At the AAAS in February came news that was new to me and I’d suppose a lot of people who read this site. It is that a new subdiscipline called aeroecology – the study of life in the air – has gotten perhaps its biggest boost from aircraft control and weather tracking doppler radar systems installed in the last 20 years. A UC Santa Cruz press release on using them to track bats, and issued to boost attention to one paper at an aeroecology session at the DC meeting, got a little attention. The AP‘s Randolph E. Schmid did some additional reporting and wrote it up. Also giving it a ride was Elizabeth Pennisi at ScienceNOW and in Science, both outlets of the AAAS itself.

Here’s the point of this post. If such stories put a big blip on your own personal mental radar screen, at Miller McCune magazine freelancer Wendee Holtcamp has assembled the news from its root. She went to Texas – actually, stayed home, as a glance at her website shows that’s where this nomadic scientist-cum-sciencewriter went to college and still is – and tramped through big woods near the Gulf southwest of Houston. She introduces her readers to a US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who loves how the radar reveals migratory songbirds toward a stopoff in this preserved hunk of old growth hardwoods, a place where the trunks of live oaks are wide as cars. More important, one meets an old Cajun who has pretty much single-handedly – since he was a highschooler in the late 50s – pushed ornithology into recognizing that some radars can see birds just fine. Some had doubted it. Said birds are too small and soft. He says birds, and bats, are just distinctive, big raindrops to radar.

The piece reveals how technology, natural science, preservation, the works of both public and private sectors, plus happenstance and what some called angels in the Battle of Britain, entwined with rich and heartening result. Nice job. (Bonus: click through to the story and learn what a devil’s walking stick tree is).

- Charlie Petit

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