Pasteurization, heat-treatment process that destroys pathogenic microorganisms in certain foods and beverages.
Pasture-ization, expansion of grazing areas, pasture lands, usually at the expense of forest land. (Pasture: from the Latin pastus, past participle of pascere, “to feed”)
Some birds that I don’t see when I walk through the fields, or even associate with meadow lands, somehow find my backyard. Right now a number of jays (Garrulus) are visiting, they can be loud, but I like them very much. Just like the woodpecker, who was hammering away on the dead tree early summer, and makes a come-back every now and then, to feed, I believe, under the bark, but also on the larger blooming plants, the great mullein. I wonder how the birds find these backyard oases in the sea of green pasture and cultivated fields.
I read an article in the New York Times, “Searching for Bird Life in a Former ‘Ocean of Forest” . Far away from the Frisian fields, the theme is similar. The article reports about a project of a group of local researchers in Colombia who collect birds and data to study how birds have responded to changes in land use and climate. They are able to do this because a little over a century ago a collector, Miller, from the American Museum of Natural History arrived in the eastern foothills of the the Andes to do the same thing. Miller collected more than 800 birds. Since that time the land has changed from ‘an ocean of forest’ to “mere islands in a sea of pasture”. The Colombian research group had a hard time finding a forested area large enough to sustain the kind of birdlife, Miller had been so easy to find.
Many bird families are missing, antbirds among them, a species that avoids exposure to sunlight…
Pasturization –high exposure to sunlight, a heat treatment process that can cause the disappearance of certain members of an ecosystem
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