September 2021 Yellowbill

Last month, on a pair of rice and crawfish fields in southeast Texas, mounds of vegetation a few feet tall made modern history. The mounds were nests, built over the course of several days by two pairs of whooping cranes from Louisiana. “Historically there probably were whooping cranes nesting in Texas, but it’s been an awful long time since that’s happened,” says Wade Harrell, whooping crane recovery coordinator at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “They’re resilient, and they can use a variety of different habitats,” he adds. “The species is on a comeback.”  Read more…

Juliet, last wild macaw in Rio, visits zoo every morning to canoodle companions, quell loneliness

A macaw that zookeepers named Juliet, believed to be the only wild macaw left in Rio de Janeiro, makes her daily visit to the city’s zoo.

Some have claimed she’s indulging a forbidden romance. More likely, loneliness compels her to seek company at Rio de Janeiro’s zoo.

Either way, a blue-and-yellow macaw that zookeepers named Juliet is believed to be the only wild bird of its kind left in the Brazilian city where the birds once flew far and wide. Read more…

Scientists Decode The Physics Of Wave Surfing Pelicans

A pelican flies off the La Jolla coast, April 26, 2017.

The top of the bluff just south of the Torrey Pines Golf Course is a special place for those looking to take a leap off a cliff to fly. The combination of a cool ocean, hot land and a steep bluff make it possible. “Inland heats up and all that cool ocean breeze goes east,” said Vito Michelangelo, flight director at Torrey Pines Glider Port. “And that’s what creates the magic here for us. Soaring. As paragliding pilots.” Read more…

More Cool Facts About the Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker

Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker © John Sutton / Flickr

Considered a “double keystone species,” all species of woodpeckers are truly ecosystem engineers. Woodpeckers will excavate cavities in trees to raise their nestlings. Over time, these activities can then be used by other species of birds such as bluebirds and swallows. They can even be used by squirrels. Read more…

Head of AOS commits to ‘changing exclusionary or harmful bird names’

Kirtland’s Warbler is one of 149 North American bird species that bears a person’s name. Photo by Joel Trick/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

The president of the American Ornithological Society tells BirdWatching that the organization’s leadership supports the recent push to change the names of birds that are named for people and that he is forming an ad-hoc committee now to address the issue over the coming months.

“We are in favor of taking any actions that would make ornithology and birding more diverse and inclusive,” says Mike Webster, the current AOS president. (He is also the director of the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and is the Robert G. Engel Professor of Ornithology at Cornell.) “That would include changing exclusionary or harmful bird names, where that’s necessary. I think the question is, how to go about doing that in a thoughtful way that maintains stability of bird names because that stability is important. But we absolutely are in favor of changing names where it will help increase diversity and inclusion.”  Read more…

There are 50 billion wild birds on Earth – but four species dominate

European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) are one of the world’s most common birds
Arndt Sven-Erik/Arterra Picture Library/Alamy

Earth is home to around 50 billion wild birds according to a new global estimate, but most species are very rare and only a handful number in the billions. Just four undomesticated species are in the club of those with a billion-plus individuals, with house sparrows (Passer domesticus) the most abundant, followed by European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris), ring-billed gulls (Larus delawarensis) and barn swallows (Hirundo rustica). By contrast, 1180 species number fewer than 5000 birds each. Read more…

A LONG-LOST LETTER FROM ALBERT EINSTEIN MADE AN UNCANNY PREDICTION 70 YEARS EARLY

SINCE THE DAWN OF THE ELECTRONIC AGE, it has never been easier for researchers to engage with the general public — gaining access to precious resources otherwise unavailable.

This is illustrated perfectly in our latest publication, in which we introduce a previously unknown letter written in 1949 by none other than Albert Einstein. In it, the German-born mathematician and physicist discusses bees, birds, and whether new physics principles could come from studying animal senses.

We performed magic tricks on birds to see how they perceive the world

Magic tricks can teach us about how the brain works. Magic capitalises on very specific blind spots in people’s attention and perception so the techniques that magicians use to trick audiences are particularly interesting to psychologists like me. Misdirection, for example, relies on the control of the audience’s attention to fool them. A magician will divert the audience’s attention away from things that show how the trick is done, towards the effect they want them to see. This and other magic techniques can reveal important characteristics of how our minds work. Read more…

Crashed drones force birds to abandon 1,500 of their eggs at California beach

Crashed drone forces birds to abandon thousands of their eggs at California beach CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF FISH AND WILDLIFE

