Did You Know...

In ballet, dancers learn how to do a "plie", which is from the French word "plier", meaning "to bend". A "demi-plie" is a half knee bend while a "grand plie", is a full knee bend.

Humans use their ears to hear; but, snakes hear with their tongues through vibrations. Organs in their knees help crickets hear while fish have ridges on their bodies that act as ears.

If a ram (male sheep) and a dam (female sheep at lambing time) have lots of lambs, they've created a group of sheep called a flock, drove, hirsel, trip or pack.

Mark Twain was the first writer to submit a typed manuscript to a publisher. He submitted The Adventures of Tom Sayer to Chatto and Windus in England in 1876. It was typed on a Remington typewriter.

The steps that dancers learn in ballet have French names. This is because ballet first became popular in France over three centuries ago.

Champis, The Sheep-Herding Rabbit

Video clip of Champis showing off his herding skills. The video is a bit overlong; but, cute.

Champis the bunny doesn't only hop — he also knows how to herd his masters' flock of sheep, possibly having picked up the skill after watching trained dogs do the job.

The 5-year-old pet rabbit from the small village of Kal in northern Sweden shot to online fame last week, having garnered more than 700,000 YouTube hits so far, after a clip of his sheep herding skills surfaced on a blog.

The June video shows a persistent Champis running back and forth on the farm, trying to keep Nils-Erik and Greta Vigren's sheep together.

Greta Vigren said she first noted his talent last spring when they let out the sheep to graze for the first time after the long Swedish winter.

"He just started to behave like a sheepdog," she recalled, adding that while he likes to round up the sheep, he is consistent about leaving the farm's hens alone, treating them more gently.

"He's like a king for the whole group. He thinks he rules over both the sheep and the hens. He has a very big ego."

Dan Westman, a sheepdog breeder who shot and posted the video of his friends' bunny, said he was in awe when he first witnessed the phenomenon, noting Champis does the job even better than most dogs would.

"It's really incredible, it's a herding rabbit," he said. "He rounds them up, and if they get close to escaping through the gate he sometimes stops them," he said.

"I mean I work with sheepdogs and know how hard this is. There are very few dogs that could do what this rabbit does."

Westman, who's known both Champis and its owners for years, said the beige little mix-breed bunny had never been trained for the job but seemed to have learned the ropes all on his own.

"He's probably picked some of it up from watching the dogs," he said.

Despite his tiny size, Westman said the sheep seem to pay their minder a world of respect, letting him herd them around when he feels they need some moving.

Drought Affecting World's Only Self-Sustaining Whooping Crane Colony

Photo courtesy: szatmarr666/CC BY 2.0

An article was written lately about the FAA Allowing Whooping Cranes To Resume Migration Flight to Florida. This was a feel-good story in which the FAA, charged with overseeing entrenched interests of airlines, decided they would let a flock of endangered Whoopers be escorted to Florida by people flying ultralight gliders.

Continuing extreme drought in Texas and a Federal court case regarding Texas water rights has conservationists worried about the future of the Western Whooper flock, which is the only one that is self-sustaining. No ultralight escorts needed.

Photo courtesy: USDA and NOAA/Public Domain

As reported in the Island Breeze,

The 5-foot tall cranes that migrate in the eastern United States, largely between Wisconsin and Florida, are a separate flock from those migrating between Texas and northern Alberta, Canada. But the Wisconsin-based International Crane Foundation is now taking a more active role in Texas water policy and outreach efforts because of the threat to the species there, including testimony in a case in federal court involving water rights and cranes.

Lack of rain leads to other problems which affect the western flock.

Over the past year, rainfall at the Arkansas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas has totaled 15 inches. That's down 59 percent from normal, government figures show. Some coastal marshes are now saltier than the ocean, and toxic algae blooms known as red tide are washing along the coast.

Sumatran Elephants Could Be Extinct in as Little as 30 Years

Photo courtesy: xlibber

Over the next three decades, the human population is projected to reach 9 billion people. In that same time, Sumatran elephants, currently numbering around 2,500 members, are expected to reach zero. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the same harmful deforestation practices which have already halved the elephants' population since the mid-1980s continues on through to today virtually unabated -- putting the majestic and endangered species on a collision course with extinction.

In the last 35 years, the once heavily-foliaged Indonesian island of Sumatra has nearly half of its forest coverage from deforestation, resulting in the fragmentation of habitats for much of the region's unique wildlife. Among the island's hardest-hit species have been large land mammals, like Sumatran elephants, which are highly dependent on large swaths of uninterrupted forest. As such habitats have dwindled, so too has their chances of long-term survival.

