Being true to our mission means that we at audubon cannot shirk our responsibility to cover the world as it exists. One of our goals is that you take political and personal action using the tips we offer. “Flying this morning we inspected the tar sands from above,” reports Barry Yeoman from Canada’s boreal forest (“Crude Awakening”). “The trees gave way to a manmade, industrialized desert, streaked with black.” At first glance, Alberta’s tar-sands deposits would appear to be a boon, an immense North American energy source. But their development is ravaging one of the world’s most important forests and the breeding grounds for up to three billion birds. Barry’s story includes details about alternative-energy standards your lawmakers ought to be backing. Closer to home, contributing editor Susan McGrath documents the insidious presence of artificial compounds in everything from cosmetics to shower curtains that can ravage our endocrine systems, while also instructing you on laws to support and products to avoid (“Pandora’s Water Bottle”). “Look at DDT,” she quotes one toxicologist. “That was an endocrine disruptor. We collected the science to understand it, and we passed the regulations to correct it. We have to get the bad news in order to mitigate, conserve, protect, and become stewards of the natural world.”

We have to get the good news, too. Through photography editor Kim Hubbard’s uplifting images and writer Ted O’Callahan’s vivid prose, we take you on a five-day spring trip through Nebraska to witness two of the world’s greatest wildlife spectacles: the enchanting courtship rituals of greater prairie-chickens and the migration of thousands of sandhill cranes ("March Magic"). “Most people come thinking they will see something special, but the experience has the ability to touch them in a way they don’t expect,” says Bill Taddicken, director of the Iain Nicolson Audubon Center at Rowe Sanctuary, of the cranes. Just as surprising is Tejon Ranch, a quarter-million-acre oasis outside Los Angeles (“Shangri-La”) that has been permanently preserved thanks to a landmark conservation accord. Ewan Burns’s powerful landscapes and wildlife photos offer a snapshot of this Noah’s Ark. “The ranch’s dizzying diversity of species includes California condors, southwestern willow flycatchers, and Swainson’s hawks,” writes contributing editor Jane Braxton Little. “Bears prowl the backcountry and elk graze on windswept mountain slopes.” It’s enough to make you forget about tar sands, if only for a moment.

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