Birds Do It

 ... migrate, that is! 

According to the tracking site BirdCast, this past Tuesday evening saw record-breaking levels of bird migration across North America. 

The map brings two spatial observations to mind. The first is the importance of the 100th meridian (100ºW longitude) -- a line corresponding roughly to the 20-inch isohyet and evident on a surprising variety of North American maps. 

The second is the vivid reminder of the importance of the Rio Grande Valley to migratory birds. When we lived there from 1994 to 1997, we became aware that the greatest bird biodiversity in the country is observed in the handful of counties at the southmost tip of Texas. Several hundred species of birds (more than half of the U.S. total) have been observed in just two locations Aransas National Wildlife Refuge and Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. 

This map is taken from my Texas County map page, in turn taken from 
my friend who created it for the regional Chamber of Commerce back in the day.

The latter was much closer to our home in Pharr, and we enjoyed a rich diversity of migratory birds there -- a single square mile that was occasional host to about 400 species of birds. Both sites are important because of the overland portion of the flyways converging -- with many birds essentially funneled between the Rocky Mountains and high plains to the west and open water to the east.  Birds following the eastermost flyways tend to do island-hopping as they skirt that side of the Gulf of Mexico.

I include a somewhat outdated map of the Lower Rio Grande Valley for several reasons, even though it does not show these refuges. Aransas NWR is a bit to the northeast -- just beyond the northern end of Padre Island, and Santa Ana is just to the south of Alamo (the town, not the San Antonio fort). What the map does show is that this is a largely urban corridor, with important highways and bridges in every direction -- a real challenge for preserving habitat, even for birds -- and even more importantly for large cats. Every acre of land matters, and I was involved with the Rio Grande Sierra Club in several efforts to preserve what remained. We were especially interested in maintaining corridors of connection between available patches of habitat -- this sometimes required rethinking the construction of bridges so that wildlife could transit under the roadway and along the floodplains. 

It is also worth noting -- for those not familiar with Texas geography -- that the Rio Grande Valley is not a valley at all. Rather, it is the very large, very flat delta of the Rio Grande / Rio Bravo. The lower 100 miles or so of this 1,896-mile river flows through a very large triangle of very flat land. 

Not Just Birds

The migration of birds made living in the Valley even more interesting than it otherwise was; I especially enjoyed certain evenings of my 108-mile commute to the town of Alice during seasons in which scissor-tailed flycatehers or red-tailed hawks would race my car in their hundreds. 

This is also an important corridor for monarch butterflies and was the first point of entry for Africanized "killer" bees, which we did observe at Santa Ana NWR. I knew what they were, because I had been mildly swarmed by during my first visit to the Amazon. This is a sound one does not forget!

Finally, of course, migration across this border by humans is immensely important and is lately the subject of much misinformation, abuse, and misguided wall-building. 

Lagniappe

I am reminded of what Nixon's (criminal) Attorney General John Mitchell had to say on the subject: 

"The conservation movement is a breeding ground of communists and other subversives. We intend to clean them out, even if it means rounding up every bird watcher in the country."

We thought Nixon was the worst -- and at the time he was -- but even he ended up signing many landmark environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act.

Routes of Enslaved Peoples

 Congratulations to RISD Professor Spencer Evans for his installation at the harbor in Bristol, Rhode Island, entitled Our Ancestors Come with Us. This work was dedicated on August 24 and is the culmination of the Bristol Port Project Marker Project and is now part of Routes of Enslaved Peoples, a global UNESCO network of projects.

It is a good reminder for those of us who are proud of New England's role in the abolition of slavery that New England also played a key part in establishing the cruel institution on this continent.

There is surely more to notice, but what caught my attention was the fact
that each of the elders has a forward foot planted firmly on a stone, while
the youngster is pushing off from a similar stone, propelled to a wide-open future.
Their backs are to the sea as they all face inland.

I created the map below because of my Google Map habit, which leads me to create simple maps when I find articles or web sites that should have a map but do not. On this map, the sites identified as part of the project by UNESCO are shown with blue markers; the red markers are for similar sites not identified on the Routes of Enslaved Peoples web site.

