Every spring, the rain brings bird songs back to the California desert. Michael Stein has this week’s Birdnote®.

Just three years ago, the DeepWater Horizon oil spill gushed 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Reporter David Levin from Mind Open Media reports on a team of chemists, engineers, and biologists that is attempting to assess the overall damage to the Gulf ecosystem.

The EPA has written to the State Department, criticizing its draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Keystone XL oil pipeline. UCLA law professor Ann Carlson joins host Steve Curwood to discuss the criticisms in detail and explain how this might impact the Keystone decision.

Every spring, Central Vermonters flock to general stores to buy tickets to the Joe’s Pond Ice Out Contest. If they can correctly guess when a flag will fall through the frozen pond, they’ll go down in the history books, and win a decent chunk of change. Living on Earth’s Emmett FitzGerald reports from West Danville, Vermont.

The problem of storing energy from renewable sources is a great limitation of alternative energy technology. The solutions are either inefficient or unaffordable. Host Steve Curwood speaks with Curtis Berlinguette from the University of Calgary about his team's research into a more affordable and efficient mechanism to store renewable power.

A new study in Science magazines claims that whales in the Gulf of Maine have learned a novel feeding behavior from each other through a form of cultural transmission. Study author Luke Rendell, lecturer in biology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, tells host Steve Curwood about the emergence of and reason for this behavior.

On Earth editor at large Ted Genoways tells host Steve Curwood that if the Baptist preacher can’t convince residents to sign a land easement, the possibility of taking the land by eminent domain might.

TransCanada, the company planning to build Keystone XL, needs permission from land owners for the pipeline to cross their property. Company land agents across rural Nebraska are trying to get landowners to sign on the dotted line, but one agent has attracted controversy because he's also a Baptist preacher. Nebraska farmer Terry Van Housen talks to Living on Earth’s Bobby Bascomb about his experience with the preacher land agent.