Can guarantee the 4th of July show in Taos just had the best accordion solo nationwide. Take that.

🔊 Sound On

We call this kind of diagram “the writer’s nightmare” Generally ecosystems or social-ecological systems, everything is reciprocal, temporally overlapping. meanwhile standard narrative is linear and multiple cause/effects end up as laundry lists

Great thread. Especially love the “simplified” food web diagram.

Especially thoughtful piece today from @sammyroth.bsky.social, on the dumb discourse from the climate change has been overhyped bros. open.substack.com/pub/climatec...

I got a question on TikTok about how you would fix the bad dirt and thus the ecosystem, but, like, this is a good ecosystem. It’s just bad for forests. Humans automatically think soil fertility is good because it suits our needs, but extremophiles need a home too.

Natural history on canvas: Brueghel knew about bird-eating noctule bats Just published in @pnas.org, OA for all eyes Led by the one-and-only @romero-vidal.bsky.social, with the amazing @elena-tena.bsky.social and Sonia Sánchez-Navarro @ebdonana.bsky.social LINK: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

What a fascinating substack post by @richardconniff.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/richardc...

I think a lot about this @theonion.com headline theonion.com/report-every...

It used to be commonplace for folks in climate circles to say that a big part of chinas capacity on climate was a level of command and undemocratic action that Americans wouldn’t tolerate. Seems like that thread has vanished in the Chinese miracle story, maybe because U.S. is so messed up now, but

a quarter!!

Nothing quite like confirming ID of a Western Brown Snake by checking the head scales to get the blood pumping

Not much discussion on Bluesky, but it's currently the U.N. Intl Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. Lots of interesting stuff being put out, including this primer on the persistent myth that pastoralists have caused widespread desertification pastres.org/2026/06/19/c...

Get that this is an open question for mammoth hunters, but one thing that comes up time and again for grassland / rangeland cultures generally is people eat a lot more veggies that you might expect. Tubers, aliums, stone fruits, gourds, all out there

Our newest paper, led by postdoc Thayara Carrasco & published in @funecology.bsky.social, tracks functional diversity loss of land mammals during the Late Pleistocene extinctions in a grassland ecosystem 🧵 besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... 🎨: @lacerdajulio.bsky.social

Interesting piece. I wonder at what point the word “restoration” itself is obscuring what’s needed.

I especially love this diagram.

1995: Nigeria executed Ken Saro-Wiwa for opposing Shell's destruction of Ogoniland. 2008: The company was alerted to 100+ ruptures since 2008 but ignored them. 2026: Their leaky pipelines are still operating across Nigeria. This is the death project in action. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Did you know that creating small clearings helps herbivores keep trees from taking over savannas?💭 This Plain Language Summary discusses how new glades draw grazers who keep young trees short. This slows woody encroachment & maintains open savannas in an affordable & scalable way🐃 🔗 bit.ly/4xfgWpX

hoping to find long-term algae fans and/or experts for a story i'm working on! if that's you or someone you know, please reach out!

📣 BIG NEWS! 📣 We're re-launching bioGraphic as a completely independent nonprofit! As we make this transition, we're taking a publishing (and social media) break in July and August. Then we'll be back with more inspiring, paywall-free journalism about the natural world. More details below 👇

Based

When reality surpasses fiction! Top: fictional forecast for August 2050, broadcast by French TV in 2014 to warn about the consequences of global warming. Bottom: Real French forecast for yesterday, June 22, 2026.

As part of her dissertation research on vocal mimicry in tropical birds, Nelsy Niño has just banded her 100th Grey Seedeater. A congratulatory rainbow appeared in the Colombian sky. 🌈🐦🇨🇴🇨🇦 Keep up the great field research Nelsy and Jessica! @ibiouwindsor.bsky.social @animbehsociety.bsky.social

“Not til June can the grass said to be waving in the fields. When the frogs dream and the green waves and the buttercups toss their heads and the heat disposes to bathe in the ponds and streams, then is summer begun.” Thoreau, 1850

We were sitting around playing drawing games last night and I saw some gigantic creature slowly plow through the moth sheet and I was like what the fuck was that?! Oh, just a beaver dragging a branch straight through the moth sheet. Sheets are of no importance to beaver.

