Give A Shit About Nature engagement report

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• Sep 13, 20269.3x their median

  Dandelions are one of the last flowers standing in the fall. Spray one with roundup and you're spraying every bumblebee queen that visits, just as she's preparing to hibernate. The flower doesn't die on contact. It takes days, and it keeps getting visited the entire time. Bumblebee queens are feeding hard right now, building the fat reserves that have to carry them through months underground with no colony and no food. Every queen that doesn't fatten up is a colony that doesn't start next spring. Research from Finland found glyphosate-exposed bumblebees lost the ability to tell flowers apart by color, and lost their sensitivity to the ultraviolet patterns bees use to find nectar. Late solitary bees, hoverflies, and butterflies are working the same flowers too. If the dandelions genuinely bother you, dig them out. A weeding fork gets the taproot. Or leave them. The first hard frost takes care of it.

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• Sep 13, 20265.5x their median

  In April 2009, dozens of cedar waxwings were found dead in a single yard in Thomas County, Georgia. Their stomachs were packed with one thing: small, red berries. The birds had hemorrhaged into their lungs, tracheas, hearts and brains. It was cyanide poisoning. A decade later the curator of the UNC Chapel Hill Herbarium found dead waxwings on campus, in sight of a large nandina planting. That's what finally prompted somebody to test the berries. Nandina, sold as heavenly bamboo, is from China and Japan, it's invasive across the Southeast, and it's still sold at garden centers. Most birds can detoxify small amounts of cyanide. Eat one or two nandina berries and you'll be sick for a day. Cedar waxwings don't eat one or two. They gorge on them. A flock strips a bush in minutes. And the ripe berries release cyanide slowly as they digest. There's no warning, no bad taste, nothing that says stop. By the time it's hitting, the bird has a crop full of them. Worse, nandina berries hang on all winter, when almost nothing else is fruiting. It's most attractive exactly when the birds have the fewest options. If you have one, cut the berry clusters off before they ripen. That solves the problem this year. Then dig it out. Get under the root crown and pry it up, or it comes back. Alternatively, a cut stump with a dab of herbicide will usually kill it for good. Replace it with winterberry holly, American holly, or eastern red cedar. Red berries all winter, and waxwings are supposed to eat those.

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• Sep 13, 20265.3x their median

  The yellowjackets are winding down for the year. Their nests are a few weeks from collapse. And they're hangry. All summer long, the workers were hunting protein: caterpillars, flies, grubs - all of the stuff eating your garden. They fed it to the larvae, and the larvae fed them back a sugary secretion. That was the deal. But in late summer, the queen stops laying. The larvae pupate. No new larvae replace them. With no more larvae, there's no more sugar. That leaves a few thousand workers with nothing to do and nothing to eat. So they go looking. Your soda, your trash can, the peach on the ground, all good options. The same insect that ignored you in June is now in your face in September because its food supply ended and you've got the good stuff. Pretty much none of them will survive the first real frost. The workers, the queen, the whole colony dies. Only the new queens make it, scattered and alone under bark, and they'll never come back to that nest. The big gray one in the tree is either already empty or about to be, and it won't be reused. Cover your drinks, keep the trash lid on, and give them a few weeks. They've been working for you all summer, let them die in dignity.

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• Sep 12, 20264.9x their median

  It's time for my occasional reminder that balloons don't fly up to grandma up in heaven. They go up about five miles, burst, and fall back down. What lands is a translucent scrap of latex with a ribbon attached, floating on water, stuck on land, looking almost exactly like a jellyfish. Sea turtles, seabirds and fish eat them. Balloons are the deadliest piece of plastic a seabird can ingest, something like 32 times more likely to kill than a hard fragment, because soft latex folds and blocks the gut instead of passing through. The ribbon stays intact for years, and it wraps around necks, wings and flippers long after the balloon itself is gone. The biodegradable balloons don't fix the problem. University of Tasmania researchers buried latex balloons in industrial compost, the fastest breakdown environment that exists, and dug them up 16 weeks later fully intact. Louisiana made intentional releases a finable offense this year. Most of Europe has banned them. If you want to mark something: plant a tree, light a candle, blow bubbles, ring a bell. Whatever you're releasing it for, it isn't going where you want it to go.

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• Sep 24, 20264.6x their median

  PSA: Your washing machine won't reliably kill ticks, but your dryer will. A USDA entomologist figured this out after he found a live one crawling on his washer's agitator. So he bagged up tick nymphs and ran them through the laundry. Most survived the cold and warm cycles. 95% of the lone star ticks survived hot water. What killed them is the dryer. A CDC team later found that dry clothes tossed straight into the dryer on high heat killed the ticks in about 6 minutes. Washing first made it worse: the damp load took 50 minutes on high to do the same job. Ticks die by drying out, and wet clothes buy them time. In a lot of the country, adult deer ticks get a second season in October and November, right when everyone's out raking leaves. They don't quit at the first frost. They're out on any day warm enough, even in winter. When you come in from the yard or from a long hike this fall, put your clothes in the dryer on high for 10 minutes, then wash them. The ticks won't stand a chance.