In light of the ongoing threats, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) recently reclassified the Sumatran elephant's already troubled conservation status from 'endangered' to 'critically endangered' -- joining Sumatran rhinos, Sumatran orangutans, and Sumatran tigers on that grim list of species nearing extinction.

Conservationists have renewed their warnings to curb deforestation on Sumatra, asserting that, if nothing is done, the elephants will likely be wiped out entirely very soon -- though there is a still time to stop it:

"An immediate moratorium on habitat conversion is needed to secure a future for Sumatran elephants," says the WWF in a statement, as reported by The Telegraph. "Scientists say that if current trends continue, Sumatran elephants could be extinct in the wild in less than 30 years."

Gorgeous Cape Made Entirely From Spider Silk

Photo courtesy: Bonnie Alter

It's eccentric and completely outrageous but it is gorgeous. This cape, on display in the exhibition "Golden Spider Silk" at London's Victoria & Albert Museum through June 5, is made out of the threads that a spider uses to make its web. The colour is completely natural: exactly what comes out of the spider.

Some statistics: It took four years and one million spiders to make the cape, completed in 2011. Each morning 80 people in Madagascar go out and collect the female Golden Orb (Nephilo madagascariensis) spiders which are common to the highlands. The spiders are 2" in size and fit in the palm of your hand.

They are brought to the silking facility, and the "silk" which is emitted from the underside of the spider's abdomen is collected. You can get 40 yards of it from one spider. Then they take the spiders back out into nature in the afternoon and set them free. They are not hurt during the process.

Photo courtesy: Bonnie Alter

The silk strands are collected and put onto the bobbins. It takes 24 strands to make a single thread. However this may be too fine so usually they use 96 strand thread. The spider silk thread is then woven on a loom. Whew!

So how did this happen. Two men, Simon Peers, a textile designer and researcher and Nicholas Godley, an entrepreneur, initiated the project. Simon Peers spoke to a rapt audience at the Museum about the work. He has lived in Madagascar for over twenty years and was fascinated by the weaving and textiles of the land. Peers wanted to revive the local traditions of weaving and whilst doing research stumbled upon the story of this extracted silk. It was an irresistible draw; he was hooked.

Photo courtesy: Bonnie Alter

He explained that the idea is at least three hundred years old. The Solomon Islanders grabbed the webs with bamboo poles from the trees; they made masks from it as ritualistic objects.

It has been written about in text books, and Rube-Goldberg-like contraptions have been created by a French colonial administrator to do it (see above). At the end of the nineteenth century there was even a college to train spider silk weavers and then because of the many difficulties and expense the industry died out.

Photo courtesy: Bonnie Alter

The two men worked for eight years to develop this project. In 2004 they started "silking" spiders and by 2008 it became a reality.

The first thing that they made out of the silk was this magnificent shawl. It took four years to complete and is woven from threads twisted from 96 individual spider strands. The heavier brocaded part is made from 960 twisted strands.

Photo courtesy: Bonnie Alter

Then they moved onto the cape. Why a cape format? It was conceived by the designer as a homage to the spider using both embroidery and brocade. It is decorated with lovely spider images, flowers and a clasp that looks like a web.

The cape is superman and it is liturgical as well. It summarizes our conflicted views of spiders: on the one hand they are the stuff of nightmares and horror films, and on the other there is the poetry and beauty of the spider's web.

Unemployed Artist Creates House From Decommissioned Euros

Very interesting story about how the house came to be.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade; and, that's exactly what Frank Buckley did. When life gives you a global economic crisis, a gloomy real estate market, and an uncertain currency future, make a house out of shredded-up money. And, why not? That's what unemployed Irish artist Frank Buckley did; and, it's working out well for him.

Over the last couple of months, Buckley has amassed a former fortune: a whopping 1.4 billion euros (US$2.3 billion) in decommissioned paper currency and used it to build himself a home -- proving that even if you're not made of money, your dwelling could be.

Considering the hardships being felt by Europeans in light of their ongoing monetary crisis, as well as Ireland's housing slump, the artist's creative construction is particularly timely.

"It's a reflection of the whole madness that gripped us," Buckley says of his project. "People were pouring billions into buildings now worth nothing. I wanted to create something from nothing."

"Whatever you say about the euro, it's a great insulator," he added.

Proposed Airport Would Affect Thames River Estuary

Avocets are just one of the many species that rely on the Thames estuary to survive. Photo courtesy: Omar Torres/AFP/Getty

The reflections of redshank that shimmer in the wet silt of the Thames river estuary are an illusion: the birds appear still, but they are in a race against time to eat enough before the tide comes in and they retreat on land to wait for their next meal. To ingest enough energy to survive, they need to eat two insects a second.

