1. Every Sunday just after dawn, a group of men gather on the overgrown lawn of a public park in a quiet neighborhood in the capital of Suriname. They have bird cages, each carrying a songbird — a picolet, a twa-twa or a rowti, as the species are known here. Over the next few hours, the men will lean in and listen to the birds as referees note the duration of each burst of singing, and rate each songster’s performance on a chalkboard. Birdsong competitions, a sort of a Battle of the Bands between trained tropical birds, are a national obsession in Suriname. Behind it lies years of training, thousands of dollars of investment, and a close-knit community quietly resisting the accelerating pace of the modern world. (via The New York Times)
2. Good news: Three hip young women from Beijing led by Li Siqi, also known by the nickname Crazy Birdy, are birdwatching around Mount Ling on the outer reaches of the Chinese capital. Twenty-something Li has been keen on the hobby since 2013. “I took a photo of a pretty bird and then started looking online to find out what it was,” she says. “That got me interested.” Li now has an environmental education company that takes families birdwatching, and she also teaches children about nature and birds both in and out of the classroom. Young Beijingers like Li are increasingly becoming interested in conservation, and many now think birdwatching – also known as birding – is a cool thing to do. (via South China Morning Post)
3. Not Good News: A new study has estimated that domestic cats kill between 2.7 and 5.5 billion birds each year in China alone. Drawing on a questionnaire survey method which generated almost 2,200 responses across the country, including questions direct observations of prey returns to cat owners and predation events by unowned cats, the team used statistical simulations to generate the nationwide effects of cats in China. The researchers state that "free-ranging cats cause a tremendous death toll that may be profoundly impacting China's wildlife populations and biodiversity". Other figures from the study include cats killing 1.6-4.95 billion invertebrates, 1.6-3.6 billion fish, 1.1-3.8 billion amphibians, 1.5-4.3 billion reptiles and 3.61-9.80 billion mammals annually. (via Bird Guides)
4. Muscle structure and body size predict the athletic performance of Olympic athletes, such as sprinters. The same, it appears, is true of wild seabirds that can commute hundreds of kilometres a day to find food. The researchers from McGill and Colgate universities studied a colony of small gulls, known as black-legged kittiwakes, that breed and nest in an abandoned radar tower on Middleton Island, Alaska. They attached GPS-accelerometers — Fitbit for birds — onto kittiwakes to track their flight performance, discovering that they sometimes travel as far as 250 km a day to find food for their offspring. Researchers found that, despite beating their wings less frequently, birds with larger muscle fibers were able to fly as fast as those with smaller fibers. (via Science Daily)
5. Rare Bird Alert #1: Since 2006, Bruce Peterjohn has slipped teeny-tiny aluminum rings on the little toothpick legs of more than 3,000 hummingbirds. But that didn’t guarantee that banding his latest quarry would be a slam dunk. There shouldn’t be a hummingbird at Green Spring Gardens of Virginia this time of year. It’s winter, the season ruby-throated hummingbirds spend in Mexico or Central America. And there should never be a rufous hummingbird, a species that spends the summer in the west of the United States and Canada, not in the east. That’s what bird-loving visitors to Green Spring Gardens thought they’d spotted: a doubly rare rufous. (via The Washington Post)
6. Rare Bird Alert #2: With feathers the color of a tropical sea and giant yellow feet, a warm-weather bird called a purple gallinule was spotted in southern Maine on Jan. 16, hundreds of miles from home. On the same weekend, a second purple gallinule showed up in Bar Harbor, where it was captured and transported to a nearby wildlife rehabilitator. A species that typically winters in southern and tropical swamps, these birds were likely carried to Maine by strong winds from the storm that hit New England over the weekend, And they may not be the only ones. (via The Bangor Daily News)
7. “All of our work to defend core conservation and bird protections and urge action on climate for the past four years have become day one actions for the Biden-Harris Administration. Bird survival is human survival and birds are telling us they are in trouble. We have no time to lose,” said David Yarnold, president and CEO of the National Audubon Society. “The relentless attempts by the Trump Administration to undo existing environmental protections have placed us at a significant disadvantage.” On Thursday morning, the Biden-Harris team released a list of executive orders directing federal agencies to reverse, review or revoke any environmental policies that are “harmful to public. (via Audubon)
8. They say the early bird gets the worm. In the case of the American Robin, their food of choice is actually Ashe Juniper berries. During the wintertime, Ashe Juniper berries are typically found in abundance in the American Southwest, which is where you’ll find this migratory bird. Unfortunately, due to continuing drought conditions in the region, Ashe Juniper berries never fully materialized this winter. And as a result, the American Robin have had to migrate to an area where they did, which happens to be Central Texas. The Travis Audubon Society reports that a roost of nearly 2 million American Robins have been recorded in the region. (via KXAN News)
9. A study of Victorian duck shooters has found that only one in five were able to correctly answer questions about identifying protected bird species, raising pressure on Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews to ban duck hunting ahead of the 2021 season. Late last year, the Victorian Game Management Authority (GMA) released the results of a survey that quizzed roughly 5,300 hunters in the state about hunting rules. Duck shooters performed the worst, with just 20 percent able to correctly answer questions about bird identification. "It tells both the Government and the Victorian public that duck shooters cannot even do the single basic thing that they claim they are out there to do,'' said Animal Justice Party MP Andy Meddick. (via ABC News)
10. Backyard Birders take note: When Arctic air and squalling snow send winter temperatures plunging, backyard bird feeders can seem like the trendy bistros of the bird neighborhood—with flocks of sparrows and chickadees cramming in to get their fill. A study published in Journal of Animal Ecology shows that such observations are no coincidence: Some birds flee the countryside and find refuge in urban areas—and the bird feeders there—to survive extreme winter weather. Ecologists Chris Latimer and Benjamin Zuckerberg used data from over 3,500 Project FeederWatch sites in the eastern U.S. for their research on the connections between winter weather patterns and bird occurrence. (via Living Bird Magazine)
Bird Photo of the Week
By Hap Ellis, Northern Cardinal.
Bird Videos of the Week
By Bob Dolgan, Dodger.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - It’s a Party!
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Toucan Sam.