On cold winter mornings the bulbuls come squawking their full-throated calls as they swoop onto bird-feeders, their white-tipped gray breast feathers appearing frosted by the chill. There, they will eat bread crusts and seeds — or halved mikans given a chance — but in the forest they are omnivores. Superficially ...
On Saturday, Jan. 18, I set foot in Addis Ababa for the first time since I left Ethiopia in late ...
A city in Osaka is planting trees to lure the endangered Ural owl back to a forest ravaged by an ...
Search online for “Pacific gyre” and you’ll get about 455,000 results in 0.15 seconds. Try “Pacific trash vortex” and you’ll get 474,000. Here’s another: Do a search for “Pacific garbage patch” and, in 0.40 seconds, you’ll have 593,000 hits. If you’ve heard horror stories ...
U.S. investigators were taking samples Sunday at a New Mexico underground nuclear waste site where airborne radiation was detected, though authorities stressed they had found no contamination. Officials monitoring the possible radiation leak said there was no danger to people or the environment at ...
If you’re looking for a fine piece of wood, you’d be hard put to improve on a slab of hinoki (Hinoki cypress, Chamaecyparis obtusa) from the Kiso Valley straddling Nagano and Gifu prefectures. The sparsely populated district is home to the only natural hinoki ...
The division of Japan into distinct climatic zones means that anyone traveling around the country will normally encounter quite predictable demands in terms of clothing requirements; while for those in any one area the local weather forecast will be correct more often than not. ...
The Japanese whaling fleet — this year just a factory ship, three catchers and what is being called a “surveillance” vessel — left Shimonoseki in Yamaguchi Prefecture in secret on Dec. 9, 2013 bound for the Southern Ocean and its annual hunt that will ...
My day job is at Chuo University in western Tokyo, and January at Japanese universities is chaotic, what with final classes, reports and grading as our second term comes to an end and the academic year winds down toward its conclusion in March. Among ...
Residents of the U.S. Northeast dug themselves out Wednesday from a snowstorm that grounded flights, shuttered schools and left a bitter cold in its wake, while a blizzard swept across parts of Atlantic Canada. The atmosphere was particularly frosty in New York, where some ...
“Resilience” is a hot topic these days — not in self-help books, but among policymakers worldwide. As governments become convinced that climate change is a real threat, they are taking steps to ensure communities can bounce back from the increasing impact of floods, storms, ...
Despite their greater age, big old trees do more than small young ones to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, said a study that explores how well forests slow global warming. The findings overturn the conventional view that old trees are relatively unproductive in ...
Another new year has arrived and a Hokkaido blizzard is tearing past my window, drifting snow onto every surface as if it means to drown out the world in whiteness. Thankfully it also brings a muffling silence into which thoughts pop and crackle. As ...
By the time you read this I should be in the Simien Mountains of northern Ethiopia. I have been asked to go back there to tell the nation’s current generation what the forests and wildlife were like in 1967, ’68 and ’69 when I ...
This month’s column takes an intrepid look at efforts to expand protected areas in Japan and worldwide, areas that are essential to conserve biological diversity and mitigate natural disasters. “Intrepid” because ecosystems are the backbone of food and water security, and with national security ...
