La beauté de la nature

This gorgeous songbird is half male, half female

While banding birds in Pennsylvania, researchers discovered an unusual rose-breasted grosbeak.

Researchers with a team monitoring bird populations at Powdermill Nature Reserve, in Rector, Pennsylvania, netted a surprise on September 24: a rose-breasted grosbeak with bizarre coloring. It had the bright scarlet feathers of a male grosbeak on one side of its body and the canary yellow plumage of a female on the other. Today’sPopular Stories History & Culture America’s postal service is a rural lifeline—and it’s in jeopardy Science Tropical storms can sometimes ‘supercharge’ the storms that follow Animals Birds are crashing into NYC buildings. Record numbers are being rescued. When they saw the robin-size songbird’s split coloring, it was immediately clear that the grosbeak was what scientists call a bilateral gynandromorph—an animal that appears half male and half female.
“There was no question about it,” says Annie Lindsay, bird banding program manager at Powdermill. Measurements also revealed that the bird’s right wing was slightly longer than the left, typical of the difference between male and female grosbeaks.
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Beautiful moments between animal mothers and their babies

From emperor scorpions to hippos to wallabies, many wild moms remind us of ourselves. Here are some intimate scenes captured on camera.

Every animal can thank a mom for making life possible. But the animal kingdom’s many mothering methods are as different as orangutans and octopuses. Some mothers lay eggs, in treetops or on the seafloor, while others labor through long pregnancies and live births.
Lion moms may live with their daughters for life, harp seals must cram every bit of their maternal care into less than two weeks, and many lizards never meet their offspring at all. Some mothers, like octopuses, sacrifice their lives to give the next generation its start.
Just keeping babies alive long enough to reach adulthood is a challenge. But moms also have to teach their young how to be a monkey, a cheetah, a whale, or a falcon.
“Many species seem to recognize that the young really don’t know what they are doing,” says animal behavioralist Jennifer Verdolin, author of the book Raised by Animals, “so they are given a kind of grace period to learn.”
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What We Can Learn from Trees

They inspire us, comfort us, and remind us how life moves on.

Every tree tells a story, but some are beyond eloquent, holding memories, embodying belief, marking sorrow. We hold trees in our imagination, where they grow in strange, wonderful ways in forests inhabited by fantasy and also by our fears.
In fable and legend, a forest shelters spirits, witches, and once upon a time, a big bad wolf.
Also white harts that leap just ahead of the hunter’s arrow, and a hermit who may emerge just in time to nudge along a tale that ends happily ever after, but sometimes not.
We incorporate the rich metaphors that trees provide: We turn over a new leaf and branch out; ideas blossom and bear fruit.
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Simon POLLET 13/10/2020