14-year-old Shikha Patra and her friends conduct a water survey to document the lack of clean drinking water in their community. (Photo: Rhitu Chatterjee)

Just outside the slum, new roads have been built and modern apartment complexes have sprung up, but here the people have been left behind.

Most homes don’t have toilets. Infectious diseases are common. And residents don’t have access to clean drinking water.

But 14-year-old Shikha Patra is determined to change that.

Patra and some younger kids from this neighborhood have gathered around a public faucet, a simple pipe that sticks out of the ground.

While women wash dishes and clothes and fill their empty buckets, Patra asks them questions.

Patra explains that she and her friends are conducting a community water survey. She asks the women about the quality of the water.

“It’s yellow,” they reply, “and it smells bad. We don’t drink it.”

Patra types their responses, along with the address of the nearest house, into a smartphone.

All of this information is directly uploaded from the phone to a database. It’s how Patra and her friends are documenting the absence of drinkable water in the community.

Patra plans to create a map with that data and use it to demand clean drinking water from the local municipality.

“Our number one priority right now is water,” she says. “It doesn’t matter what it takes, how many years it takes. But we must bring drinking water.”

This is one of many projects Patra and other kids in the neighborhood are working on as part of a child-driven community organization called Prayasam.

Watch this short film based on The Revolutionary Optimists, a feature documentary about Prayasam that will be broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens in June 2013.

Harnessing Youthful Idealism

Amlan Kusum Ganguly, a lawyer-turned-entrepreneur, started Prayasam in 1996.

Working with children is not what he had envisioned. He intended to work with adults to address public health issues.

Ganguly recalls trying to convince parents to take simple measures, like washing their hands with soap, to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. Time and again he met with the same cynical response.

“They said, ‘We don’t have any time, and we don’t have to listen to this rubbish,’” Ganguly recalls.

“If I’m talking about giving them drinking water, or toilets, or something, they will be interested,” he says, but the adults were unwilling to take responsibility for improving their lives themselves. “I said, ‘No. You have to take onus of your own life.’”

Just as he was about to give up on the project, something unexpected happened.

“Some of the children who were listening to all these conversations for days long, they approached me and said, ‘Can you work with us?’” he recalls. “So I said, ‘Why not?’”

Today, Prayasam works with more than six hundred children, some as young as five or six. They live in slums all over Kolkata.

Ganguly meets regularly with small groups to review and guide the work they’re doing, but it is the children who decide what problems to tackle – and how.

The projects range from ensuring parents vaccinate babies to helping classmates finish school.

The children often use music and art to educate community members. They also engage the media and push government officials to pay attention to the slums’ problems.

Turning a Dump into Playgrounds

One of the group’s initial successes was battling a garbage dump that sat next to people’s homes.

“The smell from the garbage was so strong that it hung in the air, everywhere,” says Shibashish Ghosh, who was among the kids who led that fight. “It killed people’s appetites.”

21-year-old Shibashish Ghosh helped transform this former garbage dump into a playground. (Photo: Rhitu Chatterjee)

At first, Ghosh and his friends approached community elders for help. “They said, ‘We’ll think about it.’ Well, they kept thinking,” he says. “In the meantime, more and more garbage from distant places was being dumped there.”

So the children decided to act.

Ghosh and his friends held rallies and performances all over the neighborhood. They invited a famous singer to help their campaign. He’d written a song about the need to clean up Kolkata.

The singer and the kids performed the song in the middle of the garbage dump. That brought media attention.

Local papers featured the kids and their work, the city was shamed into taking action, and the dump was removed.

Today, two playgrounds sit where the garbage dump was.

Ghosh now works for Prayasam, and he tells the younger kids in the organization the story of the playgrounds. He says it demonstrates the power young people can have.

“I want them to know what we have accomplished with hard work,” he says. “Nothing should stop you from trying.” In fact, the word prayasam means to try.

Future Leaders

The organization is also creating young community leaders.

Shikha Patra, the 14-year-old girl conducting the water survey, works with the younger kids in her community. She helps them organize and execute a range of projects.