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• Sep 25, 20263.6x their median

  If you're a little ocean critter, it really sucks ass when a human rolls up and picks you up out of the water. Take the humble sea star, for example. No gills, no lungs. It breathes through tiny bumps on its skin that pull oxygen straight out of the water. Lift it into the air for a photo and those bumps collapse. The critter suffocates. And the grab itself does damage too. Sea stars, limpets, and mussels hang onto the rock with everything they've got, because letting go means getting eaten or washed away. Pry one off and you can tear it or kill it. Flip a rock and whatever lives underneath gets baked by the sun. In a lot of marine protected areas, picking up an animal even for a second can get you fined. Crouch down, get close, take the picture in the water. If you have to touch, wet your hand in seawater, make sure it's sunscreen-free, and use two fingers. Then leave it where it is.

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• Oct 8, 20263.5x their median

  Every use of a leaf blower is a massacre. A typical blower pushes air out at 150 to 200 mph. That's faster than a Category 5 hurricane, aimed straight at the layer of leaves where next year's butterflies, moths, and fireflies are hoping to spend the winter. Woolly bear caterpillars curl up under those leaves. Luna moths hide their cocoons in them, disguised as dead leaves. Fireflies lay their eggs in them. Bumblebee queens sleep an inch or two below. Blast the beds down to bare dirt and all of it gets scattered, exposed or bagged for the landfill. Flip it to vacuum mode and it's even worse. It sucks up whatever's in the leaves, insects and spiders included, and chops it up. In 2019, Germany's environment ministry told people not to use leaf blowers unless they're indispensable, because small animals get sucked in or blown around and damaged. Get a rake. Move the leaves off the lawn and driveway, pile them whole in your garden beds and under your trees, and leave them there until spring. Next year's bumblebees and fireflies will thank you.

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• Sep 15, 20263.5x their median

  In 1987, Costa Rica was 21% forest. Today it's about 57%. They saved and restored their forests by paying people not to cut their trees with money from a tax on gasoline. The country was 75% forested land in 1940, but then experienced one of the Earth's worst deforestation rates, mostly for cattle pasture. In 1996, they passed a forestry law that did two things. It made clearing forest without approval illegal, and it created Pago por Servicios Ambientales: direct payments to private landowners for the ecosystem services their standing forest provides. More than 18,000 families and cooperatives have signed contracts. Close to a million hectares have been enrolled at one point or another. But those taxes and giveaways destroyed the economy and killed all the jobs, right? Nope. 1987, the year forest cover bottomed out, is also the year the tourism boom started. Costa Rica went from 329,000 visitors in 1988 to over three million by 2018. By 1995, tourism was the country's largest source of foreign currency. Since 1999 it has earned more foreign exchange than bananas, pineapples and coffee exports combined. GDP per capita, adjusted for purchasing power, went from about $11,000 in 1991 to roughly $27,000 today. Growth has averaged over 4% a year since 1992. In 2025 the World Bank reclassified Costa Rica as a high-income country, the only one in Central America. It wasn't the economy or the forests. It's an economy because of the forests.

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• Sep 13, 20263.5x their median

  "Free-range" on an egg carton means the barn has a door. That's it. Just access to the outdoors. No minimum square footage, no minimum time, no requirement that anything even be growing out there, and nobody checking whether a single hen ever walks through it. Cage-free is an even weaker marketing term. It only means the hens aren't in battery cages. They still live indoors with no outdoor access required. And pasture-raised isn't totally in the clear either. It's a label with no federal definition for eggs. The FDA never wrote a standard for the term. Anyone can print it on an egg carton. The labels that actually mean something are all third-party given. Look for these: Certified Humane Pasture Raised. 108 square feet of pasture per hen, outside at least six hours a day. Animal Welfare Approved. Continuous outdoor access on living vegetation. The strictest one going. Global Animal Partnership, Step 4 or higher. Otherwise, take every marketing label with a mighty grain of salt.

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• Sep 14, 20263.0x their median

  Why spend $3,000 on a fence when you can build a dead hedge for free? Two rows of stakes driven into the ground, and everything you prune goes in between them. Branches, limbs, brush, the stuff you'd otherwise be dragging to the curb. It gets denser every year. The bottom composts down, you keep feeding the top, and after a couple of seasons it's a more solid barrier than a wooden fence. It's not just a fence, it's also habitat. Wrens and catbirds nest in the structure. Cottontails, chipmunks, toads and skinks shelter at the base. Solitary bees and ground beetles overwinter in the gaps. Germany has been building these as wildlife corridors since the 1990s. The UK uses them on riverbank restoration.

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Ranked by total interactions across everything we have tracked for this account, which is a longer history than the 30-day window the rates above use. The multiple compares each post to this account's own median.

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