I and the Bird #46 offers a marvelous collection of birding posts from around the blogosphere.  Don’t miss it!

This is rather cool.  It’s a collection of some very surreal yet spectacular art by V. Kush.

From Europe, a No-Chlorine Backyard Pool: It’s an article about natural swimming pools.  What a great idea!  “Natural swimming pools (or swimming ponds, as they are called in Europe, where the concept originated 20 years ago) are self-cleaning pools that combine swimming areas and water gardens. Materials and designs vary — the pools can be lined with rubber or reinforced polyethylene, as in the case of Total Habitat’s, and may look rustic or modern — but all natural pools rely on ‘regeneration’ zones, areas given over to aquatic plants that act as organic cleansers.”  See the article for a lot more information, as well as some photos.  That’s what I’d love to build…  In time.

Striped rabbit spotted in Sumatra: “One of the rarest species of rabbit in the world has been spotted for only the third time in the last 35 years. The Sumatran striped rabbit was photographed in late January on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, the Wildlife Conservation Society said. The species is listed as critically endangered by the World Conservation Union, due to loss of habitat. The rabbit was previously photographed in 2000, with the last sighting by a scientist back in 1972.”  Unfortunately, we humans are running the poor critter toward extinction at a frightening pace.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it, like so many other species before it, soon loses the battle and disappears forever.

Given the drought we’ve suffered with these past several years, and given what I’ve been saying for some time (e.g., “Doesn’t this feel like the start of a new Dust Bowl?”), nothing about this report surprises me.  “The unprecedented drought that has gripped the southwestern United States isn’t almost over, researchers say, it may have only just begun. That’s the consensus of all but 1 of the 19 climate models used as the basis for this week’s upcoming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), according to a new analysis. […] Based on the climate models, the U.S. Southwest and parts of northern Mexico could become as arid as the North American Dust Bowl conditions of the 1930s, the study authors report. ‘If these models are correct, the levels of aridity of the recent multiyear drought … [will] become the new climatology of the American Southwest,’ the team writes.”  Frightening… but not surprising.

HIV cash misspent on abstinence education: “The critics can say ‘We told you so.’ Restrictions imposed by Congress are hampering the US government’s global AIDS relief programme, a report by the US Institute of Medicine (IOM) concluded on 30 March. Launched in 2003, the $15 billion President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is the largest ever financial commitment by a nation to fight a single disease. In a move widely condemned at the time, [the Republican-controlled] Congress insisted that one-third of the $3 billion set aside for disease prevention be spent on abstinence-before-marriage sex education. This has limited money available for strategies such as condom distribution and needle exchanges for intravenous drug users, which are proven to slow the spread of HIV. The report recommends that this restriction be removed. This would leave healthcare workers in PEPFAR’s 15 target countries free to tailor their prevention programmes to local needs, says Jaime Sepulveda of the University of California, San Francisco, who chaired the IOM committee.”  I’ve touched on that topic so many times before that I won’t bore you with a litany of links to my previous entries.  Just note that I’ve stressed the same thing this report now shows: It’s common sense that abstinence-only prevention programs are futile at best, and insulting and murderous at worst.  Get rid of that religious nonsense so we can save some damn lives.