Patra says working with Prayasam has given her a new sense of who she is.

“Before, my identity was either as my grandfather’s granddaughter or my father’s daughter or as someone who lives in the house by the temple,” she says. “Now, they say, ‘Oh, that’s Shikha.’ Or, ‘That’s the girl who does surveys – or teaches kids to paint – or trains them in sports.’ I feel like they know me for who I am.”

It’s not just people within her community who know her for who she is. Last year. she and a friend traveled to Oxford University to present their work to an international gathering of social entrepreneurs.

Through her work, Patra says she has learned a lot about how to mobilize a community.

“People should feel, This neighborhood is mine – any developments, any improvements, will affect me, too,” she says. “We don’t need our group to grow in numbers. But we do want this kind of thinking, this sense of ownership, to spread both within the group and in the rest of the community.”

She says a sense of ownership creates a sense of responsibility, and that is what drives a community to change for the better.

Five men are now on trial in a special fast track court in connection with the attack. A sixth is expected to be tried in juvenile court.

News of the attack ignited protests across the country, demanding justice and reforms. Most of the original protesters were students, like the victim herself.

The attack and the reaction to it have generated passionate discussions in India about the lack of safety for women, and what to do about it, but it’s not just women doing the talking. Some male college students in New Delhi say they too are grappling with the issue.

Dhruv Sirohi, 19, an English Literature at Delhi’s Ramjas College, says he and his friends have been having conversations about sexual violence. “Everyone’s talking about it,” says Sirohi. “Everyone has a view about it.”

He says that’s creating a new awareness among young men, not just about sexual violence, but also subtler forms of harassment.

“It could be just (text) messages,” he says. “So people are aware of everything, even how you talk to a woman. So people are being more careful.”

Another student, 18-year-old Rajat Philip of St. Stephen’s College, says the past month has made him pick up on what women here face day in and day out.

“I grew up in a household with two brothers, so no sisters,” says Philip. “So you’re not exactly familiar with what all happens. It was new for me to hear about these things. You don’t notice these things. It might be happening in front of your eyes, but you don’t notice them.” For example, he explains, the unwanted attention, the lewd remarks, the groping on the streets and on public transport.

Philip says he and his friends see what they didn’t before.

“Now, if you’re walking to the metro station here, there are sometimes rowdy groups of people, catcalling to women going past. So now we notice it. And if we have women friends, we’re more concerned about them.”

And yet, he says he also feels somewhat helpless.

“We can’t do a thing about it, because that would mean getting into a fight about it. But I guess we notice it more,” says Philip.

Kabir David, an 18-year-old student also from Ramjas College, says he’s “overwhelmed” by the situation that women face going out in the city at night.

“I mean, I can’t imagine not to walk out late,” he explains, “I mean to be restricted so much in a democratic nation such as ours.”

David says he has seen men pester women with unwanted attention, both on and off-campus. And he says he has been taken aback by some of the comments he has heard from other male students.

For example, one of his roommates, who are from Ludhiana, a small town in the state of Punjab, were visiting David’s hometown, and called him to find out where the could buy a girl for the night.

“He said, ‘Kabir, where will you get a girl?’” says David. “I said, ‘I haven’t done that.’ (And) he said, ‘there must be girls here. You should be knowing about this.’”

David says he thinks men like his roommate have trouble seeing women as other than objects, and it may also have to do with young men coming from deeply conservative areas where women have very low status.

“It’s a very different mentality. You can’t really come to a proper realization as to why they’re like that, or (an) understanding,” David says.

He says the only way to ensure better treatment for India’s women is through education. He suggests boys and girls should socialize more freely in primary schools, and they should openly discuss gender issues in schools and colleges.

But when I ask if he has done much of that lately, he says he has felt hesitant to broach the issue beyond his own circle of friends.

“We don’t talk to our own classmates whose background is different from ours,” David says. “The conversation never goes to a level where I can ask them about girls and everything.”

Changing that, David says, might be a good place to start.

