It's a rite of spring, birds flying back to the Northland after a long winter.

But an especially long winter this year has caused big problems for the loon population.


"He needs a much larger area to achieve lift," said Erica LeMoine, Program Coordinator for LoonWatch, of a lone loon in a pond near Ashland.

The loons are turning up grounded because many Northland lakes, the bird's springtime landing pads, are still frozen.

"This late spring definitely has a detrimental effect. Especially when we have this type of weather," said LeMoine, "They found a loon in a wet, paved parking lot, in farm fields down by Rhinelander."

The loons are grounded, unable to move on land due to the mechanics of their body.

Raptor Education Group, Inc. has rescued 57 loons so far this spring.

Firefighters have extinguished 15 out of 25 forest fires in the Russian Far East over the past 24 hours, the regional forestry department reported Saturday.

"Out of 25 forest fires, 15 have been put out, seven are active in the Republic of Sakha [Yakutia], with one of them contained, and three others have been contained in the Khabarovsk Territory," the department said in a statement.

Over the past day, fire covered some 936 hectares in the region. As of Friday morning, the figure was nearly 13,000 hectares.

On June 9, 2008, at least 60 dolphins stranded along the coast of Cornwall, England, in what was by far the largest common dolphin mortality ever seen in British waters. For hours, rescuers tried to lead them back to sea - often unsuccessfully, as some of the animals were panicked and others just milled about in tight circles, resistant to saving. The forensic investigation that followed involved 24 experts from five countries and multiple government agencies.

Now their verdict is in, and the most probable cause was naval exercises.

For several days before the strandings, the British Royal Navy ran a large, multinational event (which included the U.S. Navy and involved active sonar and other disruptive activities) off the Cornish coast. That event, the investigators concluded, was closely correlated in space and time with the dolphins entering Falmouth Bay and eventually coming ashore. All other possible causes - disease, algal blooms, malnourishment - were eliminated.

The implication of naval exercises in a mass stranding will come as no surprise to those who have followed this issue in the United States. Nor will the Royal Navy's perfunctory denials in media accounts, which seem awfully similar to what we have heard over the years from the U.S. Navy.

In the case of mass strandings, what Navy officials always seem to demand after the fact is some definitive, minute-by-minute record of the victims' movements before beaching, as though it were possible to stick a tag on every whale and dolphin in the sea. Until biologists can provide that infeasible level of proof, the U.S. Navy refuses responsibility. But really, the Cornwall case is simple: a gun was fired, there were bodies, and no one else was in the room.

Event Time
2013-05-11 02:08:14 UTC
2013-05-11 06:38:14 UTC+04:30 at epicenter

Location
26.784°N 57.841°E depth=36.4km (22.6mi)

Nearby Cities
85km (53mi) ESE of Minab, Iran
157km (98mi) E of Qeshm, Iran
161km (100mi) ESE of Bandar 'Abbas, Iran
172km (107mi) ENE of Khasab, Oman
359km (223mi) NNW of Muscat, Oman

Technical details

Florida's $9 billion orange crop, the largest in the world after Brazil's, may not survive an incurable disease that threatens to wipe out citrus groves throughout the United States.

The disease, known as "citrus greening" or huanglongbing, is caused by a bacterium, Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus. The bacteria are spread from tree to tree by a tiny insect called the Asian citrus psyllid, The New York Times reports.

A tree affected by citrus greening may not show symptoms for years. Eventually, however, the leaves turn yellow and fall, while the tree's fruit fails to mature, falling to the ground prematurely before the tree slowly dies.

"We have got a real big problem," Vic Story, a lifelong Florida citrus grower, told The Times. "It's definitely the biggest threat in my lifetime, and I'm 68. This is a tree killer."

There is no known cure for citrus greening (which also affects grapefruit, lemons and other citrus crops), despite the best efforts of numerous research labs. The Candidatus bacteria is so devastating to citrus crops that it was classified as a bioterror weapon in 2003, The New Yorker reports.

Since January, 13 percent of the Changra goats has been wiped out, threatening the lucrative Pashmina industry in the Kashmir Valley

This summer, Pashmina shawl weavers like Ashiq Ahmed have a tough choice to make. They can either buy raw wool at inflated rates or abandon the 600-year-old weaving craft.

In 2006, the ban on Shahtoosh (woven with the hair of the Tibetan antelope) left 50,000 weavers and an equal number of traders in the lurch in the Kashmir Valley. Now, the rise in the price of Pashmina wool after the death of 27,000 goats is threatening the industry's very existence.

