Editor's Note

It seemed like one of those eureka moments design directors live for: Kevin Fisher received a series of birds’ nest photos over the transom from Sharon Beals (“Small Miracles”). “I was impressed by the elegant presentation and the razor-sharp focus, which helped accentuate the uniqueness of each of the birds that built them,” he says. “At first glance the nests seem simple, but the more you look at them, the more remarkable they become.” Using an ultra-high-resolution flatbed scanner and some amazingly high-resolution cameras, Beals, a San Francisco photographer, used nests from two museum collections to create these portraits, including the nest on our cover, which a western tanager constructed of pine needles. “[These] images have wowed scientists and artists alike,” writes Audubon field editor Kenn Kaufman. “When we are lucky enough to find [birds’ nests] in the wild, or see them revealed in works of photographic art like the ones reproduced here, we cannot avoid holding them and the birds that made them in absolute awe.”

Another “treasure trove of artistic possibilities,” to borrow one of Kenn’s phrases from the nests story, also applies to the writing and photos in “Savage Garden”, a salute to a bewitching and embattled species. Just look at the poor victim ensnared in the Venus flytrap in the amazing shot on the story’s opener—taken by Coke Whitworth, who makes his Audubon debut—and it’s easy to see the plant’s appeal. As contributing editor T. Edward Nickens notes, “The Venus flytrap is an exquisite deception, an aggregate of biochemical, electric, and passive elastic components with a single purpose: to kill.” Yet in its home amid the Carolinas’ coastal forests, this predatory wonder and other carnivorous plants are defenseless against poachers and developers. If the public fails to demand more funds and the enforcement of stronger regulations, heroic scientists and land managers are waging a lonely battle for the plants’ future.

Photographer Mark Klett is well equipped to take his own long view (“Lost World”). A trained geologist, he has earned acclaim for his explorations of the passage of time in photographs of landscapes and the artifacts of past human civilizations. The rock-art images of bighorn sheep and deer on the cliffs of Perry Mesa, in a national monument 40 miles north of Phoenix, are part of what little remains of a culture that vanished suddenly 700 years ago, possibly due to drought and excessive agriculture. “Some scientists believe that the stage is being set for similar environmental conditions today, as the region contends with explosive development, cyclical droughts, and rapid water depletion,” writes senior editor Keith Kloor. Every day our industrial civilization presses ahead, presuming it has the foresight not to follow the paths of extinct societies surpassing their limits.—David Seideman