Shanti Sharma is 31 years-old and is raising three daughters by herself. She has been working with Sakha cabs for a little over a year now, and is proud to be providing a safe mode of transportation for Delhi’s women. (Photo: Rhitu Chatterjee)

It has forced many to adopt a range of measures to deal with the problem. Women who can afford it have their own cars, many with chauffeurs. Others move around in the company of family and friends. Many have to risk public transit.

But now, there’s another option. At least for a few women in the city.

It is a small service that offers safe transportation for women. And it started off as an experiment.

The service is called Cabs for Women by Women. It is a small service; just seven cabs and eight female drivers. They only pick up women.

I got a ride with 31-year-old Shanti Sharma. She says the popularity of their service has spiked since the gang rape in December.

“After this case, our work load has increased so much,” she says. “Women who used other cab services are also turning to us now.”

These are middle-class women and relatively affluent, especially those who travel alone a lot. And some like me are new to the city, or just passing through.

Sharma tells me that one customer recently told her that even if it’s more expensive than most car services, and you have to call ahead and book it, it’s worth it. Especially so after last month’s attack.

Sharma is happy to be providing this service.

“When I’m on the road driving our cab I feel very proud, because this is a cab service for women, and I’m a woman,” she says. “Our work is supporting the women of Delhi. We’re giving them safety.”

But safety for women is just one goal, says Nayantara Janardhan, who is with Sakha Consulting Wing, the non-profit that runs the cab service.

She says the project was a joint effort with another group, Azad Foundation, which helps urban women from poor and marginalized communities.

“Azad foundation wanted to provide non-gender typical livelihood options to be able to allow these women to earn at par with the men,” says Janardhan. “They wanted to put women in charge of technologies. They wanted to open up boundaries for women. And they wanted to ensure these women end up as well rounded professionals and people who are aware of their rights.”

The cab service is only a small part of Sakha’s operations.

“We have almost 50 women who’re working with many families, with individual women and women with children (as private chauffeurs),” says Janardhan.

Shanti Sharma started out as a chauffeur for a 50-year-old blind woman.

She liked the fact that the job involved helping a disabled woman move around safely and independently.

But she says she also enjoys the independence of driving a cab.

She is a single parent with three daughters. Their names are Suman, Simran and Shruti, she tells me with a proud smile.

Sharma says she makes around $250 a month in this job and that this is the first time in her life that she is earning enough to support her family.

“Ever since I started doing this job, I feel like I’ve reached my destination. I don’t want to change jobs anymore.”

But Sharma says being a woman cab driver is a lonely business, because she and the other female taxi drivers are completely outnumbered by male cabbies.

“When I park somewhere, there’re always men there and inevitably five or six of them get together and hang out,” she says. “But I’m usually the only woman in the parking lot, so I just stay inside the car. So then I wish that even one more woman driver would have been nice, to hang out with.”

It’s not much better when she is out on the road. Sharma says the male drivers give her a hard time.

“As soon as they see a girl at the wheel they start honking for no reason, they’ll try to overtake you. I’m always worrying about how to avoid getting hit by someone.”

Soon, I get to witness what she means. At one point, as she prepares to make a U-turn, a few cars back up behind us.

The driver of a government jeep right behind us starts honking persistently. It seems like the other drivers are staring at us — a woman driving a woman.

Sharma looks a little tense, but she laughs and shrugs it off.

“How can I turn if there are such heavy traffic in front? Tell me? I don’t know what to say.”

The only way to change the attitude of the men, she says is to have more women driving.

And perhaps, I think to myself — more women demanding to be safe, on the road and wherever they’re heading.

This was a poster in the tiny restroom in a café in an upscale market in New Delhi. (Photo: Rhitu Chatterjee)

As an Indian, I had expected that by now people, ordinary citizens would have moved on. They would have forgotten the anonymous victim, who was given many names by the Indian media—Nirbhaya (the fearless one), Damini (lightning), Amanat (precious possession). The cynic in me was certain that a month after the incident she had probably turned into a quickly fading image in the collective memory of the public.

But I was wrong.