The first of these non-listed sites is very close to my former home in Annapolis, Maryland. I was aware of the significance of the site, as someone who watched Roots when it was first televised, long before I realized I would be living near the landing point of Alex Haley's ancestor, Kunta Kinte. It is embarassing that I was not aware of the memorial there -- very close to where I once had a summer job. I will make a point of visiting next time I am in Maryland.

An artistic commemoration of the horrendous Middle Passage in a very different form was Madonna's 2019 Batuka music video -- a collaboration with the women of Cidade Velha on the island of Santiago, Cabo Verde. This is one of the sites from which Portuguese colonizers transported people in bondage to Brazil. I have had the privilege of visiting during my 2006 and 2024 travel courses to the country. We will always be sure to include this sacred ground in any program in which we bring students to Cape Verde. As of this writing, Cidade Velha is not part of the Routes of Enslaved Peoples project, but it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Museum Map Detail

 My recent Museum Map post included a snapshot of the map that represents my life list of museums I have visited (to the best of my recollection).  When I wrote it, I mentioned my next intended visit, and I return to the scene of the blogging for just a bit about that.

When zooming in on the museum and national park map to add my visit to Mystic Seaport Museum (courtesy of our CAMM affiliation through the New Bedford Whaling Museum), I noticed that I had omitted another museum in the same general vicinity. It was just over a year ago that we visited a friend and former student who managed the golf course on Fishers Island. As exclusive and private as the island is, it does have host the Henry L. Ferguson Museum, where we were fortunate to have a private tour.

I am including one image from each museum below. For more, see my Flickr folders for Mystic Seaport and Fishers Island.

This mural Or, The Whale by Jos Sances is a highlight of Mystic's temporary exhibit MONSTROUS: Whaling and Its Colossal Impact. It is both massive and intricate -- and worth a visit to the museum just to see it. 

I love finding site-specific maps in museums. This one is an excellent visualization of a lecture I often give about the New England moraines that comprise the Cape and islands -- from Nantucket to Long Island. It shows that Fisher Island and all the others were about 50 miles inland from the Atlantic coast at the time they were built by retreating glaciers.

Wherever you live or travel -- especially in the United States right now -- please support museums. The better the museum, the more likely it is under attack these days. And be sure to visit often -- most museums host both permanent and temporary exhibits. 

Museum Map

I look forward to adding one marker to my museum life-list map today! When knowledge is under attack (see below), learning is productive resistance. 

My visit will be to the Mystic Seaport Museum in coastal Connecticut. Admission is covered by my family's membership in the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which we visit frequently.

I have actually been on the property before, when the museum hosted a whaleboat race in 2017. My team did not win, but we did place ahead of the museum's house team! I look forward to the museum's latest special exhibit on the monstrous impact of whaling.

The museums I have visited so far (and can remember). This is the red layer
from my National Parks and Museums Life List map.
Other layers are purple for national parks (also under attack) 
and yellow for my most important park and museum aspirations.

As of this writing in August of 2025, the felonious president of the United States has decided to direct his incoherent fury at museums in general and our best museums (the Smithsonian) in particular. Of course, he is not curious or literate enough to have any direct experience with the museums he is attacking, but Stephen Miller has apparently decided that now is the time to go after the places he hates most.

My family is grateful for museums and we will continue to support them!

Growing Old Growth

My introductory environmental geography course concludes with an assignment that sends students to the archives of Sierra, the little-known magazine published by the better-known club. The magazine began as a monthly bulletin in 1893, just a year after John Muir started the organization; it was published as a glossy bimonthly magazine when I was most active in the Club back in the 1990s and continues as a quarterly magazine today -- online and in print. 

Amazingly, the archives are now available back to the January 1950 issue (much earlier than was the case even a few years ago). It serves as a rich trove of environmental journalism on all manner of topics related to the protection of land, air, and water.  

I learn a lot any time I browse those archives and I tell myself I should try to keep up with the current editions. I rarely find time to do either, however, so I an glad for the reports from my students, who invariably find articles I really need to read! 

The latest example is "The Future Is Old Growth" by Krista Langlois. 

