Plus, psychedelics in your yard; a solar eclipse
| Wednesday, April 27, 2022 | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPHS BY KARINE AIGNER | | They love contests. They want to win cash prizes. Through Facebook and other sites, more and more hunters are signing up to kill coyotes and other wildlife. Bobcats, foxes, and crows, too.
About 420 organized “contests” are held each year, accounting for 63,000 dead animals, says the Humane Society of the United States. Sixty are in Texas alone. Eight states have banned such contests, raising questions whether they violate state wildlife and gambling laws.
“It appears that the United States is the only country in the world where wild animals are killed by the tens of thousands strictly for prizes and entertainment,” Rene Ebersole writes for Nat Geo.
Read the full story here. | | | |
| Pictured at top, the bodies of two coyotes at a hunting contest. Above, a coyote’s weight is measured before an entrant gets $80 for killing it.
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| Scarce water, profligate use: A new report says the area around the shrinking Colorado River is the driest it has been in 1,200 years. For more than a decade, photographer and Nat Geo Explorer Pete McBride has been trying, as he puts it, “to make more people aware of how many straws are dipping into our collective drink.” The basin supplies drinking water to 40 million people in the U.S. Southwest. The region’s droughts could last until 2030, Nat Geo reports. (Pictured above, a golf course, with its heavy water use, in the desert south of Las Vegas.)
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 | | ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREW FAZEKAS | | A southern eclipse: Sky watchers in South America and the South Pacific may see a partial solar eclipse late Saturday. The moon will appear to move in front of the sun to partially block its light, making the sun appear to have a crescent shape. Best views will be across Argentina and Chile, but observers in Uruguay, western Paraguay, southwestern Brazil, and Bolivia will also get to see a small “bite” taken out of the sun’s disk, too. For northern viewers, the week’s big news will be the dawn sighting of four bright worlds in the southeast (illustrated above). Keep an eye on Venus and Jupiter as they converge on Friday and Saturday mornings. Both planets will be only half a degree apart—about equal to the width of the full moon’s disk—and are viewable through a backyard telescope. — Andrew Fazekas
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EARTH MONTH: ARTICLE OF THE DAY | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY SPENCER PLATT, GETTY IMAGES | | A new wave: COVID-19 cases are rising again. Blame the Omicron BA.2 subvariant and its descendants. The uptick comes as vaccinations have stalled, particularly in the South. But BA.2 might cause more serious disease than the original form of Omicron, Sanjay Mishra reports. (Pictured above, a medical worker in New York City administers COVID-19 tests in New York, where infection numbers have climbed.) Find out more.
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY EMILY POLAR | | Top of the world: National Geographic’s May issue features a Himalayan hike that skims the clouds. “It feels intimate because the mountains feel really close,” photographer Emily Polar says about Nepal’s Annapurna Base Camp trek (pictured above), which provides epic views of legendary peaks Dhaulagiri and Machapuchare. Subscribers can read more here.
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Don’t miss ... “A reckoning in Tulsa,” our Overheard podcast episode on the anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre, which won a Webby Award on Tuesday. It was one of 13 given to Nat Geo, which was named the best media company of the year.
This newsletter has been curated and edited by David Beard, Monica Williams, and Jen Tse. Thoughts on the animal hunting contests? Let us know. Thanks for reading. | |
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