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Birding’s Tragic Blind Spot

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Friday, November 7, 2025

Birding is having a moment.  According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, there are more than 90 million birders in this country, making birding one of the most popular recreational activities, second only to walking. Bookstores have embraced this, with recently bestselling bird memoirs by authors Amy Tan and Margaret Renkl, as well as actor Lili Taylor. I too am a birder, though one troubled by a blind spot I see in too many of my fellow enthusiasts. Perhaps this blind spot is a side effect of looking at the world through binoculars. We spend so much time focused on distant birds that we don’t always see the birds closest to us. Like the birds on our plates. Consider the chicken. Globally, more than 80 billion chickens are killed each year, a number so big it borders on the unimaginable. I’ll break it down this way: By the time you finish reading this essay, nearly 18 million birds will have perished. Most chickens never see the sky, never set foot on planet Earth. They are born under artificial lights and die under artificial lights six horrific weeks later. Cage-free chickens may experience a bit more room and possibly a bit of sunshine, but the end result is equally dismal. A few chickens survive. Some are rescued (or stolen, depending on your perspective) from animal warehouses. (And yes, warehouse is a more appropriate term than farm.) In case you’re doubting how these birds differ from the ones we seek and celebrate, you might want to meet a few of them. Odds are, you’ll find an animal sanctuary near you — check the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries website for a list.  Perhaps you’re near the Woodstock Farm Sanctuary in High Falls, New York, where you can meet Peppermint, rescued from a live kill market, or The Iowa Survivors, 10 of the more than 1,400 chickens collectively saved when an egg facility in Iowa was preparing to kill 140,000 chickens during the darkest days of COVID. On my side of the country, at Tikkun Olam Sanctuary in Southern Oregon, you can meet Scissors, a bird born with a crossed beak, a genetic condition that makes it nearly impossible for her to eat like the other birds — a death sentence nearly anywhere but at a sanctuary. And if you hold Scissors in your arms as I have (she loves to be held), you might wonder how such a beautiful bird can be viewed by so many as disposable. If she hadn’t found her home at the sanctuary, she wouldn’t be alive today, deemed too much trouble to feed in reward for her eggs. As for turkeys, the United States has a national holiday to blame for the more than 200 million turkey deaths each year. And even ducks, for whom we happily make way in Boston, died to the tune of 28 million in 2024. How do we remove these birding blind spots? The first step is to acknowledge that all birds have equal value, including those we eat and those we may consider pests (such as starlings and pigeons). A bird’s relative scarcity on this planet need not be a prerequisite of its perceived value. Similarly, just because a bird species is in no danger of extinction does not make it any less valuable. Second, I encourage birders to reconsider the food on their plates. This may seem a tall ask; I too once devoured chicken wings and nuggets. But I can state now that the plant-based alternatives are just as good and carry none of that guilty aftertaste. There are also many environmental benefits to giving up chicken: chicken manure’s nitrous oxide emissions are a major contributor to global warming, and the nitrogen itself ends up in waterways, resulting in dead zones and countless numbers of dead fish. And then there’s this: If every birder in the United States gave up eating chicken, more than 2 billion chickens would be spared this year alone. In a world where we often feel powerless against the wanton destruction of environmental protections, we still have immense power at our disposal simply by changing the way we eat. Third, I urge birding, bird conservation, and bird-science organizations to explicitly support the protection of all birds. For instance, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has never officially opposed the eating of chicken, turkeys, or duck, nor has The Audubon Society. They understandably don’t want to make their members uncomfortable, yet it seems curious to bemoan the loss of so many bird species, as they do, when the number of chickens slaughtered each year outnumbers all of the wild birds on this planet. Birders are precisely the humans birds need as advocates: those who care about them and care about this planet.  A chicken, a duck, a turkey: Each is as much a bird as Flaco the owl. And no less deserving of protection. So the next time you think about going birding, consider a detour to a local sanctuary. The chickens would love to have a word. And you can leave your binoculars at home. Previously in The Revelator: Bird Bias? New Research Reveals ‘Drab’ Species Get…Less Research The post Birding’s Tragic Blind Spot appeared first on The Revelator.

Humans love to watch birds in nature. So why do we ignore the lives of the birds destined for our plates? The post Birding’s Tragic Blind Spot appeared first on The Revelator.

Birding is having a moment.  According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, there are more than 90 million birders in this country, making birding one of the most popular recreational activities, second only to walking. Bookstores have embraced this, with recently bestselling bird memoirs by authors Amy Tan and Margaret Renkl, as well as actor Lili Taylor.

I too am a birder, though one troubled by a blind spot I see in too many of my fellow enthusiasts. Perhaps this blind spot is a side effect of looking at the world through binoculars. We spend so much time focused on distant birds that we don’t always see the birds closest to us.

Like the birds on our plates.

Consider the chicken. Globally, more than 80 billion chickens are killed each year, a number so big it borders on the unimaginable.

I’ll break it down this way: By the time you finish reading this essay, nearly 18 million birds will have perished.

Most chickens never see the sky, never set foot on planet Earth. They are born under artificial lights and die under artificial lights six horrific weeks later. Cage-free chickens may experience a bit more room and possibly a bit of sunshine, but the end result is equally dismal.

A few chickens survive. Some are rescued (or stolen, depending on your perspective) from animal warehouses. (And yes, warehouse is a more appropriate term than farm.)

In case you’re doubting how these birds differ from the ones we seek and celebrate, you might want to meet a few of them. Odds are, you’ll find an animal sanctuary near you — check the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries website for a list.  Perhaps you’re near the Woodstock Farm Sanctuary in High Falls, New York, where you can meet Peppermint, rescued from a live kill market, or The Iowa Survivors, 10 of the more than 1,400 chickens collectively saved when an egg facility in Iowa was preparing to kill 140,000 chickens during the darkest days of COVID.

On my side of the country, at Tikkun Olam Sanctuary in Southern Oregon, you can meet Scissors, a bird born with a crossed beak, a genetic condition that makes it nearly impossible for her to eat like the other birds — a death sentence nearly anywhere but at a sanctuary. And if you hold Scissors in your arms as I have (she loves to be held), you might wonder how such a beautiful bird can be viewed by so many as disposable. If she hadn’t found her home at the sanctuary, she wouldn’t be alive today, deemed too much trouble to feed in reward for her eggs.

As for turkeys, the United States has a national holiday to blame for the more than 200 million turkey deaths each year. And even ducks, for whom we happily make way in Boston, died to the tune of 28 million in 2024.

How do we remove these birding blind spots?

The first step is to acknowledge that all birds have equal value, including those we eat and those we may consider pests (such as starlings and pigeons). A bird’s relative scarcity on this planet need not be a prerequisite of its perceived value. Similarly, just because a bird species is in no danger of extinction does not make it any less valuable.

Second, I encourage birders to reconsider the food on their plates. This may seem a tall ask; I too once devoured chicken wings and nuggets. But I can state now that the plant-based alternatives are just as good and carry none of that guilty aftertaste. There are also many environmental benefits to giving up chicken: chicken manure’s nitrous oxide emissions are a major contributor to global warming, and the nitrogen itself ends up in waterways, resulting in dead zones and countless numbers of dead fish.

And then there’s this: If every birder in the United States gave up eating chicken, more than 2 billion chickens would be spared this year alone.

In a world where we often feel powerless against the wanton destruction of environmental protections, we still have immense power at our disposal simply by changing the way we eat.

