Nature Blog

Who Looks for You: Thoughts on Barred & Spotted Owls

Alden Smith, VINS Executive Director, reflects on the personal and emotional connection with barred owls, drawing parallels to their late mother, while also addressing the difficult conservation decisions regarding the culling of barred owls to protect the declining spotted owl population. This tension between emotional attachment to individual animals and the necessity of biodiversity conservation highlights the complexity and challenges faced by VINS in their mission to protect avian species.

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Passenger Pigeon Apocalypse

Three billion is the number of birds lost to North American populations in the last 50 years. It’s also a low-end estimate of the number of Passenger Pigeons that once lived on the North American continent. These birds were said to number so many that flights of them overhead could darken the sky. The fact that humans alone as a species were responsible for this devastating extinction is terrifying but, viewed from a certain angle, hopeful.

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