Scenes like this capture why environment groups and nature lovers across Europe are so deeply opposed to building a new airport on the Thames estuary, an internationally important area for hundreds of thousands of migrating birds, for reptiles like the slow worm, for newts and water voles, and for rare insects that thrive on old industrial land.

Altogether, the airport land and surrounding areas and waters include five separate Special Protection Areas for passing or over-wintering avocet, hen harriers, ringed and golden plovers, marsh harriers, little tern, dunlin and pintail, as well as hosting one of a new breed of marine sites, this one designated for its population of 6,000-8,000 red-throated divers. There is a Special Area of Conservation preserved for its species-rich estuaries, mudflats and salt meadows. Much of the area is also covered by the Ramsar international convention on wetlands, recognising how crucial the estuary is for birds travelling as far afield as Siberia, Canada and north Africa.

A consultation on a proposal for a possible airport, as expected to be announced by the prime minister in March, is a long way from a blueprint for any new airport. But plans drawn up and published independently last year by the architect Sir Norman Foster and the consultants Halcrow give a good idea of the scale of such a development. It would involve building over a huge area of mudflats and far out into the river, taking up to a quarter of the existing channel, according to the RSPB; the charity's famous logo features the avocet, which lives nearby.

Such a massive pouring of concrete and tarmac would itself cover a giant swathe of the plant- and animal-rich tidal zone, as well as the land where wading birds retreat at high tide. Further sites, up and down the estuary and river, would be affected by tides forced to flow around the runways and buildings. Add to that expectations that much more of the region would have to be sterilised of birds to reduce the potentially catastrophic risk of them striking the engines of aeroplanes, and the RSPB conservation director, Martin Harper, has described the proposal as an "act of vandalism".

In addition to the physical stress would be the noise, vibrations and the impact of industrial activity the airport would attract to the area. These, too, affect birds like the redshank, which live on the edge of survival as they struggle to build up the energy to survive between feeds in often bitter temperatures and winds. "If they have got to fly further [to find food], or they are disturbed, you are affecting the edge they are living on," said Nik Shelton, an RSPB spokesman.

All this is not to mention the additional problem of aircraft pollution, in particular emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides and water vapour contrails.

With no concrete plans yet articulated, it is hard to assess the potential climate-forcing effect of a new hub airport. But Foster's draft envisages four 4km runways, built to carry up to 150 million passengers a year. By contrast, the UK's independent Committee on Climate Change report on aviation emissions in 2009 estimated that, in order to meet the government's target for the middle of the century of limiting greenhouse gases to 2005 levels or below, ministers needed to limit demand increases to 60% – or 138 million more passengers. By itself, then, without any growth at other (often underutilised) UK airports, a new Thames Hub would increase capacity beyond what is recommended.

The coalition government has the option to drop that Labour cap on aviation emissions, but it would have to argue the case with industry, agriculture and other sectors for increasing aviation's already generous projected quarter-share of emissions in 2050.

On both fronts, wildlife and climate change, the proposals alone – even without approval – will be another blow to the Conservatives' already fragile environmental credentials, which helped rehabilitate the party in opposition. "David Cameron's pledge to lead the greenest government ever will ring hollow if he gives the green light to a huge expansion in air travel," said Andy Atkins, Friends of the Earth's executive director.

Britain's Birds are Remaining in Countryside This Year

The greenfinch is among common garden birds that have taken their leave of suburbia this winter. Photo courtesy: David Tipling/Alamy

It has been a hard winter for English suburban bird spotters. The nation's house birds have disappeared from towns and cities, leaving gardens devoid of their most familiar feathered visitors.

Their absence has triggered a flurry of letters and emails to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds from anxious householders disconcerted by the absence of blue tits, greenfinches, chaffinches and house sparrows from suburban Britain.

"We have been inundated with letters over the past few weeks from homeowners who have got used to seeing house birds in their gardens over our recent harsh winters but who are perplexed by their absence this year," said Nik Shelton, an RSPB official.

The reason for the birds' disappearance is straightforward, he added. "House birds like the blue tit or the chaffinch eat seeds or insects, which are easy to find in the countryside when the weather is mild, as it has been for this winter so far. When the conditions get tough, when the ground becomes hard and frosty, it is difficult to get at insects or pick up seeds. Food become scarce, so the birds head into towns and cities in search of sustenance. That is what happened last year and the year before when we had very hard winters. But not this year. Our blue tits and chaffinches are perfectly happy in the countryside at the moment."