Photo: Mitch Epstein via Sierra

I decided I needed to read the article when the student who reviewed it mentioned a quote from David Foster, who is the author of Thoreau's Country, one of the books I use in an upper-level course. Small world of environmental geography! Foster's book was published in 1999, just as I was beginning to teach a course I would later rename Land Protection. At the time, he was the director of Harvard Forest, which my students and I were fortunate enough to visit several times with John O'Keefe, a forest ecologist who continued to host our visits for a number of years after his retirement. The combination of Foster's book and O'Keefe's many walks in the woods -- combined with a few sessions with more recent staff -- have allowed me to lead many student visits there in recent years. 

As I read the article, I saw quite a few references to Harvard Forest before seeing the mention of David Foster, who is not mentioned as the director, but rather by his affiliation with an initiative known as Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands, and Communities (again: very geographic!).

The article begins with someone who currently works at Harvard Forest. Erik Danielson is a self-taught dendrochronologist whose hobby is finding really big, really old trees. In the process, he has found patches of old-growth forest that have completely escaped the notice of other forestry experts. The article suggests, in fact, that Harvard Forest has purchased such a patch, about 30 miles north of its main properties. 

The article is a nice introduction to a central theme of my course and Foster's writing, which is that the reforesting of North America in general and New England in particular has continued since Thoreau's time but obscures the fact that almost all of the forests we see today are on land that was cleared for agriculture. Langlois goes a bit further, mentioning that much of what we see has been cleared again after its second growth. And maybe even again after that! 

She then reports on some of the scholarship around those old-growth patches that do remain, and some disagreements over exactly how they should be managed -- or perhaps benignly neglected. A familiar concept that she mentions is the effort to develop corridors of protected forests to maximize the resilience benefits of the genetic diversity contained in these relict patches. 

She also mentions -- though not by name -- the importance of buffer zones around the old-growth areas. I have thought -- and taught -- about buffers as a way to protect the integrity of key habitats. This is what the Massachusetts Biomap program calls Critical Natural Landscape. This article suggests a subtly different use of buffer zones. Second- and third-growth forests that surround old-growth forests can not only protect those rare patches: they can also provide a matrix into which they can expand. This cannot be true in a literal sense -- we cannot have new growth of old trees. But some ecologists are arguing that if left alone and surrounded by protected land, an expanded area could exhibit the essential characteristics of old-growth. 

Please read the entire article -- especially if you are in my Land Protection course -- for more insights about the spatial dimensions of forest ecology and forest protection.

Lagniappe: Coffee Connection

I plan to follow up with some of the Harvard Forest experts Langlois mentions, because there may be a benefit for coffee growers. My next sabbatical will be devoted to coffee on the island of Fogo in Cabo Verde. During my preliminary visit in 2024, I learned that a large proportion of the islands small coffee crop is harvested from trees that are over 100 years old. It is, of course, impossible to plant new 100-year old trees. But perhaps some lesson from Harvard Forest will provide benefits from those who work with those century trees. 

My Fogo Sabbatical

Talking Coffee with
Cabo Verdean President Neves

In these challenging times for education in general and public higher education in particular, I am especially grateful that my university continues to provide sabbaticals for its tenure-track faculty and librarians. Pending final approval, my next (and final) sabbatical will be in the country of Cape Verde, primarily on the island of Fogo. I had the good fortune to visit with a travel course in January 2024 and look forward to returning for the entire Spring 2027 semester. 

I look at this as an 80/20 project, with the majority of my effort to be devoted to projects related to coffee but with attention also paid to the heritage of whaling. Ultimately, we might have the opportunity to bring recreational whaleboat rowing and racing to a country that has been a key part of whaling history and geography. 

I provide this blogpost as a way to share my project with friends and colleagues who may be interested in involvement with one or both of these projects. For now (August 2025), I provide a link to my full sabbatical proposal, whose abstract I present below.

ABSTRACT:

Cape Verde is an archipelago with deep connections to southeastern Massachusetts in general and with Bridgewater State University in particular. This sabbatical proposal describes two projects that arise from my two decades of work with the country and drawing upon two of my areas of interest. The major project is to learn more about the important but little-documented coffee industry of Cape Verde, particularly on the island of Fogo. An extended stay during the harvest season will allow me to continue sharing a global perspective on coffee with the country’s growers, processors, and policymakers. It will also allow me to learn details of Cape Verde’s unique coffee industry and to bring that story and the actual coffee to the attention of industry leaders in the United States. A secondary project intends to use recreational whaleboat rowing and sailing as a way to promote learning about Cape Verde’s maritime heritage.  

