For the past three years, the Bates College men’s rowing team has stood by as the women’s team has qualified for, and excelled in, the NCAA Women’s Rowing Championships. Since the NCAA doesn’t sponsor championships in men’s rowing, it would be understandable if there might have been mixed emotions about seeing their teammates get to extend their season in something resembling the limelight.

“These guys are very supportive and respectful of the women, but I’m sure it was difficult to watch sometimes, knowing that they might never have an opportunity to perform on such a stage,” said Bates head coach Peter Steenstra.

But the teammates from the Class of 2009 had a different idea for the way their senior year could end differently: competing across the ocean, in the prestigious Henley Royal Regatta in Henley-on-Thames, England.

First, the Bobcats had to prove themselves worthy of the trip to Steenstra (admission is open). “My reply was simple — finish in the top three at New Englands and top four at ECACs and you’ll have earned it,” the coach said.

They took care of that part. The team enjoyed its finest ever year of competition, earning the bronze medal (and third place in the NESCAC) at the New England Rowing Championships. “There is no question in my mind that this is the best crew to ever come out of our boathouse, and these guys have earned the opportunity to compete on the international level,” said Steenstra.

Of the 58 entries for The Temple Challenge Cup, one of the eight, NCAA Basketball Tournament bracket-style competitions (or “knock-out draws”) within the Henley Royal Regatta, five are from the U.S.: Bates, Brown (freshmen), Princeton (lightweights), Kent School (high school), and WPI. Most boats are from the U.K., but there are handfuls from Ireland, Holland and Australia too. An original field of 58 boats will dwindle to 32 after June 26 qualifying involving only British and Irish boats. The 32 surviving boats will pair off for one-on-one, single-elimination races every day starting July 1 until July 5, when a champion will be crowned. (See all the entries at this link.)

The team is pumped, to say the least, and aside from the one week following graduation, have been doing two practice sessions a day since May 12. “I’m sure they would be the first to tell you that they are in the best shape of their lives,” quipped Steenstra.

There will be no sightseeing for the team, only preparation and competition on the biggest stage of their lives. “Only if you compete for your country’s national team will you reach a higher level of competition,” said Steenstra. “I want the guys to appreciate the opportunity but not be intimidated.  We know almost nothing about the crews we are racing, and each race will be run like our one chance to win it all.”

Go to the official Web site of the Henley Royal Regatta

For many thousands of years, two species of large flightless birds shared the same habitats in Australia.

One was the emu, still thriving in Australia today.

The other was a bigger, heavier bird, known to scientists as Genyornis newtoni, that became extinct around 50,000 years ago — around the same time humans arrived on the island continent.

Why did one species disappear while the other survived? The simple answer is diet. Genyornis couldn’t adapt to radical changes in the available food supply, while the emu could, according to a geological study published in the July 8 issue of Science magazine and co-authored by Bates geochemist Beverly Johnson.

But the tale of Genyornis and the emu is the key to a much greater story, one that suggests the human capacity for affecting the environment. Today, much of interior Australia is arid, hosting only sparse, scrubby desert plants. Prior to the arrival of Australia’s first human inhabitants, though, that landscape supported trees, shrubs and nutritious grasses watered by summer rains.

It was that ecological change that doomed Genyornis and it was the human presence that caused the change, say the study’s authors. They theorize that those early inhabitants altered the ecosystem drastically enough, probably through large-scale burning, to cause the extinction not only of Genyornis, but of the continent’s large land mammals as well.

Moreover, the rapid transformation of prevailing flora apparently also affected the climate by reducing “biosphere-atmosphere interactions that promote penetration of monsoon moisture into the interior,” as an abstract of the study states.

This much-publicized research is based on the analysis of fossil eggshells from the two species, including shells collected in core samples and analyzed by Johnson. “You are what you eat, basically,” she explains: Different types of food leave discernible chemical traces in our tissues and, as in this case, in the eggs that birds lay.

Through the analysis of carbon isotopes in the eggshells, “you can determine the proportion of grasses consumed by the birds, relative to trees and shrubs. For an non-discriminating herbivore, such as the emu, the eggshell chemistry reflects the diversity of the ambient vegetation,” Johnson says.