Her story is still very much part of people’s daily consciousness. Every day, the papers here have at least one story on their front pages, with updates on the trial. (The case has been moved to a fast track court and trial is set to begin on Monday). There have been more stories on the inner pages of papers, stories on gender violence and other related issues. The victim and the issues she has come to represent are still very much part of everyday conversations in Delhi.

And thank goodness for that! Because, this is a huge change since the days of my adolescence or even my early youth.

Growing up in Mysore, a small town in southern India, I remember reading about rape cases in the local paper. But the reports were always brief, hardly a paragraph or two in length. And I don’t remember any follow-up stories. In addition, no one in my circle talked about these incidents, except in hushed tones and brief, embarrassed conversations.

I have to admit that my parents were open to talking, when I broached the topic. But those conversations usually ended up in them warning me to be alert and careful when going somewhere, especially after dark. And my brave mother often encouraged me to yell at or fight a perpetrator if I ever got groped or attacked.

As I grew older, the only space to discuss rape and sexual assault was among close women friends. And that was when someone had had the unfortunate experience of being groped or had lewd, violent remarks made at them by boys or men. There was no dearth of these angry, frustrated conversations, because every Indian woman I know has been in these situations at least a handful of times, if not more.

As a teenager and young adult I often dreamed of a time when our society, men and women alike, would care enough to want to put a stop to violence against women. But as I grew older, understood people better, cynicism took over. And I gave up hope for ordinary citizens ever caring enough to demand justice for victims of any kind of violence.

I am heartened by what I’m seeing here in Delhi now. And I’m cautiously optimistic. It’s still early days.

So I’ll be spending the next few days trying to understand how the events of the past month have affected people here. I’ll be reporting on the experiences of ordinary people, especially young men and women. I’ll also be keeping an eye on some of the legal changes afoot, and if they’re likely to have an impact.

Keep an eye on our blog for more updates. And tune in to our radio program for a variety of voices from Delhi talking about sexual violence and gender related issues.

In the meantime, here are some pictures depicting the current mood in the city.

The 23-year-old physiotherapy student was brutally assaulted on board a bus last month.

That attack has caused outrage across India and around the world.

Anchor Marco Werman speaks with The World’s Rhitu Chatterjee in Delhi.

And citizens of all religions celebrate the festival, which Indians call the Badaa Din, or the Big Day.

Anchor Aaron Schachter speaks with journalist Sandip Roy about Christmas celebration in his home town, Kolkata.

Roy is the culture editor for First Post and associate editor with New America Media.

When some of Baba’s friends from grad school visited us, they would ask him jokingly if he was still a non-believer. My mild-mannered but sarcastic father would often respond with something like this: ‘See my point is that the world population is growing. And God has enough on his plate already. So we need to go a little easy on the guy when it comes to approaching him with our troubles. That’s why I try to solve my own problems. Imagine me going to the temple in the afternoon and loudly ringing the temple bell, when the poor guy up there might be trying to take an afternoon nap. It’s kind of inconsiderate on my part, isn’t it?’

That would silence his friend. But the questions would return during another friend’s visit.

My parents didn’t talk to me or my brother about religion either.

When I was about 10-years-old, I could take it no more. By then, I was certain that my parents thought and felt differently about God and religion compared to pretty much everyone I knew. While we celebrated all Hindu festivals, our home was not filled with idols of Hindu Gods and Goddesses, and Ma and Baba never prayed.

It was time they came clean. So one evening, I sat my parents down and asked them: “Guys, what’re your thoughts on God?”

My parents smiled and exchanged glances. (That was the standard response whenever I sat them down to ask a difficult question about life, the universe and everything.)

Baba responded first. He closed his eyes, like he usually does when he tells a story or makes an argument and began to make his case.

He told me that his father (my grandfather) had abandoned religion after an intense period of being obsessed with religion. He had diligently read all religious texts-the Bhagavad Geetha, the Bible, the Quran, etc. – and decided that religions provided people with a moral compass. But each religion was so certain that its own way was right that religion also often led to conflict. So, he decided if he followed a basic rule – lead a simple, honest life and treat fellow human beings with kindness and dignity – he would be fine.

