Where to find me... the Bering Sea

Mountains in Glacier National Park, Montana
Copyright (c) 2007 Wendee Holtcamp

Just wanted to post a quick update: I leave in the morning for my next big adventure - a month on a boat in the Bering Sea (see the more detailed post below). You can follow my adventures at Nature's Great Beyond blog - http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond, where I will be posting dispatches once or twice a week. Post comments or questions - I love to get feedback and comments on my blogs while traveling!

I'm excited that tomorrow, I'm going to spend 6 hours on my layover in San Francisco hanging out with my friend Zofia (mom to my beautiful niece Kira), and then around 347pm, I fly to Anchorage and will stay overnight with a journalist friend there. I leave on Tuesday morning for Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island. Then the ship itself leaves Wednesday sometime in the afternoon, depending on weather.

I don't know how internet will be on board so my first priority will be getting those Nature blog posts in, so check there first! After that I'll try to tweet a bit here and there. I brought with me: rubber boots, rain jacket (it's supposed to mostly rain...), Barry Lopez' Arctic Dreams, lots of music on my MP3, binoculars, and a Bird Guide to Alaska! Among other things.

Also during July keep an eye out for the next annual Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine Water issue. I have a feature called "Saving Land, Saving Water" (based on our recent trip to San Antonio and the Hill Country) and my daughter has two photos published in it! You can usually get it on the newstands, in Texas at least, in mid- to late June.

Not long after I return, a colleague and I are taking the Great Gulf Coast Road Trip to check out the effects of the oil geyser on land and sea, from Texas to Florida to report another couple of stories. It will be a busy and fun summer!

Scientific American piece

A dead Kemp's ridley sea turtle - a critically endangered species - washed ashore at Texas' Padre Island National Seashore, probably a drowning victim to net entanglement from shrimping boats offshore.
Copyright (c) 2008 Wendee Holtcamp

This piece in Scientific American I wrote came out a few weeks back and I forgot to include a link! The article is called, Fury Over Conservationists Taking Fees from Developers: A proposed megaport and a sea-turtle nesting beach collide within the group that maintains the endangered species list (IUCN). This was a crazy piece to write. It is an extremely complex and controversial issue, and I had to research and write it very quickly and cover a LOT of info in a relatively small space. Here's a link to the PDF that has the full magazine layout with a cool pic of mating sea turtles, and here's a link to the article on Scientific American's website.

It starts with these two paragraphs:
Every winter and spring, tens of thousands of endangered olive ridley sea turtles clamber onto the shores of Gahirmatha Marine Sanctuary, along India’s northeastern coast, to lay eggs in one of the world’s most spectacular phenomena—the arribada, or mass nesting, which occurs only in India, Costa Rica and Mexico. This past season, however, the arribada did not happen at Gahirmatha.

Although turtles have occasionally failed to mass-nest in previous years, conservationists fear this time the cause is dredging for a new seaport. Indian scientists and conservation groups place some blame on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), among the world’s most respected conservation organizations. The union has taken corporate money to consult on the port, effectively giving it a green stamp of approval even though it may spell the end for this nesting site....

Read more here!