Defenders of Wildlife Blog

San Francisco Bay Area handbag designer Mary Frances — whose artsy, whimsical creations have adorned the arms of  celebrities including Oprah Winfrey, Kate Hudson, Teri Hatcher and Jennifer Aniston — is generously donating five percent of sales from her Ocean Habitat handbag to Defenders of Wildlife.

Elegant beadwork defines these finely crafted pieces of wearable art that celebrate and call attention to the beauty and importance of our oceans. The designer describes the bag on her website: “A Capri blue ocean sets the background for sea creatures surrounded by seaweed, coral, and embellished with real shells.”

An oil-slathered Kemp's ridley sea turtle in the Gulf of Mexico gets help from a veterinarian during BP's oil disaster last summer.

This timely donation comes on the heels of the federal government’s final report, released on Tuesday, chronicling the BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster that spread over huge swathes of the Gulf of Mexico with devastating impacts to marine life last summer.

Thanks, in part, to her support, Defenders will continue to advocate for safer drilling regulations and stronger protections for our oceans and marine life.

You Can Help

• Pick up an Ocean Habitat handbag from Mary Frances Accessories online
• Find out what YOU can do to help wildlife impacted by the BP Gulf oil disaster

When making choices for dinner, these days more and more people are adding another criteria to the usual ones of tasty, nutritious and low-calorie: sustainable. We all know fish meets the first three… But when it comes to sustainability, here are two species you definitely want to bypass at the fish counter.

Here are some foods you should forgo:

Bluefin Tuna — Maybe Later? Uh, Not

Bluefin tuna has been commercially fished since ancient times. Today, it is a common menu item, served as steak or raw as sushi or sashimi. Unfortunately, bluefin tuna have become so popular that they are being overfished. That is, fishermen aren’t leaving enough bluefin tuna in the water to replenish stocks.

The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, which manages Atlantic and Mediterranean populations, sets fishing quotas every year, aiming to keep the bluefin out of trouble.

But many scientists and conservation groups say that the quotas are too high and some have even lampooned the group,  dubbing it the International Commission to Catch All Tuna.

While a giant bluefin tuna (sold for $396,000 at the Tsukiji fish market in Japan) was breaking the record for the highest price ever paid for a single bluefin,  the U.S. government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration kicked off a public comment period on the bluefin. The public comment period is a step toward listing bluefin under the  Endangered Species Act. So help may soon be on the way. But for now, you should consider putting the chopsticks down.

Shark Finning — I’ll Pass, Thanks

Another concern for conservation groups is shark finning, where fisherman chop only the fins off of  (often still living) sharks, then toss rest back into the ocean. The fins are sold in parts of Asia, where shark fin soup is a very popular delicacy. Lisa Ling reported for CNN that the “soup is a delicacy reserved for the wealthy on special occasions … [but with] an unprecedented number of people making more money than ever, the demand for all things that signal an improvement in status is gargantuan.”

Luckily, as Reuters reports, some young Asians are choosing to forgo these endangered delicacies in favor of more sustainable options.

How You  Can Help

Choose only sustainable seafood! You can learn more about threats to tuna, sharks and other marine species, and explore what fish species are caught sustainably, at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Sustainable Seafood Program.

Have you made your New Year’s resolution yet? Have you broken it yet? Looking for a new one? Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced in a press release today that the National Park Service will waive admission fees on 17 selected dates throughout 2011, and encouraged all Americans to make a New Year’s resolution to visit a national park this year.

Boulder Bridge in Rock Creek National Park

When I was growing up in southern Ontario, Canada, my parents would take the family on long walks on stunning trails in our hometown every Sunday. Even though you see your family every day, it’s surprising how much more you get to know each other when you take a break from life’s electronic distractions and share stories and discussions while surrounded by the beauty of nature. Now that I live in Washington, DC, I still put on my hiking shoes and walk the trails of the District’s beautiful Rock Creek Park.

If you’re free this January 17th, National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis suggests visiting Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site in Georgia, where “visitors can literally walk in Dr. King’s footsteps.”

A cluster of giant sequoia trees at Sequoia & King Canyon National Parks

Have you ever wanted to see the giant sequoias in Sequoia & King Canyon National Parks? Or experience the vastness of the Grand Canyon? No matter what your experience level is as a hiker or a walking enthusiast, if you make exploring the national parks a part of 2011, I bet you’ll be happy you did. There’s probably a lovely national park near you — click here to find out!

The 2011 fee-free dates will be the weekend of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (January 15-17), National Park Week (April 16-24), the first day of summer (June 21), National Public Lands Day (September 24), and the weekend of Veterans Day (November 11-13).

Mistletoe in Georgia's Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge

This New Year’s Eve, as you’re snuggling up to a loved one beneath a sprig of mistletoe, spare a moment to consider the festive plant’s role in the wild.