Third, I urge birding, bird conservation, and bird-science organizations to explicitly support the protection of all birds. For instance, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has never officially opposed the eating of chicken, turkeys, or duck, nor has The Audubon Society. They understandably don’t want to make their members uncomfortable, yet it seems curious to bemoan the loss of so many bird species, as they do, when the number of chickens slaughtered each year outnumbers all of the wild birds on this planet.

Birders are precisely the humans birds need as advocates: those who care about them and care about this planet.  A chicken, a duck, a turkey: Each is as much a bird as Flaco the owl. And no less deserving of protection.

So the next time you think about going birding, consider a detour to a local sanctuary. The chickens would love to have a word. And you can leave your binoculars at home.

Previously in The Revelator:

Bird Bias? New Research Reveals ‘Drab’ Species Get…Less Research

The post Birding’s Tragic Blind Spot appeared first on The Revelator.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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Lemurs Are Having a Mysterious 'Baby Boom' in Madagascar. Here's Why That Might Not Be a Good Thing

Researchers are investigating a sudden spike in pregnancies in one black-and-white ruffed lemur population that might signal environmental stress to the mammals

Lemurs Are Having a Mysterious ‘Baby Boom’ in Madagascar. Here’s Why That Might Not Be a Good Thing Researchers are investigating a sudden spike in pregnancies in one black-and-white ruffed lemur population that might signal environmental stress to the mammals Elizabeth Preston, bioGraphic November 7, 2025 8:30 a.m. A population of black-and-white ruffed lemurs on Madagascar is experiencing changes in the cadence of its breeding, researchers say. Inaki Relanzon / Nature Picture Library Every August, about halfway through his journey into Madagascar, veterinarian Randy Junge decides he’s never doing it again. After 30 hours of travel from the United States to reach the island off the southeast coast of Africa, he and his colleagues face a 12-hour trip by car over roads that are “bad to nonexistent,” he says. Then a team helps them carry their gear to camp—a hike of 18 miles through the rainforest. Once he recovers a little, though, Junge—who is the vice president of conservation medicine at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium in Ohio—always changes his mind. He’ll be back. What stands to be learned about the long-term consequences of environmental change to the health of Madagascar’s lemurs is just too important. Junge works with Andrea Baden, a biological anthropologist at Hunter College in New York, on a long-term project monitoring a remote population of black-and-white ruffed lemurs (Varecia variegata). Baden started the project at Ranomafana National Park in southeast Madagascar in 2005. Junge joined in 2017. Every summer, they camp out at the park for about ten days and work with a Malagasy team to capture lemurs; conduct medical exams; and collect blood, feces and other samples for later analysis. They also observe lemur families and social interactions. For the rest of year, Malagasy research technicians, guides and graduate students keep tabs on the lemurs’ activity. Because the site is so arduous to reach, it remains a relatively pristine habitat with undisturbed lemurs. But there are signs that the globally transforming climate is changing these lemurs, too.  One of the researchers’ interests is the black-and-white ruffed lemurs’ fertility. The species breeds sporadically, but in 2024 the Ranomafana population had babies for an unprecedented second year in a row. The scientists fear that what looks like a miniature baby boom might actually be a sign that this species is in danger. Did you know? Where do lemurs live? Lemurs are only found in the wild on Madagascar and the nearby Comoro Islands. Like humans and chimpanzees, they are primates, though lemurs are more distant relatives of ours than the apes are. Black-and-white ruffed lemurs are largely arboreal, walking and leaping between tree branches across their forest habitat in search of fruit. Goran Safarek / Shutterstock Wild animals face challenges that their captive counterparts don’t. Back in Ohio, Junge’s animal patients at the zoo “live a pretty soft life,” he says. The lemurs he sees in the rainforest, by contrast, bear signs of their tougher environment, such as cracked teeth or broken fingers that have healed crooked. The environment also shapes reproduction. The pampered black-and-white ruffed lemurs in zoos breed every year and often bear litters of three to five infants. In their native habitat of Madagascar, where all wild lemur species dwell, the black-and-white ruffed lemurs have fewer babies at a time—if they get pregnant at all. Like other lemur species in the wild, black-and-white ruffed lemurs live in the treetops, eat mostly fruit and breed within a specific window of time. But unlike their cousins, which breed annually or at regular intervals such as every other year, black-and-white ruffed lemurs have unpredictable gaps between birth years. Their fickle fecundity is reinforced in a surprising way. Most of the time—as is the case with other lemur species—a female black-and-white ruffed lemur’s vulva has no opening at all. “They could not have sex if they wanted to,” Baden says. But for 24 to 72 hours around July of a lucky year, she says, “Their vagina will open like a flower.” There’s a brief frenzy of mating. Then the females close up shop again. “It’s totally weird,” Baden says. Researchers Randy Junge and Andrea Baden visit the Ranomafana forest in Madagascar each year to study black-and-white ruffed lemurs with their Malagasy colleagues. Randy Junge The result is a boom-or-bust baby cycle: In the years when the Ranomafana population breeds, usually 80 to 100 percent of adult females end up giving birth that October. A mother normally has two or three infants at a time, born helpless and with their eyes closed, “like puppies,” Baden says. Unlike nearly every other hairy primate, young black-and-white ruffed lemurs are unable to cling to their moms’ fur.  For the first month or so of life, the mom has to stay with her young nearly full-time in the nest—a high platform of branches and leaves. For maybe an hour each day, she leaves to forage fruit and to socialize. “Mom takes off and will literally make a beeline to other females’ nests and pop in and pay little visits,” Baden says. After about a month, the mother moves her infants to a new nest, carrying them one at a time in her mouth. Outside this nest, an adult male or female will stand guard, letting the mother spend more time away. Some moms continue parenting like this, Baden says. Others change tack, teaming up with their neighbors instead. They carry their babies to the nests of relatives or friends, or to crooks of trees, and park the kids together under the eye of a sentinel male, while all the moms go out. Baden compares this arrangement to a kindergarten. The mothers who take advantage of shared nests spend more time feeding themselves, and their infants seem more likely to survive, perhaps because more regular meals for mom translate into richer milk. The synchrony of their reproductive habits helps to make this communal care possible. “Something in their environment tells them ‘yes’ or ‘no,’” Baden says. The availability of certain resources may serve as a signal to breed. But no one knows exactly what that signal is, she says. “We’re only just starting to understand this system.” Black-and-white ruffed lemurs typically birth two to three babies at a time, but their pregnancies can be as long as five years apart. Lauren Bilboe / Shutterstock From 2005 to 2023, Baden always saw two or more years between breeding seasons at Ranomafana. Gaps between breeding years seem to be the norm in other black-and-white ruffed lemur populations, too. In Madagascar’s Manombo forest, other researchers observed a stretch where black-and-white ruffed lemurs didn’t breed for five years. That’s why, at Ranomafana in 2024, field observers were startled to see the lemurs mating for the second year in a row. To learn more about what was going on with the population, the U.S. scientists brought a portable ultrasound machine on their annual field visit. (Coincidentally, Baden was eight months pregnant at the time. She sent a graduate student in her place to make the long journey and hike. “I’m tough, but not that tough,” she says.) The Ranomafana population consists of about 40 lemurs, with 15 or so adult females. As in other years, the team used tranquilizer darts to capture some of the lemurs. After using a net to catch each sleepy animal falling from the tree canopy, they collected medical data, conducted ultrasounds on the females and replaced radio collars as needed. The team managed to get ultrasounds on seven of the females. The blurry black-and-white images revealed another surprise: pregnant mothers—but only some. Four of the seven females were pregnant (three with twins and one with a single fetus). In normal years, either none of the females get pregnant, or nearly all of them do. “Not half,” Junge says. Furthermore, he says, one fetus was about twice as big as all the others, suggesting its mother had bred early, outside of the usual window. Junge and Baden brought a portable ultrasound into the field to determine if any females were pregnant for an unprecedented second year in a row. Randy Junge The scientists didn’t know how many of these fetuses would survive to term. Come fall, though, the infants arrived—not in October but mid-September, in yet another aberration from their usual pattern. Multiple litters were born. Some lemur moms successfully reproduced for the second year in a row. Two years of babies might seem like a good thing. But Baden worries that the consecutive breeding years in Ranomafana hint at something different—perhaps a scrambling of whatever environmental cues usually synchronize their boom-or-bust communal breeding. “We’re seeing kind of wonky timing of reproduction, and we’re seeing the plants are fruiting and flowering at different times,” likely due to climate change, Baden says. “We’re seeing way drier wet seasons.” All in all, she says, “There may be some sort of breakdown in the system.” Researchers estimated in 2019 that this species had declined by at least 80 percent over the prior two decades. If scientists can figure out what environmental cues influence the black-and-white ruffed lemurs’ reproduction, that knowledge could be critical for keeping them alive.  Junge is studying the lemurs’ blood to see if the presence of a certain vitamin or mineral in their diet, for example, predicts when they’ll breed. “For instance, if there was a critical nutrient they get from one tree that isn’t fruiting, it could upset the whole reproductive cycle,” Junge speculates. “It’s a little scary, because that ability to succeed may be a very fine line.” A black-and-white ruffed lemur on a branch Diego Grandi / Shutterstock Climate change is rattling Madagascar and its wildlife beyond Ranomafana National Park. In addition to warming and rainfall changes, cyclones are becoming more common and intense on the island. These storms knock down trees and leave holes in the canopy. Increasing storms could disrupt the lemurs’ food supply. Because black-and-white ruffed lemurs have a more selective fruit diet than other species do, they may struggle to adapt when cyclones destroy their preferred feeding trees. The five-year breeding gap in one black-and-white ruffed lemur population came after an intense cyclone tore through their forest.   But climate change is only one of the environmental factors threatening Madagascar’s lemurs. Habitat loss is an ongoing problem that’s difficult to combat, as Harizo Georginnot Rijamanalina, one of Baden’s Malagasy graduate students, has seen firsthand. Rijamanalina recalls visiting a forest in his village as a child. He was tagging along with his father, who was on a mining expedition. While his dad’s team dug their pit, Rijamanalina explored the forest, collecting sticks to make into toy weapons, while lemurs swung overhead. That forest is still intact; Rijamanalina went home for a visit in 2022 and identified about 11 lemur species living there. After finishing his PhD at the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar’s capital city, he plans to take his expertise back home and work on conserving that site and its wildlife. But other areas of lemur habitat across the island have shrunk as he has grown up. The impacts of climate change on the forest, Rijamanalina says, are “exacerbated by intervention of local communities, who struggle from the difficult life.” In trying to survive, they log the forests, mine them for gold or gemstones, or hunt the lemurs themselves for meat.  “You see, every year, the forest [gets] pushed back,” says Tim Eppley, chief conservation officer at the U.S.-based conservation nonprofit Wildlife Madagascar. “It’s largely driven by lack of opportunity and food for the local human populations.” All wild lemurs live in Madagascar and the nearby Comoro Islands, and most populations have been impacted by the forces of development and climate change. Luca Nichetti / Shutterstock As a result, Eppley says, lemurs today are in “a very precarious situation.” Nearly all of Madagascar’s more than 100 lemur species are threatened with extinction. “Many of them have very small populations that exist just within a single forest, or maybe a series of forest fragments,” Eppley says. Every population is critical to protect, scientists say. Baden and her team hope that continuing the ultrasounds in coming field seasons, along with their other biomedical research, will unlock secrets about the black-and-white ruffed lemur’s fertility and unusual reproductive habits that could help safeguard the species. By tracking which lemurs get pregnant, then comparing the data to how the lemur families look later, the team can find out how many pregnancies arise from the short breeding season—and how many of those fetuses make it to term and survive. Lemurs have semi-opposable thumbs that help them grip branches. Pav-Pro Photography Ltd / Shutterstock Even though some Ranomafana females gave birth in two consecutive seasons, “I’ll be curious to see what mortality looks like this time,” Baden says. She’s noticed more infants in recent years not making it to their first birthday. It could be yet another sign that, between the poorly understood lemurs and their shifting environment, some equilibrium is slipping. Was the Ranomafana lemurs’ one weird year in 2024 the start of a trend that could hurt their odds of survival? Or just a fluke? In 2025, the Malagasy team didn’t notice the lemurs mating and assumed things were back to normal. The U.S. researchers brought the portable ultrasound with them when they returned to the rainforest in August, though, just to be sure. And what they found was unprecedented: At least two females were pregnant, yet again. If the babies make it to term, it will be one mother’s third straight year of breeding. She’ll birth those infants, though, into an uncertain future. This story originally appeared in bioGraphic, an independent magazine about nature and regeneration powered by the California Academy of Sciences. Get the latest Science stories in your inbox.