Last night I saw a nightjar or should I say…last night I saw a nightjar!!! Wild to be walking toward a rock on the pavement that suddenly flies. Even my dog was surprised. Such cool birds, with a special place in grassland lore and ecology…

A new documentary called “burn, scar” chronicles the aftermath of the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire in northern New Mexico from the perspectives of fire victims and Forest Service officials.

The thing where rattlesnakes are becoming more dangerous because they’re losing their rattles because the ones that warn us get killed preferentially is really peak humanity

One cool thing about the atmosphere is that you can take fundamental particles governed by nondeterministic quantum mechanics, mash them into air, whose bulk fluid mechanics are described to high precision by deterministic laws, then swirl the air around a planet and get nondeterministic weather!

Kind of baffled by the attention this gets next to agriculture. This is the water use of a midsize farm or feedlot. And the corporate capture angle is if anything worse.

Look who finally decided to join us

Wut www.quantamagazine.org/the-dirt-tha...

Happy #WorldBicycleDay to all who celebrate this simple solution to some of our most complex problems.

Grasslands are one of the most threatened ecosystems in the world. It’s always an honor to walk restoration sites with their caretakers. It’s really a small group of us doing this work in North America.

Think of CO₂ removal like a time machine. How far back does planting 100 million trees take us? One mature tree takes up ~25 kg of CO₂/year, so 100 million trees will take up 2.5 MtCO₂. That's a time machine that takes us back ~33 minutes in a year. Nature will not save us from fossil fuel CO₂.

All for the message that lots more money going to rural land stewards is great, but…the answer to this headline is a definitive “no.” And…there was a lot more to the pushback against Crowther than is being let on

For decades, native plants couldn't be given away. Now a Chicago park sale that normally draws 1,100 people drew 2,300 this year—and sold out completely. "It's not a fad," says one nurseryman who's watched the trend for 44 years. "This is a long, steady climb."

EDGE OF THE PLAINS 05/22/2026 Something strong and good always resonates with me out here south of Cimarron, NM near Philmont Scout Ranch. I don’t know what it is. Like it’s holy or something. Such a quiet, “empty” place. #photography

Still thinking about this (from @ferrisjabr.bsky.social 's Becoming Earth): "a single gallon of gasoline represents 100 tonnes of ancient life, roughly equivalent to 20 adult elephants". I knew it was big, but never worked it out. A tank of petrol is a LOT of ancient life. +1 reason to electrify!

Tired: we humans have no responsibility for climate change because it’s a natural cycle Wired: not our fault, aliens did it

Outbreaks of dry storms burned over 100,000 acres across the Plains the last few days. High-end fire weather today and especially on Monday could easily double the acreage. The Seven Cabins Fire in NM and Sharpe Fire in OK are already quite active this morning.

There is no ethical consumption in capitalism, but it's been a hard week for trying to apply my "not an absolutist" approach to "the AI is running on illegal unpermitted gas turbines."

this Elon Musk plot to steal your 401(k) money is really going underdiscussed

Please enjoy baby Alligator Gars feeding on brine shrimp (Artemia), set to a Bluey instrumental 🙂 🐟🧪gars are planktivorous at this stage (20 mm, 12 days post-hatch), but will soon switch to eating insects and fish! They’re also already breathing air!

TIL mao zedongs favorite poet was Walt Whitman. Go figure.

For a $20M investment, mapping deep geology related to the breakup of Pangea has located: 1. Regions where the risk to power grids from solar storms is 1000x higher! 2. New targets for critical mineral exploration Seems like a pretty cheap date?