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No matter which of the US national parks you choose to visit, you will discover intriguing wildlife and breathtaking scenery. There are a handful of parks, however, that offer things that you won’t find anywhere else.

From the Grand Canyon in Arizona to the stunning gorges of northern New York, the United states offers some spectacular natural scenery. Enjoy this brief journey through those parks.

Everything about California’s Yosemite National Park is big. The park itself is roughly the size of Rhode Island. The Sequoia trees are absolutely humongous, while the El Capitan is the world’s largest granite monolith, standing 3,593 feet tall.

If you really want to see Yosemite in all of its glory, make your way to Glacier Point. You will see the incredible Half Dome, as well as the grand Yosemite Valley. Everything about the park makes it one of our national treasures, a gem of our US national parks system.

Yellowstone National Park was the very first US national parks and the prototype of many future parks. Home to nearly 300 geysers including the infamous Old Faithful Geyser, Yellowstone sits atop an active volcano bed centered over Yellowstone Lake which has been theorized to erupt only a few times over the past two million years.

Hot springs, steam vents, and waterfalls heated by the lava flows just beneath the surface provide extraordinary scenery for any visitor of the US national park. Life still teems in every corner of this hostile environment.

From the colorful micro-organisms found at Mammoth Hot Springs to the bald eagles soaring overhead, Yellowstone proves that life can propagate anywhere.

Upon first glance, the Grand Canyon National Park seems to be the ripped off of an alien planet and dropped in northern Arizona. The canyon itself is a wonder to behold unmatched by anything else in the national parks system.

Carved out by the winding Colorado River, some parts of the canyon are a mile deep and eighteen miles wide creating multi-colored vistas revealing the Earth’s prehistoric past.

The south rim is where most of the more popular scenery can be found because it is the most easily accessible. The north rim is a much longer drive but has been touted by many explorers to have the best views of the canyon inside this beauty of US national parks.

The canyon is the main event for this park but there are plenty of side shows to explore: ride the rapids down the Colorado River, explore the Hermits Rest history landmark, or hike in the backcountry to discover your own secret part of the Grand Canyon. Whatever you do here, you will leave with new respect of the grandeur of nature.

These US national parks are but a select few from the national parks system that defy the definition of what is a national park and treads into a territory of wonder.

There are many spectacular parks to visit, each with its own beauty and wonder. Exploring nature and parks around the country is a wonderful way to learn of history and respect for the environment.

National Parks can be an intriguing and beautiful experience for anyone. Learn more about the US national parks at Mike Selvon portal. While you are there leave is a comment at our National Park blog, and receive your FREE gift.

Trying to read and interpret all of the jargon about various bird watching binoculars can be a little difficult if you are new to it. You will probably find that all of the manufacturers think their product is the best, and that nothing else is worth looking at.

If you are like most consumers, you want a place to go where you can find an honest opinion and some accurate information. If you do not live in an area where you can just walk into a specialty optics store and ask, do not worry, there are some resources available.

There are several such guides available to those who are in market for bird watching binoculars. Bird Watchers Digest publishes a review of the latest models and improvements every year. Additionally, a number of Web sites publish product reviews on a regular basis.

Some sites even have entire sections devoted specifically to binocular reviews and evaluation. Check out BirdWatching site for one good example of Web based product reviews. Experienced birders offer their honest opinions about the products that they use on a regular basis and what they did and did not like about each one.

When researching bird watching binoculars, keep in mind several things that may affect which style will work best for you. If you wear glasses, then some binoculars may not work well for you. Do you wish to use the binoculars to focus on small things that may be relatively close?

There are models like the Pentax Papillo, which will work very well when trying to zoom in on things like butterflies. When considering any binocular, a bird watcher needs to give careful thought to how much magnification power they need. While many are under the impression that they need the most powerful binocular available to enjoy watching birds, often times the most powerful optical tools can be very difficult to keep focused and to hold steady enough to get a clear image.

Some people in the market for bird watching binoculars pay no attention to price and do not consider cost to be of any importance. For most people, cost does play a large role in their decision.

Do not get frustrated if at first all you see are slick catalogue pages full of extravagantly prices binoculars. You can, and will, find equipment from many reliable well-known manufacturers that is well made and quite affordable for the average bird watcher.

To ensure that you are pleased with your purchase, make sure that you do the research. As shown here, there are plenty of resources available outside of actually walking into a store. Bird watching binoculars will be your primary piece of equipment as you begin your bird watching hobby.