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California lawmakers found money for these pet projects even as they slashed the budget

California lawmakers faced a difficult budget year, but they still managed to put hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks in the state budget to benefit their districts — and help them get re-elected.

In summary California lawmakers faced a difficult budget year, but they still managed to put hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks in the state budget to benefit their districts — and help them get re-elected. Despite facing a $12 billion deficit this year, California’s Legislature still managed to spend at least $415 million for local projects to help lawmakers win their next elections.  CalMatters found close to 100 earmarks inserted into just one of the state’s budget bills for local projects and programs that had little apparent benefit to anyone outside the lawmakers’ districts. Some of the earmarks raise concerns about legislative priorities in a difficult budget year, such as lawmakers spending millions from the general fund on museums, trails, parks and other amenities in wealthy communities.The spending includes $5 million in general fund money for a LGBTQ+ venue in high-cost San Francisco, $2.5 million for a private day school in Southern California and $250,000 for a private farm-animal rescue on the North Coast. Around $250 million of the local-project earmarks were funds taken from the $10 billion Proposition 4 climate bond California voters approved last year.  Some of the Prop. 4 earmarks included:  $26 million to programs paying farmers for private land conservation. $20 million to help the public access a Southern California beach gated off by a wealthy community. $15 million for “geologic heritage sites” including the La Brea Tar Pits — whose fossils have been used to study climate change in the last epoch. The earmarks were approved at the same time Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawmakers left state worker positions unfilled, suspended some health care benefits, forewent raises for firefighters, filled budget holes with high-interest bond money and took billions of dollars from the state’s “rainy day” emergency fund. Kristen Cox, executive director of the Long Beach Community Table foodbank, said the money lawmakers spent this year to enhance communities in their districts — often for projects that some would consider frills — isn’t going to the neediest Californians. “It’s misprioritization,” she said. “My priorities are to help the people that need it the most. Their priorities seem to be ‘Let’s make this city look gentrified and pretty and beautiful.’”  A secret process that benefits lawmakers Many of the earmarks — one-time allotments of cash for a specific purpose or project — are fairly benign and went to local infrastructure needs such as fire stations, parks, public schools and environmental projects.  They also represent just a small portion of the state’s $321 billion budget, which pays for programs and services that typically are intended to help all of California.  But inside the notoriously secretive budget negotiation process, lawmakers also have the ability to set aside sizable chunks of money to benefit their districts through an even more opaque earmark system.  It allows them to direct money to their pet projects without leaving a fingerprint — at least until they issue a press release touting a new community perk or show up for ribbon-cutting and check-passing ceremonies. Such spending, disparagingly called “pork-barrel spending” or “pork” for short, is hardly new or unique to California, said Thad Kousser, a former legislative staffer and political science professor at UC San Diego. He has extensively studied equity in how politicians divide up budgets for local needs.  Learn more about legislators mentioned in this story. Mike McGuire Democrat, State Senate, District 2 (Santa Rosa) Christopher Cabaldon Democrat, State Senate, District 3 Jerry McNerney Democrat, State Senate, District 5 (Stockton) Scott Wiener Democrat, State Senate, District 11 (San Francisco) Monique Limón Democrat, State Senate, District 19 (Santa Barbara) Benjamin Allen Democrat, State Senate, District 24 (El Segundo) Henry Stern Democrat, State Senate, District 27 (Calabasas) Catherine Blakespear Democrat, State Senate, District 38 (Encinitas) Brian Jones Republican, State Senate, District 40 (San Diego) Cecilia Aguiar-Curry Democrat, State Assembly, District 4 (Davis) Ash Kalra Democrat, State Assembly, District 25 (San Jose) Gregg Hart Democrat, State Assembly, District 37 (Santa Barbara) Jesse Gabriel Democrat, State Assembly, District 46 (Encino) There’s a reason it’s pervasive: When politicians keep the cash flowing back home, it helps them get re-elected, he said. “Politicians across generations — and in every country — try to use some portion of the budget on these clear signals that they’re directing the flow of government dollars to real people and real organizations right at home in their district,” he said. “Voters reward that.” Eyeing higher office? Send pork home The biggest recipient of the earmarks in Senate Bill 105 appears to be the North Coast Senate district of Democratic Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire. After losing his legislative leadership seat this year, he seems to be positioning himself for a congressional bid, according to The Santa Rosa Press Democrat. If he does run, he’ll be able to tout all the cash he brought to his Senate district this year.  His district was the recipient of more than two dozen earmarks totalling more than $100 million, accounting for a quarter of the earmark funds CalMatters identified. They went to fund a regional hospital, harbors, habitat projects, schools and fire stations. His district also received $250,000 for the farm-animal rescue.  State Sen. President Pro Tem Mike McGuire during a floor session at the state Capitol in Sacramento on April 24, 2025. Photo by Fred Greaves for CalMatters His largest earmarks included $50 million in Prop. 4 funds for a redwood trail that’s to run 320 miles across his district. McGuire’s office didn’t make him available for an interview. McGuire instead sent an emailed statement defending the earmarks. “Our state’s budget includes smart, one-time investments across California,” McGuire said. “Many in our state have been working on these projects for years to make California safer, stronger and more resilient.” Sen. Scott Wiener, the powerful Senate Budget Committee chairperson from San Francisco, is definitely running for higher office. Wiener announced last month he’s running for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat. The budget included at least $9 million in general fund earmarks benefiting the voters of San Francisco who will decide whether to send him to Washington, D.C. The money went for parks, restroom improvements and “to support the preservation and revitalization of a historic LGBTQ+ venue” in the city’s Castro neighborhood, according to the budget bill which doesn’t name the venue.  San Francisco is also slated to receive $1 million for a new oncology clinic and chemotherapy center for Chinese Hospital and $250,000 for “accessibility improvements” to Wah Mei child development center. Wiener’s office didn’t respond to interview requests. Lawmakers complained of earmarks None of the earmarks have a lawmaker’s name on them, making it extremely difficult for members of the public — or even other lawmakers — to decipher whose they are and which districts benefited. The governor’s administration is responsible for some. Legislative staff told CalMatters while reporting this story that earmark requests sent to budget committees aren’t public records.  CalMatters instead used the Digital Democracy database’s ‘Find your legislators’ tool to triangulate which pork projects are in which lawmakers’ districts from earmarks inserted into SB 105. That’s one of 40 budget-related bills Newsom signed this year. There are almost certainly more earmarks buried in the other budget measures. The secretive nature of earmarks — and the number and size of them this year — became a source of contention in September at the Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Committee.  Some Democratic lawmakers complained that so many last-minute earmarks had popped up in the spending bills. They questioned whether the earmarks were being fairly distributed to communities with the most need. “For the climate bond money, the general fund money, the Medi-Cal money, the Department of Education money, across the transit money, in almost every one, there is at least one — sometimes 40 — specific allocations,” Sacramento Sen. Christopher Cabaldon told the committee.  “The broader concern about equity and balance in those earmarks is certainly a point really well taken,” said Sen. Ben Allen, a Democrat representing the El Segundo area. Nonetheless, none of the 90 Democrats who control the Legislature voted against the budget this year, according to Digital Democracy.Newsom also signed it into law. His office didn’t respond to an interview request.  Susan Shelley of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association blasted the pork-project spending as hypocritical, especially as some liberal groups and lawmakers support raising taxes or turning to voters to pass new bonds to prop up the state’s shaky finances. Politicians, she said, like to say, “‘We need money for everything in California.’ And what are they spending the money on now? Basically gifts to the districts that make the elected representatives look good and that are not essential or not as essential.” Pork in Prop. 4  About $275 million in Prop. 4 funds also went to backfill the state’s general fund budget covering existing environmental, fire and energy programs and for expenses such as deferred maintenance at state parks.  Using bond funds to pay for existing expenses in the general fund means there’s less bond money available to pay for the new expenditures voters thought they were supporting. The separate bond earmarks from lawmakers reflect their priorities and may not necessarily be what voters wanted either. Some of the lawmakers’ earmarks include:  $40 million to secure public access to a beach blocked off by the wealthy gated Hollister Ranch community in Santa Barbara County and for a separate dam-removal project. Both projects are in the district of Sen. Monique Limón, who is replacing McGuire as the Senate Democratic leader next year. She shares a district with a handful of assemblymembers who may have sought the earmarks.  Limón’s district also received $1 million for a museum in Santa Barbara “for an interactive water exhibit.” Limón replied to an interview request with an email from her spokesperson, Christina Montoya. “While the senator was not involved in Prop. 4 allocations,” Montoya said, “she is glad to see projects funded that advance the goals of the state.” An aerial photo of Hollister Ranch, located west of Santa Barbara along the Gaviota Coast, on June 16, 2021. Photo by George Rose, Getty Images $1 million went to the UC Davis Integrative Center for Alternative Meat and Protein, primarily at the request of San Jose Assemblymember Ash Kalra. UC Davis isn’t in Kalra’s district, but he’s a vegan and the chair of the Assembly Select Committee On Alternative Protein Innovation. The $15 million earmark “for geologic heritage sites” including the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles was from Democratic Assemblymember Isaac Bryan. His office didn’t make him available for an interview. Taxpayers will pay at least $6 billion in interest and other expenses to finance Prop. 4 over the next four decades. Using Prop. 4 to pay farmers  An example of how earmarks lock up Prop. 4 funds can be found in this year’s budget for the Wildlife Conservation Board. The $10 billion bond is supposed to provide $1 billion for the board to give out as grants in the coming years. The board uses a competitive process that prioritizes habitat project proposals to provide the most ecological benefits for California. This year, the Legislature gave the board $339 million in Prop. 4 money to spend. But about a quarter of it — $88 million — is going to projects the board must now fund because of  lawmakers’ earmarks.  Gregg Hart, a Santa Barbara Democratic assemblymember, got one of the biggest earmarks from the board’s funds — $16 million for a conservation easement on Rancho San Julian, a 13,000-acre private ranch in his district. Conservation easements are legal agreements that ensure private lands don’t get sold and turned into environmentally unfriendly developments.  In an interview, Hart said preserving the ranch’s habitat in perpetuity is in line with what voters intended when they voted for Prop. 4. Assemblymember Gregg Hart speaks during a committee hearing on petroleum and gasoline supply on Sept. 18, 2024. Photo by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters “In my district, this is a signature ranch that is an environmental gem,” Hart said. “And preserving that is a very high-value project.” The conservation board also must allocate $10 million in Prop. 4 earmarks to programs that will pay farmers and private wetland landowners in the Central Valley to flood their fields to provide habitat for waterbirds.  Central Valley farmers already have received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal crop subsidies over the decades. The flooded-field earmarks came from Democratic Sen. Jerry McNerney, who represents the Stockton area, and Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry representing the Davis area. In an emailed statement, McNerney called the $10 million expenditure a “win-win for farmers and for wetlands … ensuring that migratory birds have places to rest and refuel on their long journey on the Pacific Flyway.” The total number of earmarks relying on Prop. 4 funds has Senate Republican Leader Brian Jones of San Diego saying, “I told you so.” He urged voters to reject the bond last year.  “It was going to be pork,” he said. “It was going to be earmarked projects that the legislators are going to be able to move …. into things that really didn’t have anything to do with the story that was being told to the voters when they voted.” Jones’ district was the recipient of some pork, though he said he made no requests for Prop. 4 money. His earmarks were from the general fund. They include $1.4 million for San Diego County dam repairs and $615,000 to the San Diego Mountain Biking Association “for building and maintaining public trails for mountain biking.”  ‘What did we get?’ from the general fund Other notable earmarks from general fund dollars, separate from the climate bond, include large one-time allocations for projects to benefit the state’s Jewish community. The Legislature has an  18-member Jewish Caucus.The funds include $15 million for the Museum of Tolerance and the Holocaust Memorial in Los Angeles as well as $5.4 million for the Jewish Community Center of the East Bay.  The Los Angeles Jewish community and interfaith leaders hold a candle lighting ceremony marking the exact moment of the first anniversary since Hamas spearheaded attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, at a ceremony at The Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles on Oct. 6, 2024. Photo by Damian Dovarganes, AP Photo An earmark for $2.5 million also went “for security and other infrastructure” at Milken Community School East Campus, a private Los Angeles Jewish school with annual tuition of nearly $55,000. The school is in Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel’s and Sen. Henry Stern’s districts. Stern’s office said the earmark for the private school wasn’t his. Gabriel co-chairs the Legislative Jewish Caucus with Wiener. Gabriel also oversees the Assembly Budget Committee. He didn’t return messages. Neither did the school.Gabriel this week attended a check-passing ceremony at the Discovery Cube in Los Angeles. He and two other local lawmakers touted getting the children’s museum a $5 million earmark from Prop. 4 funds. Other earmarks using general fund money included at least $1.7 million for trail improvements and an urban garden in Democratic Sen. Catherine Blakespear’s wealthy coastal district, as well as $3.6 million for the Oceanside Museum of Art.  Blakespear responded to an interview request with an emailed statement. “I’m grateful that these impactful community projects were funded through the state’s general fund,” she said. “I know they will provide immense value to these communities and their residents and are deserving of funding.” She announced this week she would be appearing at a check-passing ceremony for one of her earmarks: $1.2 million to the city of Mission Viejo for the Oso Creek Trail Improvement Project. Former Stockton-area Democratic state Sen. Susan Talamantes Eggman said such earmarks are hardly surprising. She was proud to bring back to her district $10 million in her last term to reopen two dilapidated community swimming pools.   “I mean, that is fantastic for my district,” she said.  But she acknowledged it is a lot harder for lawmakers to justify those sorts of expenses when there are so many of them in a difficult budget year.  “I think you either hope that (people) won’t find out, or they see what stuff they’re getting, and they’re like, ‘Oh, all right, well, as long as we got ours,’ right?” she said. “What people are more concerned about is equity. ‘What did we get?’”