Stopping the Ambler

The Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve is a complex of several land units in central Alaska that is larger than the state of Maryland and that is mostly designated wilderness. Even its National Park Service visitor centers are outside of the park itself, and visitors are advised to visit by plane or on foot. Even hikers are advised that there are no trails into the park. 

This wilderness is just part of what is at stake in an ongoing battle to prevent the building of the Ambler Road, a proposal whose quaint name belies the damage that it would cause if completed. It would, of course, also be very damaging to migratory wildlife and to the traditional practices of many indigenous communities. It would also provide some employment to some communities whose traditional livelihood has already been compromised by climate change.

Journalist Sarah Gilman tells the Ambler Road story in the. March 2025 issue of Sierra magazine. "Alaskan Tribes and Activists Are Ready to Resist Ambler Road, Again" is subtitled "The proposed route would slash through pristine Indigenous land." The keyword in all of this may be "again" because this is illustrative of many efforts to preserve wilderness in Alaska and elsewhere. Protection victories are always temporary; proposals to disrupt need only succeed once. 

When I read about this article in a review by one of my students, I was initially interested because my spouse and I are considering a visit to the Iñupiaq Heritage Center, part of an indigenous whaling community in Alaska. That center is several hundred miles to the north of the Ambler Road proposal, but Gilman does mention Iñupiaq among those who are contesting the project. In fact, she begins her telling of the tale from the point of view of Jazmyn Vent, a young woman who is both Koyukon Athabascan and Iñupiaq.

She quotes Vent as saying, “Once this road opens, there’s no going back.” This reminds me of a key lesson from a very different place that I have studied more extensively. The story of deforestation in Rondônia is largely that of a road-construction project that got out of hand. Planners who hoped to attract 10,000 settlers by paving the now-infamous BR-364 eventually saw 2 million people arrive.

Confluência de Confluencias

I decided to write the title of this post in Portunhol because the confluence desribed below is of rivers that are shared by speakers of both Portuguese and Spanish. (Caution: very nerdy linguistic details ahead) I considered using CONFLENCIA instead, since typing in all capital letters is a way to avoid accent marks, and the spelling in the two languages differs by a single diactrical mark. This is why most shirts and bags I order from LL Bean are embroidered with GEOGRAFIA. In doing two minutes of research on the subject I found one article supporting the all-caps convention and another article condemning it.

Now back to the geography. A confluence is simply the place where two rivers meet. I have been writing about specific confluences for some while, and this new post will serve as a confluence of those confluence posts -- hence "Confluence of Confluences" in the title. I was brought to the subject by this image, from the Facebook group Fatos y coriosidades (Facts and curiosities). 

The caption translates to: 

There exists an extremely symbolic point in South America where three nations are found in just one place: Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. It is the famous Triple Frontier, marked by the confluence of the Iguaçu and Paraná Rivers. On one side is Iguaçu Falls (Brazil), on the other Port Iguazú (Argentina) and, to the west, City of the East (Paraguay). This place is impressive not only for its geography, but also for the intence cultural and commercial integration among the three countries.

And here is an intriguing curiosity: in each country there is an obelisk painted with the colors of the national flag, positioned in a way that each can be seen from the other two -- a true triangle of frontiers visible to the naked eye. 

Tríplice Fronteira - Foz do Iguaçu (Brasil), Puerto Iguazú (Argentina) e Ciudad del Este (Paraguai)

In addition to the curiosities mentioned in the original post, I noticed that the confluence at the Triple Frontier exhibits a characteristic that is fairly uncommon among the millions of riparian conflences in the world: the two rivers retain distinct coloration because of different sediment loads and relatively slow mixing currents.