He instilled that simple rule in his four sons and they’ve lived by it all their lives. (I must add that my atheist father has a stricter moral code than most people I know.) Baba then added that being a scientist, he was a rationalist and only believed what could be scientifically proven. Hence his unwavering atheism.

Then it was Ma’s turn. She told me that maybe there was a God (or Gods and Goddesses as in Hinduism). But she didn’t see much divine interference in the world around us.

Ma didn’t understand why thousands of people in India die every year of hunger. She didn’t understand why people were devoutly religious and still dishonest. If there was a God wouldn’t he have wanted things to be better?

Maybe Gods have plans we don’t understand. But Ma felt she was better off focusing on people she could see, touch, and talk to. And that if she treated them well, God wouldn’t be upset with her for not praying regularly or maintaining any of the hundreds of rules set down by our religion. (By the way, my mother regularly partook in religious ceremonies, not to pray, but to be part of a community.)

It was probably a lot for a 10-year-old to digest. I don’t know. I can’t remember what was going through my head as I listened to their arguments. But clearly, they made enough of an impression on me that their words and stories have stayed with me till date.

What I do remember is asking them what they thought I should do or believe.

That, they told me I had to figure it out by myself. If I felt I needed to pray, I should do it. But, I should also probe deeper and ask whether I really believed, or whether I was doing something out of peer pressure, and if religion and the existence of God fit in with the way I perceive the world.

Well, that was helpful!

I’d hoped the session would clarify what I was supposed to believe. Instead my parents had carefully placed the burden of decision on my skinny, 10-year-old shoulders.

As an adult I’ve come to have a tremendous amount of respect for how my parents approached religion in their parenting. They gave us the freedom to believe or not believe.

And when I think of that freedom, I do wish my father too had had the freedom to own his atheism and not have to defend his thinking. I wish my brother and I had had the freedom to discuss these issues in school, instead of feeling awkward for questioning religion.

That’s why Ashley Cleek’s story gives me hope. Maybe the new and burgeoning movement in India will lead to more public and social acceptance of atheists.

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It made skyscrapers sway in Tokyo and it triggered a tsunami alert in the same region of northeastern Japan that was devastated by last year’s massive quake and tsunami.

No significant damage was reported this time though.

We’re looking for the name of that region.

It’s a geographical area that includes all of the northern portion of Honshu, Japan’s largest island.

It also includes some of the prefectures that were traumatized by last year’s disaster, like Fukushima, and Miyagi.

The answer is Tohoku, the region struck by last year’s devastating earthquake and tsunami. This one hardly caused any destruction or loss of life.

Why? I spoke with British seismologist Roger Musson, the author of a new book: “The Million Death Quake: The Science of Predicting Earth’s Deadliest Natural Disaster.” to find out.

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The European catfish are native to Eastern Europe. They were introduced by anglers to the Tarn river in Southwestern France in the 1980s. They have only recently developed the habit of pouncing on unsuspecting pigeons hanging out by the water.

Anchor Marco Werman speaks with The World’s science reporter Rhitu Chatterjee, who explains just how the catfish track their prey and hunt them down.

Watch these catfish in action in this video.

Compare the catfish’s hunting style with that of the Orca (killer whale) in the video below:

Some bird species use cigarette butts to line their nests.

A new study in the journal Biology Letters suggests the practice may be beneficial to those that live in the nests.

The study was done in Mexico City, and it involved two bird species: house sparrows and house finches.

Ecologist Constantino Macias Garcia and a team of students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico looked at 80 nests on the university campus.

In every nest, birds had used cigarette butts as a building material.

“It is a very prevalent phenomenon,” says Macias Garcia. “They are regularly using them.”

The birds did not use the cigarette butts intact. They extracted the cellulose fibers in the filters and wove the fibers through the twigs and branches.

So why do birds use this seemingly repulsive material—full of nicotine and other chemicals—in their homes?