Mike Selvon is the owner of various niche portals. Our bird feeder portal is a great resource for more information on bird watching binoculars. While you are there don’t forget to claim your free gift.

The passion and pleasure that a bird watcher finds in that hobby is inspirational. Those who bird watch are unique group of people. Bird watchers have a great sense of awareness as to what is going on around them and a degree of patience that is rare in our society.

A bird watcher will find as much delight in telling you about how they got to the place where they saw a particular species as they will about the bird itself. There is something satisfying about trotting up a hill, climbing an old barbed wire fence, and then sliding down a muddy ravine just to catch a glimpse of a warbler family flitting amongst some remote treetops.

Western society has made people quite content to drive up to a window, order, and then be on the way without ever getting out of the car. If only birding were that easy. Bird watchers can teach the busy world around them about what it means to deliberate, and to spend all day working towards a goal that may not even come to fruition. After all, not every outing is a successful one.

Society can learn from the patience of a bird watcher. A business mindset causes many to think that times of inactivity are wasted. Successful people in this world capitalize on every available moment and use those moments to be proactive. The bird watchers demonstrate first hand that this in not necessarily true. These people show the world that sometimes, the best and most rewarding things are the ones that you waited patiently, quietly, and for a long time to get.

To be a bird watcher is to do a great service to society by being passionate about conservation. Building processes and roads continue to destroy acres of forested ground and prime avian habitat. Various voices of the bird watching community are speaking loudly and clearly about the importance of preserving these habitats.

Bird watching enthusiasts know that progress is inevitable, but that we must work diligently to find a balance with the natural world. This passion for conservation is often born out of the time that a birder spends in the field, marveling over the complexity of not only the birds, but the entire eco-system that they call home as well.

A veteran bird watcher must understand the responsibility he or she has to the bird watching community. An experienced bird watcher needs to be proactive about bringing new enthusiasts along and teaching the proper methods and ethics of birding. As long as every generation is willing to take the time to pass along their knowledge, then the movement to conserve habitat will continue to thrive.

Mike Selvon is the owner of various niche portals. Our bird feeder portal is a great resource for more information on bird watching. While you are there don’t forget to claim your free gift.

Rainforests are the dynamic engine of the Earth’s biosphere; they fix carbon from the atmosphere, and the aspiration of plants in the rain forests produce nearly 10% of the oxygen we need to live (over 70% of the oxygen is generated by algae and plankton on the world’s oceans). They act as filters, pulling pollutants out of the air and fixing minerals into the soil, and help stem the tide of soil erosion; they are dynamic, and vividly alive, and critical to the life expectancy of our planet.

The biological diversity of tropical rain forests is staggering. Of the roughly 1.9 million named land species native to planet earth, over two thirds of them are found in tropical rain forests, ranging from Asia to South America to Africa, and places in between. 95% of the beneficial plants and plant compounds used for medicine, cosmetics and more are found in tropical rain forests, and this diversity is one of the great treasures of the world.

And it’s being lost, and lost rapidly, due to development and encroachment by urban areas. 30 years ago, rain forests covered 14% of the land area of the earth. It’s now under 6% and shrinking rapidly. At the current rate of deforestation, the last rain forest could be cut down by the 2040s.

There are several layers of impact to the loss of rainforest terrain and biomes. The first is simply conservation - when the last member of an animal species dies, that species has gone extinct. There is a strong emotional appeal to preserving wildlife, preserving wild lands, is very important to people. The second is climactic. Developing rain forest into cattle lands or crop lands leads to desertification, because of the shift in rainfall patterns and the fact that rainforest ecosystems keep most of the nutrients in plants, rather than the soil. The last impact is economic and medical; the rainforests are reservoirs of ecological diversity, and potentially domesticable plants and animals. Major research goes into finding plants and plant compounds that are tied to medical advances and present in plants and animals in the rainforest.

Rainforest deforestation impacts the planet, local and global economies. We’re going to focus on the local changes, and work from there, up the chain of events and causality. The typical cycle is that rain forest lands get clear cut and used for crop lands, then cattle grazing lands when the crops fail, then abandoned (or used for housing if conveniently located), when even grazing lands fail. This is part of a vicious cycle - most of the nutrients in a rain forest biome are tied in the living organisms, not the soil itself. When they’re clear cut, and burned, most of the resulting land is poor for agricultural use, low in phosphorus and nitrates, with soil that will blow away when the first wind storm hits. Soil exhaustion and salinization from over irrigation makes things even worse. This is, in many ways, analogous to strip-mining the soil, much as one would strip mine for copper or iron ore.

