On Sunday, I posted a short iPhone video of an osprey nest next to an 800 kw wind turbine at River John, Nova Scotia, to make the tongue-in-cheek point that someone forgot to tell the osprey about the perils of infrasound and shadow flicker. The point was tongue-in-cheek in the sense that I have no way of knowing whether young birds successfully fledged from the nest, but serious in the sense that I think health arguments against wind turbines are largely spurious. Bruce Wark, former reporter, CBC radio producer, and King's journalism professor, thinks I overlooked the most obvious threat wind...

Things went from bad to worse for a young smelt herring in West Pubnico Saturday morning. A common tern and a green crab had their eyes cocked for a meal when he happened by. My guess is that herring and green crab both fulfilled their destinies as breakfast. Nova Scotia Bird Society stalwart Ronnie D'Entremont was on hand to capture the action with this once-in-a-lifetime shot. Nova Scotia has a lot of wonderful nature photographers, but Ronnie ranks with the best. Photo copyright ©2013 by Ronnie D'Entremont. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved.  Click the image for a higher-res version....

A Grey Seal surveys the shoreline at Whale Cove, Inverness Co., Saturday. (Click photo for larger image.) Photo: Joshua Barss Donham....

A bald eagle surveyed the shoreline of St. Patrick's Channel from a red oak tree in the Waycobah First Nation at 2 p.m. Monday. Photo: Joshua Barss Donham...

Last November, a series of Contrarian posts depicted the mesmerizing spectacle of starling murmuration: the undulating patterns made by starling flocks in flight (here, here, and here). Beyond their intrinsic beauty, these scenes provoke a sense of wonder: how do they do it? How do the hundreds of individuals who make up a flock of birds (or a school of sardines, or a swarm of midges) know how to execute their particular roles in the collective ballet. The standard explanation, recounted by a pair of Italian physicists who have studied the question [PDF], runs like this: [T]his collective behaviour stems from some simple rules...