If you're worried about ticks, put up an owl box.

The animal driving most Lyme disease in the eastern US is the white-footed mouse. Ticks that feed on them are far more likely to come away infected than ticks that feed on other animals. The bigger the local mouse population, the worse the next year's tick year.

A single barred owl pair raising chicks can take hundreds of rodents in a breeding season. Owls also don't carry Lyme. The bacterium can't survive their digestive tract, so an owl that eats an infected mouse is a dead end for the disease.

Researchers at the Cary Institute, the leading lab on Lyme ecology, have been explicit about this: "Landscapes that support predators have reduced Lyme disease risk."

One owl box on its own isn't going to fix a tick year. But a yard with owls, foxes, bobcats, and weasels in it has fewer mice, and a yard with fewer mice has fewer infected ticks.

If you have woods or fields nearby, a properly sized barn owl or screech owl box (different species, different ...

Tonight, while you're asleep, several hundred million birds will fly over the United States in the dark. Most of them will pass directly over your house, a few thousand feet up.

More than 80% of North America's migratory birds travel at night. Warblers, thrushes, orioles, tanagers, sparrows. Birds that weigh as much as a few coins, crossing a continent between sunset and sunrise, navigating by stars and by the earth's magnetic field.

Mid-September through early October is the peak. On the biggest night ever recorded, radar picked up 1.25 billion birds aloft over the US at once.

And there's one thing standing in their way that you personally control: your lights.

Artificial light pulls night-migrating birds off course from as far as three miles away. Once they're drawn in, they circle the lit area, over and over, burning fuel they can't spare, until they either drop from exhaustion or hit glass. It's worst on low, foggy nights, when birds fly closer to the ground and the light bounces off the cloud ...

Neuroscientists warn that our reliance on LED light bulbs has created a 'asbestos-level' public health crisis.

It literally starves our cellular mitochondria of vital near-infrared wavelengths.

Modern light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have revolutionized energy efficiency, but researchers are warning that our constant exposure to them may come with a massive physiological cost. According to Dr. Glen Jeffery, a leading neuroscience professor at University College London, standard commercial LEDs lack the essential red and near-infrared wavelengths found in natural sunlight and older incandescent bulbs. This restricted spectrum, dominated by short-wave blue light, directly impacts mitochondria—the powerhouses of our cells. Because mitochondria are light-sensitive and rely on longer infrared wavelengths to optimize energy production, our indoor light environments may be keeping our cellular engines running on empty.

This 'infrared starvation' is linked to a cascade of systemic issues, including ...