The unexpectedly mild conditions have had other disconcerting effects on Britain's birds. For example, woodpeckers can be heard making their distinctive drumming noise in woods, a territorial display that is usually a prelude to nesting and which is not normally heard until later in the year. Jackdaws appear to be equally confused. "The warm weather has convinced them that spring is at hand. It will take a severe cold snap before they can reset their internal clocks and resume normal behaviour for the time of year," added Shelton.

It remains to be seen if that cold snap will occur, however. The Met Office said on Saturday that the weather would remain fairly mild for most of the coming week with temperatures hovering around the average for the time of year. For the longer term forecast, weather patterns are confused, with two very different but equally possible scenarios vying.

"The first scenario consists of changeable weather with rain at times and with temperatures noticeably above average for early February, with only occasional frosts," said a Met Office forecaster. "The alternative scenario is that much colder weather with winds mainly from an easterly or northeasterly quarter, will prevail well into February, bringing widespread frosts and snow to some areas. At present we cannot determine which will happen."

In other words, it is a 50-50 shot if the nation's house birds return to suburbia to avoid the cold of the countryside next month and our woodpeckers stop their drumming.

Fantasy Worlds Found in English Potholes

Photo courtesy: © Stephanie Wolff/the pothole gardener

When TreeHugger profiled Pete Dungey, an artist making miniature gardens in the cracks in Oxford's roads, they wrote that he "works alone, but hopes that others will follow his lead." Turns out a fellow Brit has been treading the same ground all along, adding an extra dose of whimsy to the already adorable little patches of green.

Dungey's counterpart, Londoner Steve Wheen, "fills potholes in roads and sidewalks with soil and living plants, decorating the spaces with miniature props to create tiny worlds," according to the European design site designboom.

Photo courtesy: © Steve Wheen/the pothole gardener

Like many other guerrilla gardeners who have come before him, this pothole gardener says he was inspired by the lack of green space in his neighborhood and a frustrated desire to garden.

With their teeny-tiny chairs, tennis courts, laundry lines, and picnic blankets, these are "green spaces" only a small doll could actually utilize, but Wheen, an avid cyclist, hopes they will put a smile on the faces of passers-by and "highlight how crap our roads and footpaths are."

A pothole designed like a road with a small sign warning of potholes. Photo courtesy: © Steve Wheen/the pothole gardener

Wheen cheerfully documents his guerrilla gardening exploits on his blog, where he also gives shouts-out to like-minded urban interventionists. Commenting on his work, a pedestrian advocacy group writes: "To us, the pothole gardener represents the kind of thing Living Streets wants to see more of -- small and beautiful things that make people take a moment out of their busy day to smile and appreciate their community."

Urban Depavers Reclaim Abandoned Lots

Photo courtesy: Depave/Video screen capture

Oh boy, do I like this group! They have everything: environmental convictions, volunteers, principles, energy...and I could go on and on. Perhaps the thing I like most about this group and their projects is they have the courage to back up words with action. Too few of us put our backs or our spare time into causes we say we support. They wanted to make a difference; and, they found a way to make that happen.

I hope the "depaving movement" goes global.

Urban areas are great for increasing density and reducing collective resource use, but they're not quite perfect. The asphalt that covers so much of cities retains heat and is impermeable; it leads to storm water pollution and is bad for air quality. Not to mention that every block of pavement is a block where plants can't grow.

Yet all over American cities, there are abandoned parking lots and public spaces that could be a lot more pleasant, and healthier, if it weren't for the layer of asphalt covering them. But one group is slowly taking back the land in an effort to create more green space and improve the local environment, by ripping up unwanted asphalt.

Depave is a Portland-based non-profit that organizes volunteer "depaving" sessions, wherein a group descends on an empty or underutilized lot and transforms it into a public green space, whether a community garden, playground or soccer field.



Since 2007, Depave has returned more than 94,000 square feet of Portland back to nature; it takes on more projects and draws more volunteers each year. In addition to the depaving, the non-profit also advocates to minimize the amount of impervious pavement installed in the city, and to recycle the asphalt and concrete it removes.

The idea is simple but very effective. Less pavement means less air pollution. It means more plants and more pleasant common areas where neighbors can gather and get away from the sometimes overwhelming density that comes with living in a big city. It means more community gardens, so more city dwellers can get involved in the local food movement.

If you're in Portland, you can check out Depave's upcoming projects and get involved. If not, you can start a movement wherever you call home; Depave offers resources and tips for getting started.

Via TreeHugger.com