A little taste of man vs. nature

I wrote a little ditty for the August 19th show, and it goes something like this:

Oh Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Your trash a turtle mouth does catch
And airplanes do get in the way
Of migrating birds on their flyway
Why does man have to make
Our presence appear such a mistake?

So you might guess that we covered some ways in which man and nature collide, including the article that definitively linked the US Airways Flight 1549 crash to an air collision with Canada Geese. We also learned about some current research regarding the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is a clump of trash the size of Texas swirling in the Pacific Gyre.

As for the news in nature, we learned about:

• biting back on World Mosquito Day
  
• a bird behavior experiment that gives credit to one of Aesop's fables
• a new set of twin pandas at a rescue center in China
• and much more!

We spent some time listening to an awesome record of nocturnal bird vocalizations that I scored at the annual conference for the American Ornithologists' Union in Philadelphia. To carry on the theme, the sound quiz was all about owls like the Great-horned Owl and the Northern Saw-whet Owl... my favorite! You should google images for this owl for some seriousness cuteness.