Some of these observations of “prairie pigeons” were made incidental to blasting them out of the sky; curlews, golden-plovers, godwits, and other sho… - Scott Weidensaul

Scientists have called the arc of maritime live oak and pine that once rimmed the Gulf from east Texas to west Florida the most important migratory stopover area in North America, but it has been fractured into pathetic slivers—consumed by vacation home developments, grazing cattle, strip malls, and, most recently, even an explosion of casino construction. Further inland, the rich, diverse forests of longleaf pine and hardwoods that once supplied the birds with food before the next leg of their journey north or being clear-cut, the trees being ground into wood pulp by portable “chipping mills.” Elsewhere, the land is replanted with a sterile monoculture of fast-growing junk pine that offers little in the way of sustenance to a weary migrant.

—A Manx shearwater, a small, stocky seabird resembling a gull, was taken from its nest burrow on Skokholm, off Wales, and moved to Boston. It completed the trip home in just twelve days—one day faster than the airmail letter sent from the United States confirming the bird’s release.

Natural systems are like those hollow Russian dolls, layer nested within layer within layer, always hiding a new riddle beneath the last one. Figuring out how they work as a herculean task, one with which humans have been grappling for a relatively short time. If you want clear-cut problems and need solutions, try geometry. This is ecology and it doesn’t get any more complex and messier than this. But we’re learning.