1 . Growing up, Danielle Belleny was always outdoors, picking up insects and investigating the animal world on her own. She hadn’t yet heard of wildlife biology, but that’s what she was learning about. She wanted to be a vet, a person who can treat sick or injured animals, at first. She said, “I always knew I wanted to work with animals, and as a kid，that was the only job I knew where I could do that.” But when Belleny was in college, her dad advised her to learn wildlife biology instead of veterinary.

Later, Belleny started working on research projects. One project involved placing trackers on a bird called the northern bobwhite. For another, she spent time herding goats, as a way to protect a grass habitat for endangered box turtles (龟) without hurting them.

Belleny’s working at Plateau Land &. Wildlife Management. “In the mornings, I’m usually out the door before sunrise,” she says. She surveys birds, keeping track of different species. And she searches for signs of what other animals in the area are doing. Around lunchtime, she’ll return home and write up a report. In the afternoon, she leaves for another site visit. Landowners can request her services. She advises people on how to protect the wildlife that lives on their farm. Her work takes her all around Texas.

Outside of work, young Belleny has been bird-watching for seven years. Her first book This Is a Book for People Who Love Birds was published in May, 2022. Now she’s working on a children’s book about birding, which is scheduled to come out in fall 2023. Belleny has some advice for young people thinking about careers. “Try everything you’re interested in through books and libraries. If you’re into wildlife biology, go to a library and find some field guides. After learning much information, you can do research work more easily.

4 . “The first domestic geese may have lived about 7,000 years ago in what is now China. That may make them the earliest bird to be domesticated, ” says Masaki Eda at the Hokkaido University Museum in Sapporo, Japan. Eda is part of a team that has unearthed an archaeological (考古的)site in Eastern China called Tianluoshan, which was a Stone Age village between about 7, 000 and 5, 500 years ago. “Its resident lived basically by killing wild animals and looking for plants that can be eaten, ”says Eda, “but they also grew rice. ”

The team has now identified 232 goose bones at Tianluoshan, four of which belonged to immature geese that were less than 16 weeks old, with the youngest probably less than 8 weeks old. This implies they must have hatched at Tianluoshan, because they were too young to have flown in from elsewhere. Some of the adult geese also seem to have been locally bred(饲养), based on the chemical make-up of their bones, which reflects the water they drank. These locally bred birds were all almost the same size, indicating captive breeding( 圈养) . Finally, the team carbon-dated the bones and found that the locally bred geese lived about 7, 000 years ago.

“The main thing that stood out for me is the fact they actually did radiocarbon dating on the bird bones, ” says Julia Best at Cardiff University in the UK. This makes the dating much more reliable than if the team had simply dated the surrounding materials. ”If geese were domesticated 7, 000 years ago, that would make them the first bird to be domesticated, ”says Eda. The other candidate is the chicken, but there has been an argument over when and where this first appeared,        A study published in 2014 reported that chickens were domesticated in Northern China as early as 10, 000 years ago, based on DNA from bones. However, the bones weren’t directly dated and “a lot of the things they claimed were chickens were pheasants(野鸡)”, says Best.

“Domestic chickens only appeared around 5,500 years ago. With the firm evidence we currently have, I think it is true, ”she says, but adds that the domestication of chickens is understudied, so the story could well change as more evidence emerges.

5 . Most cities were built on rivers. People originally settled in Paris because of the Seine, and in London for the Thames. A third of New York City’s surface area is water. For centuries, city folk used rivers for shipping, fishing and play. In a rare city without a big river, Johannesburg say, you notice its absence.

Yet in recent decades, we have ignored urban rivers. The Industrial Revolution ruined rivers for more than a century. Huge new urban populations filled them with waste water, factory emissions(排放物) and harmful gases of ships. In Newcastle in the early 1800s, salmon(鲢鱼) had been so plentiful in the River Tyne that apprentices(学徒) were said to have terms in their contracts stating that their masters shouldn’t make them at it every day. By the 1950s, the salmon were gone.

However, in recent decades, cities began cleaning up rivers. The Thames is now the cleanest it has been in 150 years and has seals and the occasional whale, sometimes alive. In cities like Chicago, riverside storehouses have been turned into fashionable restaurants and waterfront apartments. All in all, the latest trend is to change urban waterways into the natural play space so lacking in most cities.

But rivers also need to regain their original purpose as transport center. Passenger traffic may decrease as an urban issue if working from home becomes the norm during and even alter the pandemic. But there’s one form of urban traffic that just keeps growing: deliveries. Imagine using the enormous capacity of shipping to take delivery trucks off the roads. One of the newer Thames barges(驳船) with a capacity of 1, 750 tons can replace 44 large trucks, which uses much less energy and causes less noise pollution. In other words, we need to turn truck drivers into barge captains.