The most significant example of a non-mixing confluence is known (sometimes) as the Wedding of the Waters, also in Brazil. In this case, the waters of several countries come together, but no national boundaries are to be found for hundreds of miles up any of the hundreds of streams represented by the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimões at Manaus. For this geography nerd, the Amazon begins at this confluence, though an increasing number of maps apply the word "Amazon" to the lower portion as well as the entire length of the Solimões.

In this video posted in 2011, Florida Aquariam educator Allan Marshall goes all in with an explanation of what makes this confluence so special.

Prior to seeing this video, I had no idea that the river was so deep. I knew about the temperature difference between the two rivers, but I did not fully understand the reasons. The waters are flowing from regions with very different climates, so they begin with very different temperatures. It so happens that the waters that start of cooler also have the higher reflectivity, helping them to remain cooler all the way to the center of the Amazon Basin.

And Now for Those Confluences

As I suggest above, confluences have had my attention for some while. In order to finish this post in a relatively timely fashion, I will just point to some of the other material I have posted on the topic. Some of these posts include links to still other posts. So if you get lost on the morass, I apologize ...

Wedding of the Waters is a 2015 post I created for the blog that I was maintaining back then as part of our Project EarthView outreach program. It includes a link to the video above and a bit of context about the entire basin.

Confluences is a 2015 post on this blog (Environmental Geography) that I created after I was delighted to find an article about ten visually interesting confluences around the world. My post includes a link to that original article as well as my own contribution: a Google map showing all of those intersections in one view. I have now amended that map to include the Triple Frontier.

Down the Creek is a 2023 post about the Rio Madeira, the longest of the Amazon's 1,300+ tributaries. Madeira Playlists points readers to photos and videos from my 2023 voyage from Porto Velho to Manaus, ending with my own closeup views of the Wedding of the Waters.

And finally, my six-part course Amazônia: Fables to Forests includes a slide set entitled Tributaries and Confluences. These are the maps and illustrations I use for an entire lecture on the hydrography of the Amazon Basin itself. 

Lagniappe

This bonus bit is for students in my environmental classes who just happen to like the sound of a phrase, that is a speciality of both geology and geography and that was a big part of my master's thesis and that has kept me interested in the form and function of rivers for many years. This is for them, if they happen to be reading this:

FLUVIAL GEOMORPHOLOGY

Neither Geo nor Duck

 My daily routine includes several of the New York Times puzzles. This habit serves three purposes, as far as I can tell. It is perhaps keeping my aging brain a little sharper. It helps me to come slowly to consciousness each morning as I very slowly sip each day's first carefully crafted, free-range cup of coffee. And it allows me to procrastinate on any actual puzzles I might need to tackle. Bonus: I can procrastinate further by sharing results online -- it helps me to touch base with the nerdiest of my many nerdy friends. 

Some puzzles I do every day, and some I do never. My favorites are the inevitable Wordle and the obscure but lovable Strands.  This post is about yesterday's Connections. This is one that I try about half of the time, and that I solve about half of those times. And it is the best one for kvetching with friends online. Nobody who plays this game fails to complain about it sometimes. 

A brief explanation is in order for those who have managed not to get sucked into the Connections orbit. Each puzzle is an array of 16 words or short phrases. The player is to put them into four groups of four, each of which shows up as a colored square -- in the final results, correct groupings appear as color bars.

The purple bar is always the most difficult and garners the most discussion. The groupings tend not to be very obvious -- otherwise this would not be a possible. But the purple group is sometimes not obvious even after it has been chosen correctly by default. For example, they might belong together only if a common syllable were to be added or maybe even a rhyming word substituted.

I might grumble about that last, purple category. But if I fail at the puzzle, it is not because of that group, which comes together automatically if I have gotten the other four. So winning or losing is, for me, a measure of just how mentally sharp I am that day. I often "brag" about one-day streaks as a result.

Yesterday, the entire puzzle came to me quickly. Four solid bars means I had no missed guesses. I posted the "results" online in the usual way, which means that the achievement is shown but without the actual words.

Clearly a win, but with the most difficult group last, which is typical. And now for the real point of this rather rambling blog post: the actual results. It is safe to post this now because the original game has moved to the next round in all time zones.

