nature calling: A visit with the Panthers...again

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This has become one of my favorite traditions: an annual visit to Will Roberts' AP Environmental Science classes at Powell High School.

Each student had been assigned to read a portion of one of my three books: Natural Histories, Ghost Birds or Ephemeral by Nature and be ready to ask questions about what they had read. I like the format because it is free-wheeling. We go where the students want us to go.

I write about natural history—what is and has been and often touch on ephemerality, i.e. short-livedness. Species come and go. And the topic came up several times as when we visited Jim Tanner and the ivory-billed woodpecker, the so-called Ghost Bird. Are they extinct, or not? Plus we took an unusual turn toward botany with discussions about Osage orange, ginko and Franklinia. (My late UT botany professor: Dr. Aaron Sharp would have been pleased.)

Named in honor American polymath Benjamin Franklin, Franklinia was a native flowering shrub discovered by William Bartram along the Altamaha River in Georgia. Bartram collected seeds to cultivate in the 1770s but the species has completely vanished from the wild ever since. It, in effect, is a Ghost Plant.

Species do come and go. Most we never see and some we only get a fleeting glimpse before they perish. Another example: the last credited sighting of a Bachman's warbler came in South Carolina in 1962. Today it is gone or very well hidden, a second ghost bird.

We also talked about one of my favorite animals: a non-releasable, non-flighted American Kestrel named Docs that turned up at UT Veterinary Medical Center this past January with a badly injured right wing. It will never fly again. Kestrels are an anomaly. They are feisty little birds of prey that eat a variety of prey. They are the most widespread falcon, yet they are on the decline. Even after the banning of DDT in the early 1970s, the kestrel population has continued to decrease, down 66 percent since 1966. Why? Is it habitat loss or some other factor?

It's a mystery, as so much of life truly is.

Best of luck to all of you! Thanks, Will. See you on 2020.