Rivers are the reason our cities are where they are. We just forgot about them.

6 . According to the Solar Energy Industry Association, the number of solar panels installed(安装)has grown rapidly in the past decade, and it has to grow even faster to meet climate goals. But all of that growth will take up a lot of space, and though more and more people accept the concept of solar energy, few like large solar panels to be installed near them.

Solar developers want to put up panels as quickly and cheaply as possible, so they haven’t given much thought to what they put under them. Often, they’ll end up filling the area with small stones and using chemicals to control weeds. The result is that many communities, especially in farming regions, see solar farms as destroyers of the soil.

“Solar projects need to be good neighbors,” says Jordan Macknick, the head of the Innovative Site Preparation and Impact Reductions on the Environment(InSPIRE)project. “They need to be protectors of the land and contribute to the agricultural economy.” InSPIRE is investigating practical approaches to “low-impact” solar development, which focuses on establishing and operating solar farms in a way that is kinder to the land. One of the easiest low-impact solar strategies is providing habitat for pollinators(传粉昆虫).

Habitat loss, pesticide use, and climate change have caused dramatic declines in pollinator populations over the past couple of decades, which has damaged the U.S. agricultural economy. Over 28 states have passed laws related to pollinator habitat protection and pesticide use. Conservation organizations put out pollinator-friendliness guidelines for home gardens, businesses, schools, cities—and now there are guidelines for solar farms.

Over the past few years, many solar farm developers have transformed the space under their solar panels into a shelter for various kinds of pollinators, resulting in soil improvement and carbon reduction. “These pollinator-friendly solar farms can have a valuable impact on everything that’s going on in the landscape,” says Macknick.

7 . Bees aren’t the only insects pollinating (给……授粉) red clover. Moths (飞蛾) do about a third of the flower visits after dark, new research suggests. The discovery stresses what researchers may be missing in researching into the night shift of plant pollination, including a previously unknown benefit of the moth pollination to the clover—a boost in seed production.

This work may help deepen scientists’ understanding of the pollination services provided by nighttime moths. For about a century, the general understanding of clover pollination has been that bees —and bees alone—are the key insect players. “Clover is a valuable agricultural plant and has received a lot of studies,” says Jamie Alison, a pollinator ecologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. “Yet, none of those studies have said anything about the possibility of moth pollination.”

Álison and his colleagues discovered moths’ pollination role while studying how plants and their insect pollinators would respond to climate change by moving uphill. To record the exact pollinators that would go to grassland plants, the team set up 15 time-lapse (延时) cameras in the Swiss Alps. The method allowed Alison and his colleagues to investigate nighttime visitors. In all, the team collected more than 164,000 photos of red clover flowers, with 44 of these images capturing visits by insect pollinators.

Most of these flower honey seekers—some 61%—were bumblebees. But a substantial proportion (比例)―34%―were moths, mostly large yellow underwings, visiting in the early morning hours. Butterflies and either a wasp or another bee species finished the other 5 percent of the visits.

“Moths are well-known as regular pollinators of many other plants, but their role in clover pollination seems to have been overlooked.” Alison says. He and his colleagues also investigated how many seeds the clover flowers produced, and they had a happy surprise.

“It’s clear that the role of nighttime moths as pollinators of crops has largely been ignored,” Funamoto, a pollination biologist at the University of Tokyo, says. “I think future studies will reveal many plant species that are thought to be dependent on pollination by daytime insects are actually pollinated by nighttime moths, to some extent.”

9 . A single tremble shook beneath my feet. The trees above me began to sway(摇摆) hard. Then came the deadly_________that could only mean one thing, destruction. Every house and object was now_________. My vision blurred (模糊) even more when I saw the remains of my house. The house that used to_________all the happiness in the world was now_________a pile of ruined pieces. I_________all the times I played with my little brother and sister. Images of them were_________in my mind, so I let the darkness sweep over me completely so I could see them vividly one last time. I regained a bit of my_________after lying on the ground for some time. My eyes viewed different things, but I walked on mindlessly, with no_________to anything around me at all.

Years have passed since the disaster that_________me years ago. I never thought I would be okay again after this__________event.

Today I am going on a trip to California to help__________of a recent earthquake. Then, I see her. A young girl is weeping into her arm. I walk toward her. Losing family was__________, but because of my life changing experience, I am strong, and I can__________the lives of those who are suffering as I was. When I reach the girl, she stares at me with sad eyes, and I gently stick out my hand for her to hold to. One day, she may__________others the way I did for her. She holds my hand tightly, and together, we look for a brighter future where we can help those around us and__________the world starting with one disaster at a time.