In an active and thriving rain forest, minerals and nutrients cycle quickly. When the rain forest is chopped down, those nutrients aren’t there any more. They’re shipped off as building materials or simply burned to clear the land. When grasses are seeded for cattle ranching, the soil is already starting depleted, and gets more so quickly. Eventually, the grass gets overgrazed, winds and rains come down and wash the soil into estuaries, and the process cycles even faster.

Erosion from deforestation is an attendant problem. The cover provided by the rain forest canopy keeps the tropical sunlight from baking the moisture out of the soils, and the aspiration of the plants helps capture rain clouds and seed clouds for rain. After the forest has been cleared, rainfall drops considerably. The tropical rain forest is a perfect example of a system where the combination of elements creates a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

There are several programs in place to try to preserve rain forests; the problems come from the fact that, in terms of local economics, it’s hard to convince a farmer that clearing more land to raise more crops and make more money is a losing proposition compared to leaving the rain forest in place as a refuge for vermin and predators. Trying to preserve islands of rainforest land hasn’t worked; the minimum area for viable rainforest biomes is around one hundred square miles, and most of the island experiments have been a tenth of that or less. Now, larger non governmental organizations are trying to buy up large tracts of rainforest land to keep as nature preserves, or to use as a basis for ecological tourism as a revenue stream to offset land use taxes, and the economic incentives for clear cutting.

Some efforts are being put in place to teach local farmers to work with the rain forest ecosystem rather than competing with it, using clearings in the rain forest for garden plots, and attempting to harvest the bounty of the rainforest directly. These have met a great deal of resistance because of the difficulties in balancing immediate short term profit with long term sustainability.

Learn about Preservation of Endangered Rainforest Birds & Plant Species at http://www.paradiseearthonline.com

One of the thrills of bird watching is the discovery of a species you have never seen before. In the past, a bird watcher often had to wait for a long time to get help in identifying a bird that he or she may not have recognized. Programs, like the one at Cornell University, allowed those who bird watch to submit photographs and descriptions of things that they had seen. The experts and researchers at the university would then help them identify the bird. The internet however, has eliminated the hassle of waiting for the mail. This information is available instantaneously online.

The ability to come home from a day in the fields of Belize watching birds, or even after bird watching in Costa Rica, and to sit down in front of a computer has given birth to a completely new realm of resources. Bird watchers can visit sites such as Birding and Birding Guide to access information about what they have seen through their binoculars while bird watching that day. There are several benefits to websites like these and the photographic resources available on the web.

Aside from written descriptions, the internet provides a wealth of photographic information to bird watchers. Photographs that would add up to literally mountains of books could quickly be searched, organized, and selected for viewing online. The convenience is immeasurable. The ability to get information quickly and accurately makes the research process an enjoyable one for most bird watchers.

One of the features that bird watchers who are internet savvy might find of particular interest is the communities that exist on the bulletin boards of websites catering to bird watching. These forums allow users to start, and participate in, conversations concerning a wide variety of topics that relate to birding.

Some conversations, called threads, are global in their scope and may include broad topics like equipment, which are not geographically specific. Other threads may be very geographically specific and give local bird watchers a place to share individual information about sightings and numbers in special locations that probably are not of interest to someone outside of that region.

In addition to the sense of community that bird watchers can find on the web, it also serves as a very useful tool for spreading information. Local chapters of bird watching clubs and conservation groups, such as The National Audubon Society, utilize the parent websites of their organizations to provide news of local interest.

They may also use this space to advertise upcoming events, seminars, conferences or group outings. A birder who wants to get involved and volunteer with an organization may also find opportunities to do so listed here. These websites are an ideal place to find a great deal of useful information.

Mike Selvon is the owner of various niche portals. Our bird feeder portal is a great resource for more information on bird watching and technology. While you are there don’t forget to claim your free gift.

If you’ve not done so already, it’s time to clean out and refill your hummingbird feeders, because the Ruby-throated hummingbird - the king of nature’s frequent flyers - is on its way back to the eastern U.S. Reportedly, they are about a week ahead of last year.

Ruby-throated hummingbirds spend the winter in Central America, roughly between southern Mexico and northern Panama, and begin leaving in January. The males leave first, followed about ten days later by the females, but their exit from Central America is spread over a three months period, and they do not migrate in flocks. These factors eliminate the possibility of losing the species to storms.