Animals
Climate
Conservation

Crews Are Working to Fix Alaska Native Villages Devastated by Flooding. but Will Residents Return?

Crews are working to repair remote Alaska Native villages that were devastated by the remnants of a typhoon last month

KWIGILLINGOK, Alaska (AP) — Darrel John watched the final evacuees depart his village on the western coast of Alaska in helicopters and small planes and walked home, avoiding the debris piled on the boardwalks over the swampy land.He is one of seven residents who chose to remain in Kwigillingok after the remnants of Typhoon Halong devastated the village last month, uprooting homes and floating many of them miles away, some with residents inside. One person was killed and two remain missing.“I just couldn’t leave my community,” John said while inside the town’s school, a shelter and command post where he has helped solve problems in the storm's aftermath.But what will become of that community and others damaged by the severe flooding — whether their people, including John's children, will come back — is an open question as winter arrives.The office of Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy says the state's focus is on repairing the villages and supporting the more than 1,600 people who were displaced. It could take 18 months. Hundreds are in temporary housing, many in Alaska's biggest city, Anchorage, where they must accustom themselves to a world very different from the subsistence lifestyle they're used to.Even with short-term repairs, residents question whether their villages can persist where they are as rising seas, erosion, melting permafrost and worsening storms threaten inundation year after year. John hopes repairs can keep the community together long enough to come up with a plan to move the village.“A lot of people have claimed they’re not returning. They don’t want to do this again,” said Louise Paul, a 35-year resident of Kipnuk, the hardest-hit village, who evacuated about 100 miles away to the regional hub city of Bethel. “Every fall, we have a flood. It might not be as extreme as this one was, but as the years have set in, we’re seeing it. The climate warming is increasing the storms and they’re just getting worse and worse.” A region of natural abundance — and floods Where the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers enter the Bering Sea is one of the largest river deltas in the world — a low-lying area roughly the size of Alabama, with dozens of villages and a population of about 25,000 people. For thousands of years Athabascan and Yup’ik people were nomadic, following the seasons as they fished for salmon and hunted moose, walrus, seals, ducks and geese. They settled into permanent villages around churches or schools after missionaries and then government arrived. Those villages remain off the road system — connected by plane or boat, with all-terrain vehicles or snowmachines in winter.Flooding has long been a problem. Strong winds can push high tides and even sheets of ice onto land. In the 1960s, tidal floods prompted some frustrated residents of Kwigillingok to start another village, Konkiganak, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) away. Alaska Native villages on the front lines of global warming With climate change, storms have grown more intense. Shorter periods of ice coverage means less protection from erosion. Melting permafrost undermines villages.Kwigillingok spent years seeking state and federal help as well as working to raise some houses on pilings and to move others to higher ground, according to a 2019 report from the Alaska Institute for Justice. But that “high ground” is only about 3 feet (0.9 m) above the rest of the village on the flat, treeless tundra.In Kipnuk, the Kugkaktlik River has cut ever closer. This year, the Trump administration canceled a $20 million grant for a rock wall to reinforce the riverbank — a step recommended by the Army Corps of Engineers in 2009 — amid the administration’s efforts to cut government spending.Some 144 Alaska Native communities face threats from warming, said a 2024 report from the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. Over the next 50 years, some $4.3 billion will be needed to mitigate damage, it found.Relocating villages is no easy task. Newtok began planning in the mid-1990s and only moved its last residents into the new town of Mertarvik, northwest of Kwigillingok, last year. The relocation cost more than $160 million in state and federal money. A storm surge unlike others Harry Friend has lived through many floods in Kwigillingok in his 65 years, but nothing like what the remnants of Typhoon Halong brought the night of Oct. 11. Other homes, loosed from the ground, bashed his before floating upriver. The Coast Guard plucked dozens of survivors from rooftops.“When the water started coming in, my house was floating, shaking, floating, shaking," he said. The next morning, the homes of his older sisters and brother, who lived next door, were gone.His family has settled with relatives in a nearby village, but he returned to see what he could salvage and to retrieve his shotguns so he can hunt.Unmoored homes are scattered across the tundra like game pieces on a board. One building rested on its corrugated metal roof and rocked in the wind. Others had smashed into boardwalks. Coffins lodged in above-ground cemeteries washed away.But work crews have arrived with large earth movers, gravel and other material brought by barge. Some residents have come back to help, such as by repairing boardwalks, recovering coffins or righting fishing boats that overturned.Efforts to rebuild, which include repairing water and fuel lines, will proceed as long as the weather allows, said state emergency management spokesman Jeremy Zidek.Kwigillingok resident Nettie Igkurak stayed behind to cook traditional food for the workers, search crews and remaining residents. The school freezer works, and it's stocked with moose meat.“I knew I had to stay and cook for them because they had no one,” she said.Friend has since rejoined his family. He couldn't remain at the home for the winter: The power outage spoiled his stockpile of seal, walrus, moose and beluga whale. And because the storm surge forced salt water from the Bering Sea into the village, there's little access to fresh water.He knows the village will likely need relocation.“This is our land," Friend said. “You’ve got to come back to your home."Some 500 miles (800 km) away, Darrell John of Kipnuk — not related to the Darrel John who remained in Kwigillingok — is realizing his idyllic subsistence life may be over.“We’re probably never going back home,” he said as he took a break from filling out assistance applications at a shelter in Anchorage.Like other residents, he was airlifted twice — first to the regional hub of Bethel, and then to Anchorage when shelters in Bethel became too crowded. He and his family are staying in a motel room.They abandoned their home for the village school as the water rose at 2 a.m. When he returned, it was gone, along with his shed full of freezers packed with berries, fish, moose and seal.He got in a boat, found his house far upriver, and retrieved some clothing and birth certificates.As they were airlifted out, he saw that most of the village cemetery's graves were gone. He felt like he was abandoning his late mother and brother.Anchorage has its advantages, he said: “Flushing toilets; we don’t have them back home.”But to hunt, he now needs permits and for the animals to be in season — hurdles foreign to subsistence hunters.And he will need a job — but what?“I have no idea,” John said. “This was not a plan to be here."Johnson reported from Seattle and Bohrer from Juneau, Alaska.___ The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