Many Kinds of Mistletoe

The mistletoe we usually see used in holiday decorations is native to and grows mostly in Great Britain and some other European countries. Several species of mistletoe also grow here in North America, including the dwarf mistletoe which happens to be the preferred place for northern spotted owl to roost and nest.

Northern spotted owls prefer to nest in clumps of dwarf mistletoe

Mistletoe grows attached to the branches of trees and shrubs, drawing nutrients directly from its hosts. Mistletoe is often considered merely a pest that may harm its unfortunate hosts. But in 2001, an associate professor at Charles Sturt University, David Watson, published a paper demonstrating that mistletoe is actually good for biodiversity. It turns out that mistletoe provides food and shelter for a wide array of wildlife, and therefore, areas with greater amounts of mistletoe can sustain a higher diversity of birds and other animals.

So while a mistletoe decoration can bring two people together in a kiss, in the wild it helps to bring nesting birds, grazing antelope and deer, and many other animals together. Now that’s one hospitable plant!

A reindeer sled, Arkhangelsk, Russia. Late nineteenth-century photochrom.

In only a few more days, a small group of the world’s most famous reindeer will be doing their annual “migration.” Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder, Blitzen (and Rudolph, of course!) are the legendary reindeer that help Santa Claus deliver all those toys to kids by pulling his sleigh ’round the world on Christmas Eve. Because of the Clement Clark Moore poem and the song Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, we know a fair bit about this famous herd. But what about the rest of the world’s reindeer?

Large male reindeer in Alaska; USFWS photo

Reindeer Around the World

Reindeer live in the northernmost places in the world, such as Alaska, northern Canada and in the Nordic countries like Norway and Finland. In North America, reindeer that live in the wild are known as caribou, and only those that have been domesticated are called reindeer. Did you know that reindeer are the only members of the deer family that are widely domesticated? Reindeer are also the only the deer species in which both males and females grow antlers!

Here are some other fun facts:

• Reindeer migrate extraordinary distances, often more than 3000 miles—which must be why Santa picked them to pull his sleigh.
• While Santa’s team has only nine members, most reindeer travel in herds of hundreds or even thousands!
• Reindeer fur is something like polar bear fur: The fur is hollow, which insulates them so that they don’t emit much heat. This keeps them both warm and dry, since they don’t melt the snow that they lie on!
• Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer has a very shiny nose, but usually,  reindeer grow fur on their noses to keep warm.
• We don’t have any scientific facts that tell us how fast they fly, but they can run nearly 50 miles an hour and swim about six miles an hour.

Interesting stuff! But sadly, America’s reindeer, or caribou, are threatened by climate change. Learn more about caribou in the video below, “Feeling the Heat,” starring Jeff Corwin.

Of course, if you want to track the most famous reindeer of all on their journey this Christmas, NORAD will be tracking Santa again this year! You can follow them here.

Thousands of birds faced a special threat this year: wetlands habitats damaged by the massive Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

But thanks to local landowners, many migratory birds may have dodged disaster. Early this summer, the Obama administration set up an initiative to urge landowners to create additional habitat for these birds by flooding fields and croplands. The goal was to get enough landowners involved to total 150,000 acres of flooded and fallowed lands. Gulf Coast landowners and others along important migratory “flyways” responded to the call, cobbling together an area more than three times the size of the initial goal!

The response to the crisis was unprecedented, but so was the BP oil spill and the havoc it caused to the environment.

The initiative, created by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, was launched on June 28, 2010 as an effort to lessen the chances that migrating birds would cross paths with oil, according to a Delta Farm Press report, giving birds cleaner places to rest and safer, uncontaminated food to eat.

“Private landowners play a critically important role in protecting wildlife every single day,” USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said in an October statement.  “And I am proud that so many landowners in these eight states stepped up to be a part of this unprecedented effort to increase migratory bird habitat and protect wildlife from any lingering effects from the oil spill.”

“The outpouring of support for this effort far exceeded our expectations, and it will have an impact on countless migratory bird populations for years to come,” he said.

An Unprecedented Effort

The response to the crisis was unprecedented, but so was the BP oil spill and the havoc it caused to the environment. The worst in American history, the Deepwater Horizon spill affected at least 650 miles of Gulf Coast shoreline, including more than 380 miles in Louisiana, 110 miles in Mississippi, 75 miles in Alabama and 90 miles in Florida. But only with time, will the full  impacts of the spill on Gulf Coast fisheries and Gulf of Mexico ecosystems come to light.

What’s Next for Migratory Birds…

As climate change alters or destroys habitats, bird migration – a miracle of nature – is itself at risk. In addition to the short-term goals that cover this year’s migration season, this Gulf Coast initiative has long-term objectives as well. With luck, future migrating birds will find also refuge on the land of these nature-loving landowners.

Check out more of our coverage on the BP oil disaster.

Find out what you can do to help wildlife impacted by the Gulf disaster.