"The price of 1 kg of Pashmina wool has gone up from Rs 9,000 to Rs 12,500. It will continue to rise. Thousands of shawl weavers, who earn just Rs 5,000 a month, will think twice before buying raw material at such prices," says Ahmed.

The crisis started in January when heavy snowfall in the Changthang hills of the Ladakh region in Jammu & Kashmir killed nearly 27,000 goats (13 percent of the total population), threatening supplies of silky Pashmina wool used to make fine and expensive shawls and scarves.

Changthang is located 175 km to the east of Leh on the border with China. The average altitude of the area is 14,600 ft above sea level. This area is also known as Rupsho Valley where the main occupation of the nomads is rearing yaks and Changra goats. The unforgiving winter makes the goats grow extremely warm and soft veneer, which is six times finer than human hair and is used to make Pashmina wool.

Usually, Changthang receives only 5 cm of snow in winters when temperatures dip to as low as -35°C. This year, it witnessed 121 cm of snowfall, which many say is a direct result of climate change.

As drought worsens, NM stretches lead over other states struggling with dry conditions

Major stretches of river have already gone dry, farmers are leaving their land fallow, and cities are clamping down on water use, but things in New Mexico just went from bad to worse Thursday.

The latest map from federal forecasters shows exceptional drought has spread from a quarter of New Mexico to nearly 40 percent in just one week. At this time last year, less than one-tenth of the state was affected by what is considered the worst category of drought.

New Mexico - the nation's fifth largest state - is in the worst shape of any state, and conditions have only intensified over the past seven days.

This week's U.S. Drought Monitor shows a swath of red and dark red across New Mexico, indicating extreme and exceptional drought conditions. The ominous colors stretch up through the Midwest, showing conditions have also worsened over the past year in parts of Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.

Ascension Island - Over the last few weeks we have been recording high numbers of dead fish washing up onto the beaches around the Island.

The same thing happened, at the same time of year, in 2008. A report was published recently, called 'Reef fish mass mortality event in an isolated island off Brazil, with notes on recent similar events at Ascension, St Helena and Maldives' by Hudson Pinheiro, Joao Gasparini and Jean-Christophe Joyeux. The report states that 'it is possible that blooms of toxic algae, under certain conditions, caused cascading intoxication along the trophic web. Toxic algae occur in other Atlantic oceanic islands and there are reports of algal blooms occurring in remote areas that suffer low human impact. A second hypothesis is that seasonal upwelling events of anoxic or hypoxic waters may be involved (the low oxygen content would be due to the resuspension of sediment and organic matter deposited at geological scales) often heavily loaded with hydrogen sulphide. Oxygen-poor waters of the Benguela upwelling have been reported to affect the southeastern Atlantic continental shelf and these waters, in years of strong Benguela upwelling, can even reach the Mid-Atlantic Ridge island of St Helena.' The full report is available to download from our website.

We are currently consulting with contacts in the UK and Falklands. I have sent them as much information as I have, including species affected, numbers, symptoms and photographs. They will be able to offer advice on the best course of action. I have also been in touch with one of the authors of 2010 report, this was his response.

Scientists still don't know why hundreds of baby southern right whales are turning up dead around Patagonia, a decade after observers first saw signs of the worst die-off on record for the species, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

With no evidence of infectious diseases or deadly toxins in whale tissue samples, scientists are scrambling to determine a cause of death. Some are even pointing a finger at blubber-eating birds.

The whales come to the peaceful Atlantic bays around Peninsula Valdes along Argentina's Patagonian Coast to give birth and raise their young. At least 605 dead right whales have been counted in the region since 2003, WCS officials say.

Of those, 538 were newborn calves. Last year, the mortality event was especially severe, with a record-breaking 116 whale deaths, 113 of them calves.

Despite extensive investigations, researchers have not been able to pinpoint why so many of those calves have been washing up dead at the region's remote beaches.

A sinkhole measuring nearly 85 meters wide and 15 meters deep engulfed three houses in a town outside Russia's fifth-largest city Nizhny Novgorod as some residents of the small village were slumbering.


One of the houses in the town of Buturlino was completely demolshed. Residents managed to escape the building a few minutes before it literally collapsed like a house of cards on Wednesday night.

"I just barely left the house as everything around started to collapse," Aleksey Ionychev told Russia's Channel One.