Free Republic

Stephen Maciejewski dropped to a knee on a Center City sidewalk Wednesday morning and gently scooped up a yellow-billed cuckoo that had smashed into a skyscraper and died on its way to Central America or the West Indies. “This probably happened yesterday,” said Maciejewski, a 71-year-old retired social worker and volunteer for Audubon Pennsylvania. He labeled a plastic bag with the time, date, and location, tucked the slim migrator into it, and continued his rounds. Maciejewski gets emotional when he speaks about all the birds he finds, but nothing, he says, prepared him for what happened Friday. “So many birds...

A favorite technique of the propagandists of the Global Warming scare is to find cute and cuddly creatures that they can claim are “threatened” by global warming. For years, an iconic picture of a polar bear on an ice floe was used to frighten children into clutching their stuffed teddy bears and demanding Mommy and Daddy act to save them. But the bloom started coming off that rose when a scientist who had made population estimates that allowed the bears to be classified as threatened admitted that the estimates were: “A guess to satisfy public demand” but wrapped in...

VOne of the largest colonies of gentoo penguins in Antarctica was decimated by volcanic eruptions several times during the last 7,000 years according to a new study. An international team of researchers, led by British Antarctic Survey (BAS), studied ancient penguin guano and found the colony came close to extinction several times due to ash fall from the nearby Deception Island volcano. Their results are published today (Tuesday 11 April) in Nature Communications. Ardley Island, near the Antarctic Peninsula, is currently home to a population of around 5,000 pairs of gentoo penguins. Using new chemical analyses of penguin guano extracted...

he past few days, the Internet has been filled with commentary on whether the National Science Foundation should have paid for my study on duck genitalia, and 88.7 percent of respondents to a Fox news online poll agreed that studying duck genitalia is wasteful government spending. The commentary supporting and decrying the study continues to grow. As the lead investigator in this research, I would like to weigh in on the controversy and offer some insights into the process of research funding by the NSF. My research on bird genitalia was originally funded in 2005, during the Bush administration. Thus...