More than a thousand bird eggs were abandoned at a California beach after two drones crashed, California Department of Fish and Wildlife officials said. Around 1,500 elegant tern eggs were abandoned at the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Huntington Beach after two drones crashed into the nest, KABC reported. “In my career, I have never seen such devastation, so that was really hard,” Melissa Loebl, the environmental scientist reserve manager with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, told the station. Read more…

Photographer captures ‘odd but exciting’ crow behaviour known as anting

Photographer Tony Austin of Metchosin, B.C., said he had no idea what he was observing until he enlarged this image of crows at Victoria’s Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary on a computer screen and saw that one of the birds was covered in ants. (Tony Austin Photography)

Photographer Tony Austin recently captured a peculiar image of a crow with its wings covered in dozens of tiny black ants in the throes of what appeared to be a behaviour he described as a “very odd and violent dirt bath.”  Read more…

STUDY SAYS QUANTUM PHYSICS DRIVES BIRD MIGRATION PATTERNS

Henrik Mouritsen at The University of Oldenburg in Germany led the scientists behind the magnetoreception study, which they published in the journal Nature. The scientists were actually working off a hypothesis first proposed by a physicist back in the ’70s; one that proposed the idea that magnetoreceptive animals use light-sensitive molecules to sense Earth’s magnetic field. Read more…

How to Take Better Bird Photos

Bird photography is a very challenging genre that requires a lot of specialized knowledge, top-tier technique, and patience, but when it all comes together, it can reward you with stunning photos. If you are looking to improve your own bird photography, this awesome video tutorial features two seasoned professionals discussing their background and a range of lessons and ways to improve your work. Read more…

Wildfires Change Songbirds’ Flashy Plumage

Male red-backed fairywrens are known for their elaborate feathers. Sally Hinton / Getty Images

Devastating wildfires can do more than ruin an animal’s habitat. They can also challenge their relationships. In a new study, researchers found that flashy songbirds called red-backed fairywrens didn’t molt into their elaborate red and black plumage after wildfires destroyed their habitats in Australia.1 Their less attractive feathers were also accompanied by a drop in testosterone, which has been linked to the showy plumage. And those flashy feathers are what helps them attract mates. Read more…

Why did birds survive extinction while dinosaurs died out?

That beautiful singing bird on your fence is a descendent of dinosaurs. As all dinosaurs have gone extinct, what allowed the birds to adapt and survive? New research published in Science Advances points to a special feature of birds’ brains that could explain why they are still with us today. Read more…

Bird Species Abundances, from Biggest to Smallest

Credit: Jen Christiansen (graphic), Liz Wahid (birds)

Comparing the relative sizes of bird species has long seemed an impossible task—too many species simply lack reliable counts. A recent influx of citizen science data, however, allowed researchers to make global abundance estimates for 9,700 species, about 92 percent of all birds on Earth. Biologists Corey T. Callaghan, Shinichi Nakagawa and William K. Cornwell, all at the University of New South Wales in Australia, combined scientific data for 724 well-studied species with counts from the app eBird, where people around the world can submit bird sightings. The researchers used an algorithm to extrapolate estimates for all species in their sample. The results, published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, confirm a common pattern among animals: across the globe there are many species with small populations isolated in niche habitats and relatively few species that have managed to expand over a wide territory and grow their population into the hundreds of millions or billions. Eventually the findings could help with conservation efforts. “The next step is, Which species are rare because that’s just the way Mother Nature made them, and which species are rare because we [humans] screwed up?” Callaghan asks. This project did not try to answer these questions, but it is a “necessary first step” toward doing so, he says. Read more…

Birds’ eye size reflects habitat and diet, may predict sensitivity to environmental change

This barred puffbird, Nystalus radiatus, has large eyes that help it navigate tropical rainforests in Central and South America where it primarily hunts insects and small lizards. Credit: Félix Uribe, CC BY-SA 2.0

A new study shows the eye size of birds can reveal broad patterns of their biology and behavior, including where they live, what they eat and how they hunt, providing a potential roadmap for future conservation efforts. Read more…

Giant centipedes eat seabird chicks on South Pacific island

Predator and prey: a Phillip Island Centipede passes a Black-winged Petrel (Luke Halpin).

A new study has profiled the surprising predatory antics of a giant centipede species in the South Pacific, which feeds on an unusually large proportion of vertebrate animals – including seabird chicks. As large marine predators, seabirds usually sit at the top of the food chain. But the research, published in The American Naturalist, demonstrates this isn’t always the case. On Phillip Island, part of the South Pacific’s Norfolk Island group, the Phillip Island Centipede Cormocephalus coynei population can kill and eat up to 3,700 Black-winged Petrel chicks every year. Read more…