Dear President Biden:

Hello. Congratulations on your win. I hope you can achieve the unity you mentioned in your inaugural address. As you said, you have many crises on your plate, starting with the coronavirus and its devastating effect on the U.S. economy.

Normally I don't write letters to politicians. I am a bird watcher. But in the waning days of the Trump Administration, the outgoing president did more than pardon his cronies and others. He issued executive orders rolling back some of our long-held environmental regulations.

Mature bald eagle, threatened symbol of our land. (RE Berg-Andersson)

So now that you have issued your own executive order to get us back into the Paris climate accords, here are other Trump orders you should rescind as soon as possible.

An EPA rule that will allow major sources of hazardous air pollutants to reclassify themselves as less regulated "area sources" under the Clean Air Act, abandoning the "once-in, always-in" policy that had been in place for 25 years.

An EPA rule on greenhouse gas emission standards for airplanes that fails to adequately mitigate public health and environmental harms from such emissions, including the environmental justice impacts on residents living near airports, which disproportionately include disadvantaged minority and low-income communities.

An EPA rule maintaining the national ambient air quality standard (NAAQS) for ozone at a level that fails to protect public health and welfare based on the existing scientific evidence.

An EPA rule that will skew how the agency weighs the costs and benefits of rules under the Clean Air Act by excluding important public health benefits from the analysis while inflating the costs. In particular, the rule will cause future EPA rules to undercount the harmful effects of carbon emissions that lead to climate change and distort the value of "co-benefits," the often-substantial benefits of rules that addresses more than one pollutant.

An EPA rule weakening the Clean Air Act's new source review program for major modifications to existing major stationary sources of emissions. The rule will subject New Jersey residents to lower air quality and will make it more difficult for downwind States like New Jersey to attain or maintain federal air quality standards.

An EPA rule that unlawfully and arbitrarily limits the scientific evidence that the agency can consider when adopting rules and standards to protect human health and the environment.

A U.S. Department of Energy rule that will weaken federal energy efficiency standards for consumer appliances and industrial equipment by making it easier for manufacturers to obtain waivers from product testing requirements.

Rules from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service that will make it harder to protect endangered and threatened species by narrowly defining critical "habitat" and establishing a skewed process for excluding areas from critical habitat designations.

A rule from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that rolls back protections for migratory birds. 

These last two are the ones that most alarm me. The narrow definition of "habitat" has allowed Trump to open forests in the northwest U.S. to logging, threatening the northern spotted owl. Trump's order removing protections for migratory birds threatens, among others, the bald eagle, the symbol of this land. For this reason, 12 states filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York alleging this Trump orders violates the Endangered Species Act.

Martha, the last of the passenger pigeons (Smithsonian)

There are some people who believe what it says in the Bible, that man was given dominion over the animals, and use that as license to do what they want, including hunting some birds to extinction. Think of the birds no longer around - the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet - except in the paintings of John Jay Audubon. According to the environmental organization that took his name, over 300 birds are on the brink of extinction, as of 2019, before Trump's executive orders. This is all because of climate change, one of your many concerns. But without action, that number will surely rise.

When the coronavirus is a distant memory and people can walk outdoors unafraid and unmasked, I don't want to live in a world when I can no longer see warblers, herons, hawks or owls. Do you?

Please act now.

Thank you. 

The Smallest Survivor

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome. 

--Anne Bradstreet

I'm thinking about a gold-crowned kinglet this winter morning. 

It is at 8 a.m. the rising sun now comes out from behind my neighbor's house and hits me as I sit on my enclosed porch. Little by little the sun's arc has been lengthening as it rises higher in the sky. At this point I can only sit outside on the weekend for the 35 minutes or so I am in full sun at this point of the year because I need time to have breakfast and then ready for work. (In the pre-coronavirus days I would be on a train during this time.) 

The thermometer shows me it is 20 degrees F on the enclosed but unheated porch and my phone showed me it is 19 degrees outside, windchill of 9. That's why I'm thinking about the kinglet.

I am wearing a number of layers from head to toe, including a long down coat with hood. A gold-crowned kinglet, a tiny bird (about the weight of a couple of pennies) with bold markings on its face and wings and a yellow patch on its head (the male has an orange stripe on that yellow patch), does not have that luxury. The one I saw while taking a recent hike in the woods, trying to stay out of a fierce, cold wind, was flitting around quickly in a low shrub, looking for food. 

Gold-crowned kinglet, Pennsylvania, December 2013
(Margo D. Beller)

Usually I see this tiny bird high in a conifer, its preferred habitat, once I'm alerted to its presence by its buzzy tse-tse-tse call. They breed in conifer forests but when I see them it is during migration periods, mainly in autumn. But this bird seems to hang around in areas like mine in winter, as long as it can find food.

According to the people at the Cornell Ornithology Lab, a gold-crowned kinglet can survive in temperatures of -40 degrees F at night. That's 40 degrees below zero. How do they survive?

The scientist Bernd Heinrich wanted to know that, too. The gold-crowned kinglet (as opposed to its cousin, the ruby-crowned kinglet, which does not hang around here in winter) is among the creatures he studied in his book "Winter World" about survival in the harshest conditions. Heinrich, who is professor emeritus at the University of Vermont, owns a lot of property in Maine, which he has traveled for the observations in his many books. He found these kinglets, which normally eat insects, will eat what they can find in winter including spiders, insect eggs and moth caterpillars. They need to maintain an internal temperature of 110 degrees F, Heinrich found.

The gold-crowned will use old squirrel or bird nests and huddle together to stay warm, he found after following several to their roost one December twilight. Like me in my coat, sleeping kinglets fluff up their feathers to make an inch-thick, downy blanket. These feathers make up 10% of a kinglet's body weight. 

Heinrich also found that without this down layer, a naked kinglet would cool rapidly, which would be fatal. He caught one bird and weighed the wing and tail feathers, which are primarily used for flying, and compared them to the weight of the body feathers, which are primarily used for insulation. Kinglets have four times more feather mass committed to insulation than to flying, he learned.

Still, as I sit in the sun's warmth, warmly dressed in my down layer and holding a hot cup of coffee, I can't help but think of that little bird having to stay in perpetual motion on such a wicked cold day so it eat and thus survive. It is a cold, cruel world out there. I hope it survives.

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