Accent on Natural Landscaping

Donna VanBuecken

Bird/Pollinator-Friendly Garden

As cold as it has been, the birds have nowhere to go other than to hunker down in the bushes and leaf piles. Just sparrows – this was a result of my bird count. In general, bird are nature's messengers. As populations of birds change, those fluctuations may indicate shifts in pollution levels, … [Read more...]

Warranted but Precluded

Recently, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) announced that the Endangered Species Act Listing for the monarch butterfly was "warranted, but precluded" by work on higher-priority listing actions. With this decision, the monarch becomes a candidate for listing, and its status will be … [Read more...]

Western Monarchs Closer to Extinction

Today is a sad day. Across 261 overwintering sites, volunteers counted only 1,914 monarch butterflies for the Western monarch population of California. How does this year compare to previous years? When the Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count was started in 1997, over 1.2 million monarchs were … [Read more...]

Whitebark Pine to Be Listed Under Federal Endangered Species Act

On December 2, 2019, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the Whitebark Pine (Pinus albicaulis) as a threatened species under the federal Endangered Species Act. The tree's range covers more than 80.5 million acres in seven western states (Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, … [Read more...]

What’s Happening to Land Use?

The first formal study of erosion took place under the Soil Conservation Act of 1935. Through the years, it has been updated by many Acts. The Rural Development of Act of 1972 implemented a land inventory and monitoring program, which generally follows a complex sampling of five-year increments. For … [Read more...]

First Snowfalls

One of my readers from Austria, Grete Blacha, wrote that she wanted to see the first snowfall. These are snowfalls that I definitely call my "first" snowfall. Here are some photos of the sunset, the moon rise and sunset. No Two Snowflakes Are Alike It is unlikely that two complex … [Read more...]