Bears have stopped hibernating in the mountains of northern Spain, scientists revealed yesterday, in what may be one of the strongest signals yet of how much climate change is affecting the natural world.
In a December in which bumblebees, butterflies and even swallows have been on the wing in Britain, European brown bears have been lumbering through the forests of Spain's Cantabrian mountains, when normally they would already be in their long, annual sleep.
Bears are supposed to slumber throughout the winter, slowing their body rhythms to a minimum and drawing on stored resources, because frozen weather makes food too scarce to find. The barely breathing creatures can lose up to 40 per cent of their body weight before warmer springtime weather rouses them back to life.
But many of the 130 bears in Spain's northern cordillera - which have a slightly different genetic identity from bear populations elsewhere in the world - have remained active throughout recent winters, naturalists from Spain's Brown Bear Foundation (La Fundaci�n Oso Pardo - FOP) said yesterday.
The change is affecting female bears with young cubs, which now find there are enough nuts, acorns, chestnuts and berries on thebleak mountainsides to make winter food-gathering sorties 'energetically worthwhile', scientists at the foundation, based in Santander, the Cantabrian capital, told El Pais newspaper.
'If the winter is mild, the female bears find it is energetically worthwhile to make the effort to stay awake and hunt for food,' said Guillermo Palomero, the FOP's president and the co-ordinator of a national plan for bear conservation. This changed behaviour, he said, was probably a result of milder winters. 'The high Cantabrian peaks freeze all winter, but our teams of observers have been able to follow the perfect outlines of tracks from a group of bears,' he said."

Introductions are so hard. Do I begin with the guilt I am feeling for writing such an 'off the cuff' piece, meant to honor a man, who brought all the facts in my head together into one logical view. Maybe, I begin with the an anecdote concerning the miracle of life, and tie it back to a famous quote, book, or theory of his. Then again, maybe I should just continue to ramble.

I read "Cosmos" during high school. I dragged a chair to the river, cleared some brush (which took more than one day) plopped the chair down, and read it over the next few weeks. It was summer, the river was flooded and came up to my feet. The solitude was refreshing, and not in the way growing up in a small town can't be. When you first realize how truly lonely we are in this universe your feelings of despair, loneliness, and aimlessness: well, they sort of float down the river.

One might be inclined to think that learning of our universal solitude might make depression sink in a little more. But, Sagan had a way of turning our infinitesimally small human ability into a beacon of pulsar hope and supernovae light. He made me marvel in my own existence and intelligence.

Did you know Komodo dragons can reproduce without sexual activity. Yeah, thats right, they can fertilize their own eggs; virgin dragons if you will. Literally. Mary has nothing on dragons. In "The Dragons of Eden" he illuminates so many quirks and foibles of life and evolution it is enough to leave your head spinning. From the evolution of the forebrain in mammals from birds from reptiles from fish, to the inability of the right eye to understand what the lefthand is drawing in patients who have undergone hemisphere removal, and the theories of recapitulation. Oh my.

Before Sagan the knowledge I obtained was all strewn about on a plane. After Sagan, that plane gained dimension, and I saw the world for what it was: round. I can't continue, there is simply too much to say of the man and his writings, and I have to work early. I LOVE YOU CARL!