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Climate
Food

Researchers Found Hundreds of Mysterious Dimples on the Seafloor Near Antarctica. Now They Know What Creature Made Them

The indentations are nests of fish called yellowfin notie, and they are not randomly scattered—rather, they appear to have been arranged in distinct patterns

Researchers Found Hundreds of Mysterious Dimples on the Seafloor Near Antarctica. Now They Know What Creature Made Them The indentations are nests of fish called yellowfin notie, and they are not randomly scattered—rather, they appear to have been arranged in distinct patterns Sarah Kuta - Daily Correspondent November 6, 2025 8:56 a.m. While seaching for Ernest Shackleton's lost ship Endurance in 2019, researchers stumbled across clusters of indentations on the seafloor. Weddell Sea Expedition 2019 Scientists were using an underwater robot to explore the waters around Antarctica when they came across a peculiar scene: The seafloor was dotted with hundreds of mysterious dimple-like indentations. At first, the researchers were totally perplexed. Working aboard the polar research vessel S.A. Agulhas II, they went back and forth, debating what the imprints might be—and what might have made them, reports BBC Wildlife Magazine’s Melissa Hobson. Now, the scientists say they have an answer. The depressions were nests created by yellowfin notie (Lindbergichthys nudifrons), a type of fish that thrives in the extreme cold of Antarctic waters. Researchers describe their discovery in a new paper published October 28 in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. Fun fact: A big berg When the giant iceberg A68 broke free from the Larsen C ice shelf in 2017, it made news, even becoming a social media star. It's no wonder: The iceberg was twice as large as the entire country of Luxembourg and was even visible from space, before breaking up into smaller pieces. The discovery “goes to show that exploration of our world is still underway, with constant new findings,” lead author Russ Connelly, a marine biologist at the University of Essex in England, tells CNN’s Ashley Strickland. Researchers discovered the yellowfin notie nests during the 2019 Weddell Sea Expedition. The mission, which took place in January and February 2019, included scientists from around the world. It had several goals. A big one was to find Ernest Shackleton’s lost ship Endurance, which became trapped in sea ice and sank in 1915. But the team also wanted to investigate ice shelves in the Weddell Sea, particularly a largely unexplored region of the Larsen C ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula. In July 2017, a massive, 2,200-square-mile iceberg called A68 broke free from the ice shelf, revealing a huge swath of newly accessible seafloor below. “That calving event provided a unique opportunity to study a region undergoing rapid environmental change, specifically the first chance to study previously inaccessible areas of the seabed that were once underneath A68,” Connelly writes in a commentary accompanying the paper.The researchers didn’t find the Endurance—though another group located it three years later in 2022—but they did learn plenty about the Weddell Sea, one of the most remote and least studied regions on the planet, Connelly writes. The yellowfin notie nests, for example, were a major find. In total, the team documented 1,036 nests across five sites. The researchers found larvae in and around 72 of them. Video footage also revealed new insights about the creatures, including how they arrange their nests to ensure the survival of their young. The nests, which had all been cleared of plankton, were not randomly scattered. Instead, they were “organized into distinct patterns, forming a vast, geometric fish neighborhood on the seafloor,” Connelly writes. Over 1,000 Strange Markings Discovered On Antarctic Seafloor Many of the nests were arranged in clusters, and the scientists suspect this setup helps keep the eggs safe from hungry predators, like brittle stars and ribbon worms. Once the eggs are laid, males stand guard for roughly four months to ensure the little ones don’t get eaten. Since yellowfin notie males are known to defend the area surrounding their nest—up to about 9.8 inches away—the clusters likely make everyone safer. Some of the nests were more isolated, perched on the outskirts of the communities. Researchers think those are inhabited by larger, stronger fish that are better suited to defend themselves and their eggs on their own. The arrangement is an example of the “selfish herd” theory, which posits that animals “reduce their domain of danger by putting other individuals between themselves and an approaching predator,” the researchers write in the paper. Similar defensive nesting patterns have been observed in other species of fish, though this is the first time scientists have documented it in yellowfin notie. “The entire community is a dynamic interplay between cooperation and self-preservation,” Connelly writes. Nearly 15 percent of the active nests had pebbles in and around them, and some had been built next to rocks. The researchers suspect the fish might be taking advantage of stones that fall off icebergs as they melt. These rocks “are ideal to lay eggs on as they allow good oxygenation of the eggs, helping to prevent rotting on the seafloor, whilst also providing a barrier to animals living within the muds to eating the eggs,” Autun Purser, an ecologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute who was not involved with the research but reviewed the paper for the journal, tells CNN. Zooming out, the scientists hope their findings will help support efforts to get the Weddell Sea designated as a marine protected area. The move would not only help protect charismatic creatures like penguins and seals, but also “these hidden nurseries that form part of the Antarctic food web,” Connelly writes. “These underwater environments are a powerful reminder that even in the planet’s most extremes, life finds a way to build complex, resilient communities,” he adds. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

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Science

The David vs. Goliath Story of a Ranching Family and an Oil Giant

They were cowboys amid the mesas in a corner of New Mexico. For years they coexisted with an oil company — until one day they couldn’t. The post The David vs. Goliath Story of a Ranching Family and an Oil Giant appeared first on .

