Aves (birds)
gregladen | July 31, 2008I noted earlier that hundreds of baby penguins are being washed, dead, onto beaches thousands of miles away from their native lands. Various causes have been suggested, including the idea that the penguins are swimming into unfamiliar and penguin-hostile waters in search of fish, diminished in supply owing to overfishing.
Well, this phenomenon has continued, and sifted northwards.
While penguins commonly wash up as far north as Rio de Janeiro state in July and August - hundreds have done so this year. Bahia is roughly 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) northeast of Rio.
P. Dee Boersma, a…
gregladen | July 8, 2008 A dead Wandering Albatross Diomedea exulans drowned on a longline. Photo by Graham Robertson/Australian Antarctic Division From Birdlife International:
BirdLife International presented the European Parliament with alarming data about the extent of seabird bycatch globally and in Europe yesterday. At the same time, BirdLife welcomed the long awaited first steps of the European Commission to tackle the problem by developing a Community Plan of Action on seabirds with the intention of completing it next year.
"With 300,000 seabirds, including about 100,000 albatrosses, dying annually as…
gregladen | July 8, 2008 The Golden-winged Grosbeak - Socotra Grosbeak Rhynchostruthus socotranus shown in image - has been chosen as Yemen's national bird. Photo by Richard Porter The Golden-winged Grosbeak has been declared, by the Yemen Council of Ministers, to be the Yemen National Bird. This bird is endemic to the Saudi peninsula.
The national mammal for Yemen is the Leopard, and the Dragon Blood tree is the national tree. Oh, and the Aloe is the national plant.
Environment Minister His Excellency Abdul Rahman Al-Eryani issued a statement to the Yemen cabinet and the press saying: "I am proud we have…
gregladen | June 26, 2008... is certainly still in the future. But we have seen a step in that direction in a new paper, coming out this week in Science. This research applies intensive and extensive genomic analysis to the avian phylogenetic tree. The results are interesting.
This paper is summarized in a number of locations, most notably here on Living the Scientific Life. Here, I will summarize it only very briefly. However, there are two observations I would like to make about this paper and its apparent meaning. One has to do with the nature of science, and the other has to do with the nature of…
gregladen | June 21, 2008Birds: Nature's Magnificent Flying Machines is a book by Caroline Arnold and illustrated by Patricia Wynne for, I'd say, Pre-Elementary School kids and first/second grade. This is a good book to read to a pre-literate kid. Then put it away for later when the first grade academic report on birds is due ... it will be an excellent reference.
This is a well done and highly recommended book.
Birds... is highly specialized. It deals with only one topic: Bird flight. I like that. Who needs just another book on birds. Demonstrating to the little ones that there are questions that can be…
gregladen | June 10, 2008The following is a description supplied by Amanda of an event she observed two weekends back at The Lake in North/Central Minnesota:
There appeared to be an animal acting strangely on the surface of the water. On further inspection, it turned out to be a bald eagle moving across the surface using its wings like oars. This went on for at least a minute or two. Eventually, the eagle dragged itself in a similar manner onto shore where it stood around for a while, and shortly thereafter made its way up the slope by several feet. Closer inspection with binoculars indicated that the eagle was…
gregladen | May 30, 2008 Bill Thompson's Young Birder's Guide The Young Birder's Guide to Birds of North America (Peterson Field Guides) is a book that I highly recommend for kids around seven to 14 years of age. (The publishers suggest a narrower age range but I respectfully disagree.)
This is a new offering written by Bill Thompson III and published by the same people who give us the Peterson Field Guide to the Birds and many other fine titles. The book includes excellent illustrations by Julie Zickefoose.
A birder since childhood, Thompson says he would have loved a book like this one when he was just…
gregladen | May 17, 2008Hacker and writer Joshua Klein is fascinated by crows. (Notice the gleam of intelligence in their little black eyes?) After a long amateur study of corvid behavior, he's come up with an elegant machine that may form a new bond between animal
(repost)
gregladen | May 17, 2008MIT researchers found that phalaropes depend on a surface interaction known as contact angle hysteresis to propel drops of water containing prey upward to their throats. Photo by Robert Lewis The Phalarope starts out as an interesting bird because of its "reversed" sex-role mating behavior. For at least some species of Phalarope, females dominate males, forcing them to build nests and to care for the eggs that the females place there after mating. If a female suspects that a male is caring for eggs of another female, she may destroy the eggs and force the male to copulate with her a few…
gregladen | May 12, 2008Audubon California has announced that it has reached an agreement with a farmer to safeguard a single colony of about 80,000 Tricoloured Blackbirds Agelaius tricolor - nearly a third of the world's population of this Endangered species.