Macias Garcia wondered if it was serving a protective purpose. After all, nicotine is a well-known insect repellant, and bird nests are often full of harmful parasites, such as mites and lice.

Once the finch and sparrow fledglings had left their nests, Macias Garcia and his team took many of the nests down. They then measured the amount of cellulose fibers, as a proxy for the amount of nicotine in each nest, and counted the number of parasites.

“The more cellulose there was in the nests, the fewer parasites we found in those nests,” says Macias Garcia.

The parasites apparently disliked the nicotine-filled fibers.

The use of cigarette butts could be an urban version of a behavior observed elsewhere in other bird species.

Evolutionary biologist Dale Clayton of the University of Utah says starlings, for example, line their nests with certain aromatic plants that emit “volatile chemicals that appear to kill ectoparasites like lice and mites and also bacteria.”

He says the chemicals in the plants are also thought to boost the immune systems of chicks so they are better able to fight parasites.

The behavior has probably evolved because of obvious advantages to the survival of the species, says Clayton.

But he cautions that the authors of the new study have not shown that cigarette butts ultimately benefit bird species.

“What they need to show now is that the impact on mites does actually increase the reproductive success of the birds,” Clayton says.

After all, cigarettes butts may also be causing harm to the birds.

“Cigarette butts contain about a hundred substances that are added to the cigarettes or that come with the nicotine,” says Macias Garcia.

Many of those substances are toxic, so any positive effect of the nicotine could be outweighed by the negative effects of other chemicals.

That’s something Macias Garcia wants to investigate next.

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Along the way it becomes the largest tributary of the legendary Ganges River.

Some Hindus believe that bathing in this sacred river “frees one from the torments of death.” Unfortunately sections of this river are also severely polluted.

Development along the part of this river that passes the city of Delhi, India, has largely destroyed the land’s ability to store water for humans and wildlife.

There’s a glimmer of hope, though regarding the Yamuna River, which is the answer to today’s quiz.

A new “biodiversity park” along a stretch of the river is starting to restore some of the the natural services the landscape used to provide.

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Andrew Farnsworth of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology talks to Lisa Mullins about some of the rare species that are being spotted in and around New York.

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Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH in Boston. Hurricane Sandy gave one group of people a reason to rejoice: bird watchers. That’s because as with most hurricanes, Sandy brought ashore rare birds from distant lands, species that American birders might never have the chance to see otherwise. Andrew Farnsworth, this applies to you, doesn’t it?

Andrew Farnsworth: Absolutely.

Mullins: You are a longtime birder, in fact, and you’re a research associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. You are joining us from your home in New York. Who would have thought that Manhattan is a good bird watching area, but especially now. What rare birds are you seeing around there?

Farnsworth: Well, yesterday as Sandy passed, we found a number of interesting things. Leach’s Storm Petrel, it’s an oceanic species, Pomarine Jaeger, really not things that you would expect to see in Manhattan ever.

Mullins: Where do they come from?

Farnsworth: Well, Leach’s Storm Petrel is a bird that breeds across a lot of northern areas and some southern areas. It’s an oceanic species, though, so you would never expect to see one in the Hudson. They’re off the Continental Shelf usually. And Pomarine Jaeger is a high Arctic breeder that migrates off into the ocean so again, you would really never expect to see one inland, and especially not in Manhattan.

Mullins: Do they look exotic, like something you would not normally see in Manhattan, or do you just happen to be really good at identifying different birds?

Farnsworth: The Leach’s Storm Petrol does look a bit exotic, it kind of looks like a big, dark, very flappy, kind of bat when it flies around, and looks pretty unusual. The Jaeger looks a lot like typical gulls you might see, so that’s more of an ID challenge, but they’re both pretty obvious when you look at them.

Mullins: Tell us about Ross’s Gull, which is another bird that’s been spotted. It’s from the Arctic. How would something like Ross’s Gull have ended up in Manhattan? It was heading south, Sandy was traveling north.

