Adam Welz
@adamwelz
Author THE END OF EDEN: WILD NATURE IN THE AGE OF CLIMATE BREAKDOWN (Bloomsbury) - avail. globally Writer, conservationist, naturalist. Takes photos Posts mainly wildlife conservation, climate change, civil liberties & nature photos Cape Town, S Africa
Bank Cormorant (left) aggressively confronts a Cape Cormorant (right) with a broken wing. The Cape was obviously starving and was begging from the Bank as if the latter was its parent. (Nature can be brutal.) Photographed in 2020 at Kommetjie, Cape Peninsula, South Africa (c)Adam Welz
My small achievement of the morning: I just hit 10,000 observations on @inaturalist.bsky.social ! Thanks to the nearly 2,000 volunteer identifiers who helped! (Obs #10,000 consists of mid record shots of a Snowy Egret I saw in Maine back in 2009. I just found them in my archive.) #citizenscience
Southern Royal Albatross (Diomedea epomophora) taking off from the surface of the Southern Ocean some tens of kilometers south of Cape Point, South Africa. This bird's wingspan is 3 metres + & it seemed bigger than that up close! (c)Adam Welz 2015 #birds #birdoftheday #WorldOceansDay #southafrica
I'm consistently thrilled that this iridescent green beauty is a real bird that hangs out in - and has even nested in - my Cape Town yard! Malachite Sunbird (Nectarinia famosa) (c)Adam Welz 2026 Real photo #noAI @alan678.bsky.social #birdoftheday #birds #birding #capetown #southafrica
My #birdoftheday photo is an African Little Grebe (Tachybaptus ruficollis capensis) incubating eggs on a nest primarily made of invasive Water Lettuce (Pistica stratiotes) in Cape Town, South Africa (c)Adam Welz 2026 (More at my Insta acct @adamwelz.wild) #bird #littlegrebe #birding #southafrica
Looking north-east from Cape Point over False Bay this morning as a small winter weather system passes through. (I never take where I live for granted & it never gets old.) #capetown #capepeninsula #southafrica
I had a breathtaking eye-level view in #YushanNationalPark of this male Taiwan Vivid Niltava (棕腹藍仙鶲 / Niltava vivida), one of #Taiwan’s endemic species, during my recent trip there. Yes, those colours are real! (c)Adam Welz 2026 #taiwanvividniltava #birds #birdoftheday #birding #birdphoto
A massive winter storm is passing through Cape Town right now. I checked out the Atlantic about an hour ago & snapped this lone cormorant cruising through the rain/haze/foam; she must really want to get home! #bird #birding #birdoftheday
I'm lying about the slurs, insults and ignorant garbage emitted by Calvinballs and their followers? Really? View a little sampling of what they've sent my way today:
Ignorant faraway noname whitie frustrated that I leapfrogged their supposedly killer rhetorical question because they can't deal with anything more complex/nuanced/granular/real than "colonialzm!" (which elementary schoolkids in 🇿🇦 know more about than they do). Shem! #viva🇿🇦
Faraway whitie, living on land genocidally "cleansed" for their benefit, finally admits a shred of ignorance by asking a question instead of making a stupid statement! My answer is "why don't you come here and ask?" Some of my melanin-advantaged friends will say "because we want to."
One of the major downsides of social media is being forced to acknowledge just how right those Dunning Kruger guys were Rando can't tell the difference between Dutch and Afrikaans 🤷♂️
Heads up! I'm doing a public talk today at RUTGERS U., New Brunswick NJ, titled *A Future for Nature: Conservation in a Chaotic World* 3pm, Livingston campus at Lucy Stone Hall room B117 All welcome! See you there!
Edward Norton's recitation of Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry on the latest Colbert show reminds of a rainy late August afternoon I spent on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade back in 2009
It's quite fun tracking flights over the Arabian Peninsula on FlightRadar24 at the moment Heavy GPS jamming going on - must be weird in the cockpit!
I can see only 1 civilian aircraft in the war zone on FlightRadar24 right now, a brave/foolhardy Royal Jordanian flight from Milan to Amman RJA104 What are the pilots thinking?
Currently reading The Arid Lands by Diana K. Davis, which traces the origin of the idea so commonly held by Anglo-Europeans that non-forested areas inc. drylands & grasslands are degraded/evil/harmful. I think the recently-departed ecologist William Bond would have appreciated it.
Quotes from Pres Teddy Roosevelt, speaking at the entrance to Yellowstone National Park in Gardiner MT on 14 April 1903:
I’m reading about poaching and wildlife law enforcement in Yellowstone National Park in the 1890s and things ain’t much different in many African national parks today Plus ca change plus ca meme chose etc
It was 12:16pm in South Africa when I Googled "cet now", as in Central European Time now. Look what Google's AI Overview (which I didn't ask for) spewed up... 😂
The @nytimes.com has a front-page story abt #pollution from #lead battery recycling in #Nigeria The subhead mentions "supposedly green technology" - at 1st I thought this referred to EV batts, bt it's actually abt old-fashioned lead-acid batteries in fossil-fuelled cars Could have been clearer