The estimated global population of Tricoloured Blackbirds is 250,000 to 300,000 birds, with at least 95% of these occurring in California. Tricoloured Blackbirds have declined dramatically in the past century as native wetland habitat has been lost and the species has consequently been classified as Endangered. Tricoloured Blackbirds form just a few large…
gregladen | April 27, 2008Pterodroma magentae is the Magenta Petral (also known as the Chatham Island Taiko). There are between 8 and 15 breeding pairs in the New Zealand home range of this species. Indeed, this bird was thought extinct for quite some time before it was rediscovered in 1978.
A recent study indicates something funny is going on with sex ratio and mating strategies in this bird, which may, although I'm not quite sure how, lead to improved conservation efforts. From a BirdLife press release:
A study into one of the world's rarest seabirds provides knowledge that could help avoid extinction.…
gregladen | April 16, 2008A survey of the Western Area Peninsula Forest (WAPF) in Sierra Leone has discovered two new breeding colonies of the Vulnerable White-necked Picathartes Picathartes gymnocephalus, in addition to the 16 sites already known.
The survey was part of a one-year project carried out by volunteers from the Conservation Society of Sierra Leone (CSSL, BirdLife in Sierra Leone), the University of Sierra Leone, and the government's Forestry Division, with help from local communities.
The project, funded by the Disney World Conservation Fund (DWCF), also established a network of trained wardens in…
gregladen | April 11, 2008Storks, pelicans, ibises, and other rare waterbirds from Cambodia's famed Tonle Sap region are making a comeback, thanks to round-the-clock protection by a single team of park rangers. In a project established by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Ministry of Environment of the Royal Government of Cambodia, former hunters and egg collectors have found new employment in monitoring the breeding bird colonies. This novel approach guarantees an active role for local communities in the conservation of this important seasonally flooded wetland.
A new report shows that some of the…
gregladen | April 8, 2008Nature And Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU - BirdLife in Germany) is protesting vehemently against the planned destruction of Lake Constance's only colony of Great Cormorants Phalacrocorax carbo.
"It is hard to believe that Freiburg local authority intends to commit such a destructive act, not only in a National Nature Reserve but especially within a European Special Protected Area (SPA)", said Dr Andre Baumann (chairman - NABU Baden-Württemberg). "This persecution of Great Cormorants not only contradicts common sense, it also contravenes European bird protection legislation and is…
gregladen | April 8, 2008
This is a photo of a Tympanuchus cupido male drumming away on the lek to find a mate. The lek is the traditional breeding ground of the prairie chicken (and many other animals uses lek's) on which the males display, and to which the females travel to pick a male with whom to mate.
This bird, the greater prairie chicken, is threatened, and there is now a move to employ ecotourism to save it.
Once prevalent in every Wisconsin county, prairie chickens have been on the state's threatened species list since 1979, as fragmentation and degradation of the birds' native habitat has reduced their…
gregladen | April 7, 2008It is a little ironic that all nature enthusiasts know that it is "bad" to feed the animals ... they become dependent on the food, and in some cases will become a nuisance or dangerous, prying open cars or breaking into homes to get more food. Then the animal has to be put down or moved to a new habitat. But that sort of bad outcome is more common with, say, bears than it is with, say, chickadees. The irony here is that bird lovers, who are always nature enthusiasts, do not seem to balk at setting up bird feeders. In fact, approximately on half a million metric tons of seed is put out for…
gregladen | March 31, 2008Fall, a very sunny, very breezy day on the lake, Amanda and I sitting in the cabin minding our own business.
Suddenly, ...thwack...
... well, it was a sort of tiny miniature thwack, but a thwack nonetheless. Peering outside through the window, we could see the the last death throws of a tiny greenish bird that had run into the window. The lighting conditions must have been just right for this bird to think that it could fly through the cabin, because this was an odd and unusual event. (We later made further adjustments to the window to see to it that this did not happen again, of…
gregladen | March 30, 2008Power lines kill raptors. Tens of thousands of raptors a year die on power lines. But there are ways to avoid this.
On 26 February, the Hungarian Ornithological and Nature Conservation Society (MME; BirdLife in Hungary) signed an agreement with the Ministry of Environment and Water (MEW), and all relevant electric companies in Hungary, to provide a long-term solution for bird-electrocutions. The signing parties promised to transform power lines in Hungary, and to make them more 'bird-friendly' by 2020.
Since the 1980s, electrocutions and collisions with electric power lines have caused…
gregladen | March 28, 2008Branta ruficollis is endangered. The Red Breasted Goose International Working Group (RbGIWG, which is unpronounceable) has a new species action plan to save this critter.
Here's some info from Redbrested Goose Central:
Red-breasted Goose (Branta ruficollis) is a charismatic globally threatened species highly dependent on wetlands and farmed areas. In the last 50 years, the distribution of the breeding and wintering grounds of Red-breasted Goose has changed dramatically for unknown reasons.
This species has a small wintering range with 80-90% of the population concentrated in just five…