Word: waterfowl
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North American native cultures showed enormous diversity by 3300 B.C. Among the oldest village sites ever found is the Koster settlement, in the Illinois River Valley. Villagers there were barely beginning to cultivate wild plants, relying mostly on nuts, grasses, fish, deer and migrating waterfowl, while people across Europe, Africa and Asia were already accomplished farmers. But elsewhere in the U.S. Midwest, populations of hunter-gatherers had staked out territories and built an extensive trading network that dealt in copper, hematite, seashells, jasper and other minerals. Fishing societies along the Pacific Coast were also becoming more complex, as natives took...
...lately has also been given to an Australian Aborigine writer, three Czech writers and an Italian television crew, a professor of film from the University of Bologna and the French editor of an African magazine. As we rounded Lake Merritt -- an urban gem endowed with islands that attract migratory waterfowl -- she said she hadn't realized that Oakland is so beautiful. I replied that a lot of us run down this city that the rappers call "Oaktown" because we don't want anybody else moving here. I was more than half serious...
...cattle and torched annually by ranchers and hunters. In California, at the Nature Conservancy's Coachella Valley Preserve, a few dozen volunteers felled thousands of salt cedar trees that had sucked this small desert area nearly dry, clearing the way for the reappearance of palm trees, willows and migratory waterfowl. Off the coast of Scotland, Bernard Planterose, a warden with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and his wife Emma have planted 20,000 slender saplings -- downy birch, rowan, oak and Scotch pine -- to bring back the forest on tiny, windswept Isle Martin. And at the Fermi National...
...Deprived of high-water surges, wetlands quickly die. In the 1960s, for example, flood-control canals transformed South Florida's wild Kissimmee River from a sinuous network of oxbows and tributaries into a stagnant ditch. The disastrous result: nearly 18,200 hectares (45,000 acres) of prime wetlands disappeared. Waterfowl and fish populations plummeted. Last year, in a startling about-face, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District proposed to unleash the Kissimmee by filling in 47 km (29 miles) of canal and removing three flow-control systems. The projected cost: at least...
...carved features, known as prairie potholes, are under water for only a few weeks in the spring. During periods of low rainfall, they are almost indistinguishable from any other acreage. But when the frozen ground warms in early spring, the depressions swarm with crustaceans and insects that provide migrating waterfowl with essential protein. The smaller potholes also enable breeding pairs of birds to find the privacy they covet...