Farnsworth: Yeah, so the Ross’s Gull actually was upstate in New York, near Ithaca. It was maybe 200 miles from Manhattan, and it’s a very interesting story because it’s very rare anywhere in North America. We think it appeared because of the strong high pressure that made all of these northeasterly winds flow across the Atlantic into Canada and probably brought that species and some other really rare shorebirds to Massachusetts, shorebirds called Northern Lapwing.

Mullins: And are there birds that have come up from the south?

Farnsworth: There are, there are. There was a report of a Red-billed Tropic bird, a Caribbean species, that was found alive on the ground in Cape May, New Jersey. It was brought in to a rehabilitator’s. That’s certainly one of the farthest afield records that we’ve heard of.

Mullins: And pushed up by Sandy?

Farnsworth: That’s right.

Mullins: So that’s a good thing for you and for other birdwatchers. Is it a bad thing for the birds to be steered off course so much?

Farnsworth: A lot of the birds that get steered off course in hurricanes, if they can’t fly back to the ocean, they may die where they end up. For something like Ross’s Gull, though, even though it’s so far afield, it could easily survive, it could move on to another destination, it’s hard to say for those. But the hurricane birds, they have a really tough time often, once they get far inland and are far out of habitat and far out of range. A lot do return to the ocean, but the birds that are exhausted end up on lakes, or ball fields or river valleys, and are exhausted enough so that they’re really not able to make the flight back.

Mullins: Do storms generally kill a lot of birds?

Farnsworth: A storm like this probably didn’t kill a lot of migrant songbirds, maybe like an earlier storm might have done, by forcing them into the ocean. This probably just displaced a lot of birds. They can be really devastating but hopefully this one was not.

Mullins: Okay. Andrew Farnsworth, longtime birdwatcher and a research associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Thanks again.

Farnsworth: All right. Thanks so much.

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The severe flooding caused by Sandy didn’t come as a complete surprise to the City of New York.

Officials there have for some time been looking at ways to make the city more resilient to storm surges. Six years ago, they approached a Dutch scientist for advice.

The Netherlands is a low-lying country that is well known for its heroic efforts at holding back the sea.

The Dutch scientist, Jeroen Aerts of VU University in Amsterdam, says New York officials wanted to know what they could do to make the city more flood-proof. But, at the time, they weren’t interested in big engineering solutions.

“They were a little bit reluctant in terms of considering large scale protection measures, like surge barriers,” he says.

Surge barriers, or flood barriers, are carefully engineered concrete structures, often built in tidal inlets, to prevent flooding in coastal areas.

These and other large structures, like levees, are expensive, and New York wanted inexpensive solutions, Aerts says.

But that changed last year, after Hurricane Irene caused huge economic damage. “Then they also saw this sense of urgency that maybe (we should) also look at other options,” he says.

North Sea dike in the Netherlands (Photo: Dirk Huijssoon/Flickr)

Aerts says New York could adopt some solutions from his country – for example, the network of surge barriers that protects the city of Rotterdam and its port, or the idea of raising beaches with fresh sand every few years.

“Each time the sea rises by a little bit, a few inches, we simply put some more sand on our beaches,” he says.

Aerts’s colleague Pier Vellinga says New York should also consider some tips from Venice.

“Over the last twenty years, the frequency of flooding has increased in Venice from about four times a year to like 20-40 times a year,” says Vellinga.

Vellinga has been helping Venetians put in a range of measures to help protect themselves from these floods.

Some of them are simple; for instance, raised walkways that help pedestrians keep their feet dry.

Then there are more complex and expensive engineering solutions, like a set of mobile underwater barriers.

“It’s a set of doors that are hinged to the sea floor,” says Vellinga. “They lift up when the water is very high, and then they block the entrance” from the Adriatic Sea to the city.

Whatever action New York takes, experts say the city has to be prepared to redesign its plan depending on what the future brings.

Tim Reeder is the regional climate change program manager at the environmental agency in the U.K. He’s involved a program called the Thames Estuary 2100.

It’s a plan to protect London and surrounding areas from floods and other climate-related risks, and it can be tweaked based on the degree to which the climate changes over the coming decades.