About two months ago, a slow fall hit rock bottom for Richard Hodgson and his son Kaleb Hodgson when a white pickup truck drove through the middle of an elk hunt on their property in far northwest New Mexico. Elk scattered, their hunting clients left, and the Hodgsons realized that the oil companies that had drilled their land for decades might not be their friends after all. “It just drives me totally insane,” Richard said.  He’s the patriarch of three generations of Hodgsons who live on a spread he started 42 years ago in the high, dry country he loves. Richard was born and grew up in nearby Farmington but always wanted to be a cowboy in the San Juan Basin, among the region’s green and tan mesas under an electric blue sky.  As a young man he bought the ranch’s initial parcel with money made from driving trucks and working as a roustabout for oil and gas companies. In lean ranching years he’d go back to the oil patch for the money, using that to buy more land.  Today the family runs around 200 mother and calf pairs on the 5,600 acres it owns and roughly 32,000 it leases from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. And everywhere you look on that land, there’s an oil or gas well — the family doesn’t know how many. “I don’t know if we really want to know,” said Kaleb, Richard’s eldest son. “It’s kind of overwhelming, honestly.” Kaleb said a movie crew came to the ranch a few years ago to shoot scenes for a film and loved the place — but won’t be back. Crew members told him it cost too much to digitally remove all the wells that appeared in the background. Father and son think they have room enough to run another 60 to 100 cow-calf pairs, but recent droughts have shriveled the forage and dried up the natural watering holes. The oil and gas that come out of the ground in the San Juan Basin contribute to the changing climate that’s drying the region. This summer, the dust was so thick on the grass that it wore down the cows’ teeth. “It takes years off their life,” Kaleb said. “Everything’s an uphill battle out here,” Richard said. “All I ask for is respect.” Kaleb Hodgson, Luke Whitley and Richard Hodgson stand in a pasture on the Hodgson ranch. Years ago, the well tanks behind them leaked and flooded the pasture with produced water and oil. And the family feels it isn’t getting any from its biggest neighbor, Hilcorp Energy Co. The Houston-based company is one of the largest privately held oil and gas producers in the country, with operations in nine states. In 2017 the company began a massive acquisition campaign in the San Juan Basin when it bought ConocoPhillips’ assets. In the New Mexico portion of the basin, it now operates 11,400 wells. Roughly 1,600 of them pepper the area on and around the Hodgsons’ lands. Hilcorp and the Hodgsons are close neighbors because of a legal quirk called a split estate, under which the property rights to the surface land are separate from those of the minerals that lie beneath. The Hodgsons own the surface rights, and the federal government owns the underlying mineral rights, which, in this area, it leases primarily to Hilcorp. By law, landowners must allow subsurface rights owners to have access to those minerals. For the Hodgsons, that access takes shape in a spiderweb of roads and wells stitching their thousands of acres of pine-dotted mesas and valleys.  For years, that arrangement between the Hodgsons and Hilcorp worked —  until very recently, when it didn’t. Hilcorp did not respond to Capital & Main’s repeated requests for comment. *   *   * Over the years, relations with oil companies were manageable, if not always great.   Richard recalled his days as a roustabout and truck driver decades ago and what he called the industry’s almost complete lack of environmental controls at the time.  One example: He said that companies used natural gas to flush out newly drilled wells, then lit the polluted mixture on fire in massive flares. “This whole country at night was orange,” he said. “It was so wasteful.” Richard Hodgson. Another example: Wastewater from oil production — often called produced water and  laden with hydrogen sulfide — was dumped in ditches and ponds throughout the region. “I done it. I was sent out to do it,” Richard said. He’s sure that all of the ground beneath waste pits near older wells are contaminated from that dumping. Another example: A few years ago, he watched a neighbor’s cow drink from a puddle of filthy water pooled beneath a pumpjack. The cow stumbled off, bellowing, then fell in a ditch and died. And another: On a hot summer day, before he could grab its collar, one of Richard’s dogs jumped into an open waste pit to cool off. The dog swam around and came out covered in grease, immediately got sick and went deaf. The dog lived for a couple of years before it was run over by a truck it couldn’t hear. One more: In November, 2023, there was a spill at a well he could see from his front door. He worked for a whole day alongside a crew hired by Hilcorp to dig out 1,000 yards of petroleum soaked soil. “We got out of the hole, and everybody had a headache [from the fumes]. It was that dirty,” he said.  Richard said he left for a few hours. When he returned, the company had fenced off the pit and said their work was done. In April, 2024, Richard called the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division — the state’s primary oilfield enforcer — to get Hilcorp to remove more contaminated soil. Nothing more was removed, and two weeks later Hilcorp submitted a closure report to the Division, saying the company had finished its cleanup work. The Division closed the case the same day. The Division’s response read, in part, “Since the release occurred within an area reasonably needed for production operations (on-pad), the reclamation report will be due after the gas well has been plugged and abandoned.” That may be a while. Last year the well produced 25,500,000 cubic feet of natural gas, worth roughly $56,000.  When a previous company wanted to put a well atop the untouched mesa behind Richard’s home, he offered a spot at the base of the mesa, 500 feet from his front door. “I’d rather have that than destroy this last piece of land we got,” he said. There are now 30 active gas wells within a mile of Richard’s house. The family coped with all of it over the years with different companies.  “We did have a good working relationship to them,” Kaleb said. A truck hauling sand for a fracking job passes Kaleb Hodgson as he drives a road on his ranch. And the Hodgsons do a lot of work in their three main businesses on the ranch: raising cattle, hosting elk hunts and maintaining the maze of dirt roads connecting all the wells on the property. That maintenance happens — happened — through a long-running series of agreements with oil companies going back years. Richard and Kaleb said that earlier this year, a new landman — the person companies hire to deal with landowners — began slowly cutting them off. They don’t know why. The landman didn’t take their calls. He said if the Hodgsons had anything to say, they could call Hilcorp’s lawyers. The Hodgsons said Hilcorp also canceled its agreement with them to maintain the roads on the property. In addition to clearing access to the wells, that work channeled the region’s intermittent — and occasionally torrential — rains off the roads and well pads and onto surrounding grasslands. The work was good for the oil crews, good for the Hodgsons and good for the livestock and wild game. Plus, there was no way the Hodgsons could afford to do the work without the contract. “They come up fighting like I’ve never seen an oil company do after 40 years,” Richard said. “I’ve never had a company just stomp their feet … and say, ‘We ain’t going to deal with you.’” In September, after months of deteriorating relations with Hilcorp, a line was crossed.  The Hodgsons nurture the elk population on their land. “We take care of them all year round,” Richard said. “We provide feed, shelter and water. And then we do harvest some.” Hunters pay thousands of dollars for that privilege. But it’s not easy to track wild animals over thousands of acres, and successful hunts aren’t guaranteed. Many factors can spoil a hunt. To keep some variables in their favor, every year Richard and Kaleb have negotiated with Hilcorp and its predecessor companies to keep trucks off certain roads in the early mornings and early evenings. That allows elk to gather in herds to eat and drink, increasing the chance that hunters can find them amid the mesas. Kaleb said he texted the landman the day before a scheduled bow hunt, asking Hilcorp to keep trucks away from specific areas, and the landman agreed.  