Lynch. All rights reserved.
Salvaging the Real Florida: Lost and found in the State of Dreams
A really fine read. Twice even. As Papa said: "All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good, the bad, the ecstasy, the ...
Patrick Lynch 