Rewildings

06/02/2026

06/02/2026

What an awesome opportunity to rethink

The skunk waddling across your yard at dusk isn't the one wrecking your lawn. The grubs underneath are.

Most people see small cone-shaped holes appearing overnight, spot the skunk a few evenings later, and conclude the skunk is the vandal. The skunk is treating the symptom. The cause is below the grass — Japanese beetle grubs, the larvae of an invasive insect that has spread across 28 US states since it arrived from Japan in 1916. Skunks have an extraordinary sense of smell for soft-bodied grubs underground, and they work a lawn methodically all night while the rest of the neighborhood sleeps.

🌿 Striped skunks are native to all of North America. They eat Japanese beetle grubs, May beetle grubs, yellowjacket larvae, garden slugs, mice, and small snakes. State extension offices use skunk damage as a diagnostic tool — if a skunk is tearing up your lawn in late summer, you have a grub problem and the skunk is just reading the soil better than you can.

The lawn will recover. The grubs would have killed those root systems anyway — the skunk just exposed the damage sooner.

🐾 If a skunk is on your property:
- It is not aggressive. Skunks spray only as a last resort and give clear warnings first — stomping front paws, raising the tail, lowering the head. Backing slowly away resolves nearly every encounter
- Do not approach or handle any skunk, especially one acting tame, disoriented, or out in full daylight with no apparent fear of people. Skunks are one of the main wildlife rabies reservoir species in the US, and unusual behavior is reason to call local animal control
- The lawn damage is not the skunk's fault. Treat the grub problem with beneficial nematodes in late summer or milky spore in fall, and the skunk will move on naturally within a few weeks once the food runs out
- Secure pet food, fallen fruit, and garbage overnight. These are the attractants that turn a passing skunk into a resident

The skunk crossing your yard at dusk isn't a vandal. It's a small striped contractor showing up to a job you didn't know you had 🌱

06/02/2026

The bat zigzagging across the yard at dusk looks erratic. She's not. She's locked onto an insect with sound, reading a map that runs at frequencies you can't hear.

Little brown bats can live thirty years. They return to the same roost — the same attic, the same barn, the same hollow tree — year after year. The bat you saw last summer is almost certainly the same one this summer 🦇

🌿 She's not blind. She has small but sensitive eyes and sees well in low light, with echolocation layered on top. Her wing is her hand — a thumb plus four elongated fingers with skin stretched between them. A nursing mother eats thousands of insects in a single night.

🐾 Three details that matter this month:

- Don't seal the attic entrance between May and August — pups can't fly until late summer. Wait until fall.
- A grounded bat needs a box and gloves, not bare hands. Call your local wildlife agency for guidance.
- She returns to the same yard every May because the roost works and the insects are there. That's not chance. It's hers.

The bat over the yard at dusk has been doing this longer than most of the neighborhood has lived there 🦇

06/02/2026

06/02/2026

Great share Darren!!

Love this ❤️

Not only realignment but a deep call to reconsider how we use the word medicine.

𝖶𝖾 𝗅𝗂𝗏𝖾 𝗂𝗇 𝖺 𝗐𝗈𝗋𝗅𝖽 𝗍𝗁𝖺𝗍 𝗍𝖾𝖺𝖼𝗁𝖾𝗌 𝗎𝗌 𝗍𝗈 𝗅𝗈𝗈𝗄 𝖿𝗈𝗋 𝗁𝖾𝖺𝗅𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝗂𝗇 𝖺 𝖻𝗈𝗍𝗍𝗅𝖾, 𝗒𝖾𝗍 some of the most powerful medicine has always been free.

A walk. A deep breath. A good night's sleep. Time in nature. Genuine laughter. Kindness. Gratitude.

These simple things won't solve every problem, but they can heal parts of you that medicine never touches.

Sometimes the best prescription is not more treatment—it's a better way of living. ✨☘️

06/02/2026

With a PhD from Brown, museum exhibitions, and field recordings made for the Nat Geo Network, Brian House is a sound artist legend. His studies in the rhythms of human systems have led him into “entanglements with the nonhuman world,” via self-devised technologies.

“I’m trying to communicate sounds that are all around us, but which we cannot ordinarily hear — sounds equally geophysical, anthropogenic, and, on some level, disturbing in the sense that they may shift our worldview.”

Inspired by Roger Payne’s Songs of the Humpback Whale recordings which transformed how we view animals and conservation, Brian is going for something similarly appropriate to climate change with his new album, Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World, and an accompanying art installation.

“It’s more or less a straight 24-hour recording sped up by a factor of 60,” which becomes 24 minutes, 12 minutes each side, with its pitch raised 6 octaves in order to hear super low sounds. “My project is about atmospheric infrasound, low-frequency sounds traveling through the air, such as storms, gas flares, meteors, wind over the ocean, glaciers cracking, wildfires, etc.”

In order to do this accurately, House developed “macrophones,” rather than microphones, to go beyond the norms of the “field recording” genre for something more deafeningly epic.

“Macrophones are my design, but they’re based on infrasound arrays used by the [Comprehensive] Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization to monitor for nuclear testing,” he notes. “Microphones let us hear small sounds. Macrophones enable us to hear big ones… When I listened to the results, hearing all this crazy s**t, I’m realizing that what I’m hearing are the sounds of climate change.

“I’m not sure about calling it ‘music’ as it’s not a composition or something. It’s sound that is always here. It’s unlike anything else I’ve ever heard — atmospheric infrasound, nothing else.

“What it does is act as a kind of witness to what is happening with our planet. If you could hear these wild booms, whistles and crackles as you are walking down the street, you would intuitively understand the scale of the planet in a different way. It is not a passive planet, things are happening, big things. I don’t understand them, and that’s part of the point – in our human hubris, we think we have it all figured out, or at least that it’s all up to us, but in actuality there are agencies larger than our own at work. And either we figure out a humbler role to play within all that, or we’re gone.”

06/01/2026

This is insane! This affects human health, animal health, ecosystems, plant life, everything that we can think of that functions on the planet. It’s mind blowing that this is even an option.

Please take a moment and help this cause, and spread the word.

DarkSky International recently released an organizational statement in response to Reflect Orbital’s proposal to use in-space mirrors to reflect sunlight to…