It was 6 a.m. the next day, just before dawn. One of Kaleb’s nephews was walking slowly between pine and cedar trees in the faint light atop a mesa, leading a small group of bow hunters. They had spent the night in a camp to be ready at first light. At that point, they could see elk gathering in the valley below.  Then they heard a truck, and the elk scattered. The nephew texted Kaleb to explain what happened, but the damage was done. The hunters hiked to the next valley over, hoping to find more elk, but didn’t. “We’ve had these hunters for five years,” Richard said. “They’ve always paid a deposit for next year, and [this time] they didn’t pay no deposits. I don’t think they’re coming back.” The spoiled hunt was a clarion call for the family. “It showed us that they put a bullseye on us,” Richard said. Meanwhile, other problems grew. A week and a half after the botched hunt, water from a colossal cloudburst ran off the mesa behind their houses, washed over one of the untended roads and flooded a well pad with two and a half feet of water. The water flushed the sludge from two open-top below-ground storage tanks, creating a pond of black goo. Kaleb kept a mason jar filled with a sample, which had the consistency of old motor oil. Kaleb Hodgson holds a mason jar filled with oily sludge he collected from a spill site in September. Several days later, while standing next to the muddy well pad, Kaleb explained how much waste Hilcorp told him was flushed from the tanks. “They say it was only 21 barrels, but it covered that whole entire berm,” he said. At two and a half feet deep, the 5,400-square-foot area inside the berm could hold roughly 2,400 barrels of liquid. Kaleb said that much of the oil and water simply sank into the ground. As he spoke, workers from a cleanup company shoveled contaminated soil into a vacuum truck that could hold 80 barrels, the second that Kaleb had seen at the site.  “Contaminated dirt should have been dug out,” he said. Kaleb said he sees the resulting problem as twofold. There’s the obvious groundwater contamination from the spilled sludge, and then there’s the wasted rain water. If the roads had been maintained, the runoff would have bypassed the well pad and filled a pasture the Hodgsons have nurtured over the years, turning two hundred acres of scrubby dirt to a grassland that feeds cattle and other animals. “We wasted all that water,” Kaleb said. And the waste may have polluted the land where the family’s cattle and elk graze. A cleanup crew sucks up the oily remnants of waste sludge that was sluiced from two underground tanks by a rainstorm on the Hodgson ranch in September. *   *   * Though Hilcorp didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story, after Capital & Main visited the ranch, the Hodgsons said company representatives asked them if they had been talking with journalists. “I think we somewhat got their attention,” Richard said.  He said Hilcorp sent a new landman, who allowed the Hodgsons to fix the washed-out road near the flooded well pad so it wouldn’t flood again. Hilcorp also tested the soil there. “They did some core drilling, but I won’t accept that,” Richard said. “We’ll have to dig it out and find out what we got.” He said Hilcorp also hired a company to take care of another spill he recently came across. After months of problems, Richard and Kaleb are skeptical of the quick about-face. “They’re getting really worried about these spills because they know that I’m upset, and I’m going to make some noise,” Richard said. “I’m not saying, ‘Do not drill.’ I’m just saying, ‘Do it reasonably,’” he added. “I mean, hell, the country’s making you just very, very wealthy. Why would you not put a little bit back into what you tear up?” he asked. “That’s all I want these companies to do. Just be reasonable.” After the Hilcorp truck spoiled the elk hunt, Richard and Kaleb got in touch with their nearest neighbors, Don and Jane Schreiber, who live about 15 miles away. “There are not very many of us that live out here,” Richard said. “So anybody who can live out here and appreciate the land is a friend of mine.” The Schreibers are known for fighting oil and gas companies that thoughtlessly drill or poorly maintain wells on their land. And like Richard, Don grew up in Farmington and harbored a dream of running a ranch. Also, like the Hodgsons, the Schreibers’ own land is split-estate.  Don Schreiber looks over paperwork from a years-long battle with Hilcorp Energy about a spill on his ranch. The Schreibers bought their ranch in 1999 and over the years they have slowly sold off their cattle and leased the land to other ranchers. “I turned my back on my dream,” Don said. Instead, they spend much of their time raising awareness about how oil and gas drilling has degraded the landscape in the northwest corner of the state.  “We had two blissful years out here,” Don said of their earliest ranching days. “But then the fights started.” He said a childhood friend who worked for an oil company explained to him what companies thought of the Schreibers’ ranch and lands like it: “Pard, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but we’d just as soon have this S.O.B. paved.” After a half-dozen years of contesting sporadic oil and gas well proposals on their land — which they lost — the Schreibers’ big fights with oil and gas companies began in earnest in late 2007, when a company proposed drilling 44 new wells on their property. The Schreibers thought most of those should be “twinned,” by adding the new wells to existing well sites, which would preserve untouched ranch land from more well pads and connecting roads. After an “intense fight,” the company put in just 22 new wells, all “twinned” on existing pads, Don said.  “So in the end, we did win,” he said. But, he added, “I mean, every time you drill a well, you lose a bit.”  Over the years, Don and Jane recorded each tussle, filling binders with letters, emails and documents recording the slow but relentless fights to protect their land. Don also keeps a small display with photos of nine separate incidents in which he got a company to clean up an unacknowledged mess or unnecessary well. He shows it off at public meetings and to company representatives at their first meetings. He said its message for them is clear: “I don’t know if it’s gonna take four years or 14 years — we’re gonna beat you.” In his experience, constant, determined pressure gets a company to do what you want it to do. It’s a style of work familiar to the Hodgsons. In late September on an afternoon spent driving to a far corner of the ranch, a thin column of diesel smoke from a distant fracking site was the only thing that marred a crisply blue sky. The San Juan Mountains in southern Colorado sketched a dark jagged blue line on the horizon. Richard, his grandson Luke Whitley and Kaleb were out to round up some cows that had wandered off a pasture.  One of the Hodgson’s dogs corners loose cows near a natural gas compressor station on the family’s ranch. Aside from their Ford dually pickup and cellphones peeking from their pockets, the three could have walked off a Western film set a century ago. Each wore a cowboy hat — Kaleb’s in black felt — as well as scuffed boots with worn spurs. Later, they donned scarred chaps to protect their pants from the sage, juniper and piñon trees. Three calm horses and a clutch of excitable ranch dogs rode in the trailer behind. The leather on the horses’ saddles was dull on the sides and polished in the seats from years of use. As he drove, Kaleb described how he and his family trained horses — an integral part of running the ranch.  “Horses are very smart, complicated animals. But also they’re very simple,” he said. “They react off of your pressure.” Pressure from the reins, pressure through the knees. Pressure and release. Slowly pressure the horse in the direction you want it to go — then release the pressure.  “You do that a few times. And then you ask for half an inch. And then you do that a few times and you work your way up to an inch. Then you’re asking at the end of it for a foot,” he said. Kaleb said all horses react to pressure and release in some way. “Even bucking horses,” he said. “They’ll react to pressure and release if you’re just consistent with it.” Eventually, no matter how big or powerful the horse, careful, determined pressure gets it to do what you want it to do.  The same principle appears to be working in their relationship with Hilcorp. After meeting with the Schreibers and calling Capital & Main, the Hodgsons said Hilcorp honored their recent late-September elk hunt hours and have been working on the spill sites. But Kaleb and Richard remain ready to apply more pressure.  “I don’t know where we’re going to go with all of it,” Richard said. “[We’re] just not letting anything lie.” One of Richard Hodgson’s ranch dogs joins him in the field. Copyright 2025 Capital & Main. All photos by Jerry Redfern.

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