Cities and town have found a new and interesting way to control its booming pigeon population.

Today is the Great Backyard Bird Count, so take a few minutes today to tally up the number of birds in your backyard or local park and help track how bird habitats are being affected by the environment.

Iraq, for many of us, is an unimaginable place. Our experience of it is through the far end of a CNN camera: a desert across which camouflaged Humvees race between crumbling and bombed-out cities. There is, unfortunately, all that. But Iraq, like everywhere else, has its own particulars of ecology: the alluvial plains of the Tigris and Euphrates, the marshlands of the south, the northern highlands and mountains near the Turkish border.