“Given the fact that we don’t know how much of sea level rise exactly we’re going to get as a result of climate change,” he says, “the plan can be adapted so that we can continue to get flood protection for the next hundred years in London.”

One component of the plan is a surge barrier called the Thames Barrier.

“The Thames Barrier is part of a large flood protection system including 330 km. of sea walls to protect London,” says Reeder.

Since its completion in 1983, this barrier has protected London from floods over a hundred times. But if the sea level rises by another foot, this barrier may no longer offer enough protection, in which case it will have to be modified to hold back more water.

Reeder says cities like New York, Rotterdam, Venice, and London face an uncertain future, and they should work together to prepare for a common threat.

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And such diseases may be on the rise, according to a new book called “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.”

I spoke with the author, David Quammen, for my new science podcast.

Scientists studying Noc say he imitated human sounds. They have published Noc’s human-like sounds in a new study in the journal Current Biology.

The World’s science reporter Rhitu Chatterjee explains the new findings to Marco Werman.

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Marco Werman: I should say at theworld.org we’ve also got sounds. So see if you can recognize this sound. Okay, to me, this sounds like somebody playing a kazoo in the rain.

Rhitu Chatterjee: Or someone singing in the rain, someone in an unusually good mood.

Werman: Yeah, I’ll say, that’s The World’s science reporter Rhitu Chatterjee, and Rhitu, you’re here to tell us what that sound really is.

Chatterjee: Indeed, Marco, and it wasn’t a human at all. That’s a whale, a white whale, or a Beluga named Noc. And scientists think he was imitating the human voice.

Werman: Wow, a Beluga whale imitating the human voice is incredible. So this Beluga, this Noc, who was or is he?

Chatterjee: Well, his story is fascinating. In 1977, when Noc was about 3-4 years old he was captured off the coast of Canada by Inuit hunters and shipped off to a Navy research lab in San Diego where scientists were studying whale behavior. They kept Noc and two other Belugas in enclosures at a pier and they would often record whale calls. In 1984, when Noc had been with the scientists for about 7 years, the scientists thought they heard human voices in the background of those recordings.

Werman: And those were the whales talking?

Chatterjee: Wait, wait, Marco, you’re getting ahead of the story. At the time, researchers thought that they were hearing people talking at a neighboring pier, so they didn’t make much of it, but one day some divers were doing experiments at the whale facility, and they were communicating with their supervisors on land through underwater communication devices and suddenly a diver surfaces and asked “Who asked me to get out?” No one had it seemed and that’s when they realized it was one of the whales.

Werman: Wow.

Chatterjee: From then on the scientists started paying more and more attention to the whale sounds and realized that one of their three whales, Noc would often switch his voice to sound like humans. And yeah, they were never able to record him saying out, out, which according to the divers he said a lot, but they were able to record him at other times singing or saying goodness knows what.

Werman: So this seems like a really big deal. Is this the first Beluga whale to imitate human speech?

Chatterjee: No, Marco, a Beluga at the Vancouver aquarium is known to have said his name, Negozi, again and again. But Noc’s human-like sounds was the first to be recorded by us and Sam Ridgeway is one of the scientists who worked with Noc for nearly 30 years, I spoke with him and Ridgeway thinks that Noc wasn’t as good an imitator of human sounds say like parrots, but he thought Noc was trying pretty hard.

Werman: So, Noc lived a happy long life, but we should say that he died about four years ago, so we may never learn what he was trying to say in that song.

Chatterjee: That’s right, Marco, but who knows, another Beluga might in the future give us some insight.

Werman: Rhitu Chatterjee, The Worlds science correspondent, thank you so much. It’s always good for you to stop by.

Chatterjee: You’re welcome, Marco.

Werman: We have Noc’s human-like sound and other normal Beluga calls; you can listen to them online at theworld.org.

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(Sound courtesy of Vancouver Aquarium Cetacean Research Program)

(Sound courtesy of Vancouver Aquarium Cetacean Research Program)

(Sound courtesy of Vancouver Aquarium Cetacean Research Program)