In other words, the eggshell record indicates that “between 140,000 and 50,000 years ago, a wide variety of plants existed to support both the emu and the more picky eater, Genyornis,” she continues. “But shortly after humans arrived in Australia, beginning 50,000 years ago, the vegetation shifted to scrub. Emus could adapt, but Genyornis newtoni and most of the other large browse-dependent animals went extinct.”

So how do humans figure in the story? “Prior to 50,000 years ago, large climate shifts occurred, yet Genyornis was able to adapt to changing conditions,” Johnson says. “The critical part to all this is that the vegetation change and the extinctions occurred simultaneously at three different sites in Central Australia and at a time when climate was relatively stable.

“So there has to be another mechanism for the ecological changes that occurred at approximately 50,000 years ago,” she says. “The timing of these changes is nearly coincidental with human arrival into Australia, and therefore human activity is inferred.”

The researchers surmise that the repeated use of fire by those first human immigrants reduced certain types of vegetation critical to the diets of Genyornis and other plant-browsing fauna. More opportunistic feeders, such as emus, survived.

“We don’t present direct evidence for fire in this paper — it’s very difficult to get, though not impossible,” Johnson explains. “But we do show an ecosystem shift roughly coinciding with the arrival of humans.”

In addition, hunting and the introduction of diseases may have also contributed to the extinction of species, if not the change in plant life.

Led by Professor Gifford Miller, a geologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the research team that produced the study also included scientists from the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., the Australian National University and Wollongong University, also in Australia.

Johnson, an assistant professor of geology, has been involved with this ongoing effort since the mid-1990s and, she says, “it’s going to be several more years, probably, before we get to the bottom of it.”

Using the same basic approach, the analysis of stable isotopes in organic matter, Johnson has shifted the current focus of her research to the study of vegetal matter found in sediment cores from northern Australia. She and Bates students also have ongoing paleoenvironmental research projects in northeast Siberia and in Maine salt marshes. Her overarching interest, as well as the techniques involved, is the same for all these studies: using geological evidence to try to understand changes in climate and the environment, especially changes influenced by humankind.

“If humans were capable of completely altering an ecosystem on a continental scale 50,000 years ago using fire, a relatively unsophisticated technology,” she says, “imagine the extent of our impact today.”

At first it may be, as Johnson puts it, “mind-numbing” to consider the human potential for impacting our surroundings. But the real value in this examination of prehistoric events lies in the lessons we can apply today. “If you can understand how the system responds to past human activity,” Johnson says, “you can potentially predict how it will respond to current human activity.”

Doris Pilkington, author of Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (University of Queensland Press, 1997), will give a talk coupled with the screening of the acclaimed 2002 film The Rabbit-Proof Fence at 5 p.m. Friday, Feb. 13, in the Benjamin Mays Center, corner Bardwell and Russell streets. The public is invited to attend the film and lecture, sponsored by the Bates College Multicultural Center, free of charge. For more information, call 207-786-8376.

Made from her book about her mother’s escape in 1931 from an Australian settlement camp and her trek across 1,000 miles of outback to rejoin her aboriginal family, The Rabbit-Proof Fence by director Phillip Noyce exposes the suffering of the indigenous people of Australia at the hands of the government. The Australian government believed that the removal of indigenous children from their parents was a way to eliminate their “aboriginality.” The title refers to a 1,500-mile fence separating outback desert from the farmlands of Western Australia that Pilkington’s mother and her two sisters followed to find their way back home.

Pilkington was born in Australia’s northwestern outback in 1937. At the age of three, she was removed from her home and placed in the Moore River Native Settlement, the same internment camp from which her mother, Molly, had escaped years before. This time Molly was returned to the camp with another daughter and Doris. Once again, Molly escaped with the other daughter, leaving Doris to grow up in the camp. Determined to pursue an education, she — against all odds — qualified as a nursing aide and then went on to study journalism and film and video production.

Pilkington first won recognition in 1990 when she won the David Unaipon Award for her book Caprice: A Stockman’s Daughter (University of Queensland Press, 2003). Twenty-two years passed before she was reunited with her parents. She has recently completed her own story in Under the Wintamarra Tree. Pilkington dedicates her life to spreading the story of the indigenous people of Australia, centering her talks on the reconciliation between black and white citizens and among the “Stolen Generation” removed from their families.