Some will take the long route over land, hugging the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Others will take the over-water route, landing in North America from Texas to the Florida panhandle. The 500-odd mile flight takes about 20 hours, and the birds may lose half of their pre-migration weight.

Once in North America, the birds move steadily northwards, covering about twenty miles per day. Banding studies have indicated that the birds tend to return to where they hatched.

By mid-July, the southward migration has begun, but the peak southward migration occurs when flowers stop blooming and insects become more scarce. Also, Ruby-throats are less tolerant of cold weather than other hummingbird species. The peak migration is from mid-August through mid-September. By late September, the birds you see at your feeders are migrating birds, and probably not the birds you enjoyed during the summer. Since they all look alike, it is impossible to tell which is which. The number of birds migrating south is much higher because of the young birds joining the flight for the first time.

Since Ruby-throats don’t migrate in a flock, it is unclear how the young birds know where to go. Apparently something instinctively tells them, “It’s time to go,” and they use an inherent form of dead reckoning navigation to find their winter habitat. Banding studies indicate that once a young bird completes the first southern migration, it will use that same route for each southern migration for the rest of its life. If it works, why change? And again, the males leave first.

Most Ruby-throats take a land route back to Central America, even if they crossed the Gulf on their northern migration earlier in the year. Perhaps hurricanes in the Gulf have reduced the number of southerly migrating Gulf-crossers to a small minority.

But why go to all the trouble? Why do they migrate? You have to think back to the last ice age for the answer. As the ice covering most of North America retreated, some tropical birds discovered there was less competition for food and shelter if they moved northward, following the retreating ice. Some song birds could survive the colder climate, eating berries and seeds when insects were no longer available. They’re the birds we enjoy year round. The Ruby-throats, however, are carnivorous and must rely on nectar of flowering plants and insects. Hence, they must make the long journey south to find food.

Yet not all Ruby-throats go all the way to Central America. A few spend the winter on the Gulf coast, and a few “winter” on the Outer Banks. Perhaps they are too old or ill to make the crossing. Or maybe they were hatched too late to put on enough fat. So, their survival depends on a mild winter.

The good news is that the “Platinum Medallion” of frequent flyers is on its way back. Welcome them with a clean feeder filled with fresh sugar water, so they can regain their energy for the mating season.

Janet Winter loves her wild birds and delights in providing helpful resources and unique products for feathered friends at WildBirdGoodies.com. She is a web designer, travel agent and writer on many topics including wild birds, babies and dogs.

Bali Mynahs are a rare and beautiful bird found only on the Bali Island in Indonesia. There are as few as 60 wild Bali Mynahs that inhabit the Bali Barat National Park in its northwestern corner. There they live amongst the open woodland and openly gather in the morning hours.

In size, they are no bigger than a cardinal. However, their beauty is unique. They have exquisite white wings with black tips. Their tails also bear the black tip marking. They have a bright blue color displayed around their eyes. Their heads are toppled with a white lacy burst of feathers. They are a very vocal bird and often their chatter is accompanied with the bobbing of their heads. This is especially noticeable in their mating season.

Their main diet is that of plants and other animals significantly insects, worms, caterpillars, ants, and other invertebrates. During seasons where food is scarce they tend to travel in groups to help locate provisions.

The limited population of the Bali mynah is due to the threat of illegal pet trade. Up until 1990 there were at least 60 of the birds in existence but because of the barren nature of their habitat and their habitual grouping technique, the numbers have decreased below 10. Though they are protected by the government their capture remains a problem as they can be sold as pets for around a thousand dollars. Many of them are lost to death due to the poor conditions of shipping them illegally.

Zoos have actually developed breeding programs to help repopulate the bird and its hopeful their efforts will succeed. Luckily due to the involvement of these organizations, the numbers of illegal trade have been greatly reduced. These programs also initiate educational awareness towards these and other extinct animals. In Indonesia the Bali Mynah is the symbol of such educational programs.

There are ways you can take a stand against the extinction of animals. One way is by rejecting products which are made from animal materials such as clothing, wallets, belts, etc. Buy locally grown and produced products so you can be sure of their history. Finally, exotic pets are often sold in an immoral way. Question the heritage of the animal before making a decision to purchase. Common care goes along way in saving the lives of these and other exotic animals. No animal should be found in extinct measure to satisfy the entertaining luxuries of humankind.

Learn more about the Exotic Bird Bali Mynah at http://www.paradiseearthonline.com/