Finnish satellite crane Aino is returning back from Africa. Aino is now at Lac du Der Ne-France that is a very important assembly area of Eurasian cranes. Aino crane has made a round trip, her autumn migration route went through eastern Europe via Hungary and Serbia. Let’s just hope that her breeding mire has remained untouhced here in Finland.
You can follow Aino’s migration route real time via Satellite cranes website.
Twenty years ago March 24, 1989, the single-hulled tanker Exxon Valdez hit Prince William Sound’s Bligh Reef in Alaska, spilling 11 million gallons of crude oil into the sea. The spill contaminated about 1900 kilometers of the shoreline and killed hundreds of thousands of birds and mammals and harmed the fisheries of the area.
I made the cartoon above in 1991, and unfortunately it hit closer than I could then imagine. Exxon concentrated to wriggle out of responsibilities and used hundreds of millions of dollars to avoid and to delay all claims for damages.
Democracy Now writes:
“In 1994, an Alaskan jury found Exxon responsible and ruled the company should pay $5 billion in punitive damages to some 33,000 plaintiffs. Exxon appealed. In 2006, the 9th US Circuit Court cut the award of punitive damages in half to $2.5 billion. Then, in a 5-to-3 ruling last June, the Supreme Court cut the amount of punitive damages again and ordered Exxon Mobil to pay just $500 million in punitive damages, one-tenth of the original jury’s ruling. That equates to about four days of Exxon Mobil’s net profits.”
ExxonMobil has also gained international fame by funding the global warming denial lobby.
More about Exxon Valdez Oil Spill: Climate Progress Blog, Mother Jones Magazine.
Documentary movie Black Wave: The legacy of the Exxon Valdez.
The Legacy of Exxon Valdez, video 15 min.
Birdlife International has launched today a campaign for migratory birds. All around the world many migratory birds are in decline because of habitat loss at their wintering areas and places they stop to rest and refuel. Born to Travel campaign aims to increase public support for conservation of birds and their migratory routes.
Born to Travel in Facebook
Follow Micratory Birds in Twitter
It just starts almost unnoticed. A couple of harmless looking plastic boxes filled with soil have appeared at the corner table of my study. There is a spot lamp too, and if you look very carefully, you see some tiny tomato seedlings exploring their new habitat.
But it won’t be long before the study is filled with pots, recycled yoghurt cups and milk cartons. Countless amount of tomatoes, peppers, gabbages, broccolis, leeks and other green stuff is growing by the windows trying to catch each ray of light. To compensate that shade, there is a huge greenhouse light that will fill the whole study with dazzling yellow light just when poor illustrator is trying to finish a sensitive watercolor…
Sunbeams have awakened a hibernating gardener.
