Believe it or not, 43,000,000 Americans are gardening. That is about one in six. Gardeners, of course, come in many varieties.

Abhi Arora used to be in the tech field. Like so many people, he sat at a desk all day, staring at a screen. Due to the stress of always staying indoors and in front of a computer, he started getting anxiety issues. To recharge and refresh, he visited a local garden in California. He noticed the shift in his mood, emotions, and improvement in his mental health overall during each visit.

Arora became friends and later business partners with the garden’s owner, farmer Rishi Kumar. Kumar studied computer science in college but became obsessed with plants and gardening. He now runs Sarvodaya Farms in Pomona, California. “Rishi and I met an old man who was healing himself and his son through the power of gardens. It was then that I realized that we could help others feel the same connection to the healing power of gardens,” Arora says. The two co-founded Healing Gardens, an online marketplace where people can rent their organic urban gardens or farms for use by the hour.

“I’ve always had a love for plants and wildlife, so with Healing Gardens we want to bring easy access to the wellness benefits of nature to our community and at the same time do our part in regenerating our planet,” Arora says.

Healing Gardens is based on the simple idea that most people enjoy being surrounded by plants and animals. A healing garden is a restorative outdoor space that has been specifically designed to steer the restless mind away from circling thoughts and towards the presence of the senses.

In addition to offering private time for visitors to just spend time alone in the garden or at the farm, individual hosts may also offer events and activities like yoga classes, mediation sessions, and goat petting for kids. Beautiful imagery, luscious smells, birdsongs, and more, gently invite the guest at a Healing Garden to presence.

Spring is in the air. Birds are singing and beginning to build their nests. It happens every year like clockwork. But by comparing recent observations with century-old eggs preserved in museum collections, scientists involved in the study were able to determine that about a third of the bird species are nesting and laying eggs nearly a month earlier than they did a hundred years ago. And as far as the researchers can tell climate change is responsible.

“Egg collections are such a fascinating to for us to learn about bird ecology over time,” says John Bates, director of the Field Museum. The eggs, with the contents removed, are stored in small boxes and accompanied by labels, saying what kind of bird they belong to, where they're from, and precisely when they were collected

Fidino, an ecologist at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, built a model for studying the historical and modern data about the egg collections. He found a surprising result: among the 72 bird species studied, about a third are nesting and laying their first eggs 25. 1 days earlier than they did a century ago.

Given that the climate crisis has dramatically affected so many aspects of biology, the researchers looked to rising temperatures as a potential explanation for the earlier nesting and laying. The changes in temperature are seemingly small but lead to different plants blooming and insects emerging—things that could affect the food available for birds. So birds have to move their egg-laying dates to adapt.

In addition to serving as a warning about climate change, Bates believes the study highlights the importance of museum collections, particularly egg collections. “They’re heavy with data about the past, and they can help us answer important questions about our world today,” he said.

Hannah Huxford met the fry-stealing gull in Bridlington, a coastal town on the Yorkshire coast. Huxford posted the well-timed photo on her iPhone; it went viral (走红) soon after. A decade later, the fry-stealing gull is appearing on billboards, as part of an advertising campaign for Google.

Researchers recently discovered that food may actually become more attractive to gulls when the birds observe humans handling it first, according to a 2020 study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

Because the birds seem to be attracted to food items that they’ve watched humans touch, another of the study’s authors, says that it’s even more important to properly throw food waste and snack wrappers in the trash. “Our findings suggest that gulls are more likely to approach food that they have seen people drop or put down, so they may associate areas where people are eating with an easy meal,” Dr. Laura Kelley said.

The scientists approached 74 herring gulls in coastal towns in Cornwall, attracting them with weighted bags of fried potatoes. Only 19 gulls were curious or hungry enough to linger (逗留), allowing the scientists to place the bag on the ground and move back a short distance away, waiting to see if a gull would approach.

Their experiments showed that gulls were more cautious about approaching a tempting treat (诱饵) if there was a person nearby who was watching them closely. However, the scientists also found that far fewer of the birds than expected showed interest in investigating the food at all when being stared at.

In fact, people may be able to protect their lunches from gulls by avoiding areas where the birds tend to gather and keeping a closer eye on their meals, she added. “Gulls have a bad reputation but, like all animals, they are just trying to survive,” Goumas said. “We can try to soften the conflict we have with them by making changes in our own behavior.”