John F. Kearney & Associates
Social and Environmental Research
By John Kearney Dr. Kearney is an environmental anthropologist. From 2008-2018, he worked for the Nova Scotia wind industry as an independent consultant assessing the impact of wind energy facilities on birds. For the last four years, he has been the lead
As the residents of the Tri-county area await the return of the ferry between Yarmouth and Bar Harbor, I have been thinking about a recent discovery that I made about the inauguration of the first passage between these locations by the Bluenose
Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid, 14 kilometers in width, struck the earth with the force of more than a million atomic bombs. Three-quarters of life on earth was obliterated, including all the dinosaurs. This was the fifth, and the last of
Twice a year, one of the greatest spectacles of nature passes over our heads as we sleep. Tens of thousands of birds in the spring, and hundreds of thousands of birds in the autumn, fly over the Tri-County area. Continent-wide, the count
“We have come to fish for the herring-fish; That live in this beautiful sea; Nets of silver and gold have we,” Said Wynken, Blynken, And Nod – Eugene Field (1850-1895) This is a quote from the first stanza of a classic poem
It’s minus 15 degrees Celsius in January, and you hear a woodpecker drumming, a behaviour usually reserved for courtship and marking territory. It is still far from spring, and the time for laying eggs. The lengthening of daylight is the main factor
It has long been known that some species of dragonflies are migratory, but our knowledge of these insects was shrouded in mystery. Little was known about how far they migrated, what was their annual cycle, and what were the environmental cues driving
A Christmas tradition in some areas of the United States at the end of the Nineteenth Century was the “Side Hunt.” Hunters would choose sides, and each team would shoot as many birds as they could find in a day and put