Neither of the librarians in my house plays this puzzle -- even though it is all about categories -- but I shared the results with both of them. To my son, I had texted, "So geoduck is a thing, and it is not a duck at all." His response was priceless: "Yes, I am familiar with the geoduck. Why do you mention it? haha." He knows a lot about unusual foods and animals. 

I answered, "It was a puzzle answer and I assumed it was a duck, not a weird-ass clam." I had learned this, of course, from a google search. See whether you agree with my description.

Image: Oceana

Weird or not, they are apparently sought after, commanding prices as high as $150. The name derives neither from geography (my posting this nonsense on a geography blog) nor waterfowl. It comes from the clam's name in the Lushootseed language spoken in the Puget Sound area. The clam is found on the West Coast of North America from the Aleutians to Baja California.

And now for the other librarian response. Pamela noticed that not only are geoduck, seahorse, titmouse, and wombat animal names that end with other animal names, but that none of them are the same kind of animal as the second part of the name suggests. Sounding like kinds of a duck, horse, mouse, or bat, they are in fact a clam, a fish, a bird, and a marsupial. That is some professional-level librarian thinking!

Lagniappe: For the Nerds

In the course of looking for yesterday's puzzle outcome, I found my overall statistics for this game. According to the. NYT app, I've done a bit better at this than I thought. I have even gotten the purple category first 15 times. I think most of those were before I even realized it was always the most obscure category.

It could also be that like Reagan-era unemployment numbers, days that I open the puzzle and don't guess at all are viewed as "discouraged puzzler" days and are not counted. 

Johnstown Flood

Millionaires & Billionaires Who Did Not Give a Dam

I already knew something about the Johnstown Flood of 1889 because of my interest in floods and small reservoirs generally, and because of a long-ago NPR interview on the subject that is apparently no longer available. I learned so much more, however, from the recent Johnstown Flood episode on National Park After Dark. I highly recommend the NPAD version of this story to anybody who is interested in the intersection of environmental justice and hydrology.

Some related images are on the NPAD post on Facebook; the episode can be heard on Spotify as Episode 311 of the NPAD podcast. The flood became a subject for this blog because the event is commemorated at a National Park site. The Johnstown Flood National Memorial is located several miles to the east of the city.

The podcast episode includes a rich description of what was lost in the flood, how, and why. I did know that the neglect of the upstream reservoir's owner was responsible for the flood. I did not realize just how many warnings there had been, nor how the owners had modified the existing dam in a way that made it more suitable for their recreation preferences but also much less safe. I also did not realize that the flood waters entrained so much debris -- including an entire barbed-wire factory -- that it was more like a marauding monster than a wave of water by the time it reached downtown. And finally -- spoiler alert -- I did not realize the important role of Unitarian Clara Barton and the American Red Cross. 

As with many podcasts, NPAD is recorded about a week before it is released. Because it often discusses traumatic events, this is not the first time that the producers have had to add a disclaimer when releasing the broadcast, because it touches on similar traumatic events that are very current. In this case, disclaimers were added at the beginning and end of the program. The first is because of the very deadly and highly politicized floods in Central Texas. The second is because the release date would coincide with the one- and two-year anniversaries of floods in Vermont, very neaer the home of one of the hosts. They could not have known that severe flooding has now taken place in Vermont on the same date THREE years in a row. 

As of this writing, the official web site of the Johnstown Flood National Memorial includes many details about the disaster, including a list of every member of the sporting club that was responsible. As with all U.S. government sites, it is now subject to revision and censorship. 

The web site also includes a land-protection story I did not expect: the effort to restore the bed of the South Fork Lake to its post-flood condition. Trees were removed by machinery and goats were employed to remove brush. I am reminded of a similar project at our own home in 2013, when we rented goats to remove brambles and poison ivy. 

Goat Junior Rangers. I believe the donkey is employed to protect them from hawks and coyotes.

Other Flooding-Related Posts on this Blog

Rio Doce 2015

Flood Flash 2016

Burying the Survivors 2018

Flooding: It's Not in the Cards 2018 -- in which I explain in detail why we should stop using terms like "100 year flood" already.

Dam Shame 2020

Bonus: Haunting My Old Haunts 2012 -- not about flooding, but about the place whose flooding I discuss in several of the later posts.