1. Citizens in action: When a crimewave made New Yorkers feel unsafe on the subway, a volunteer group called the Guardian Angels sprang up to patrol platforms. Now another band of righteous citizens has formed to defend piping plovers, the tiny birds that nest on city beaches just as thousands of New Yorkers and their dogs flock to the shore. Wearing light-blue T-shirts with a logo featuring the bird, the plover patrols fanned out across the beaches on the southern shore of the city this summer to confront anyone straying on to protected areas. More than 50 volunteers had stepped up to protect the birds, which are considered a threatened species, answering the call of Chris Allieri, a resident of Queens who had witnessed apparent incidents of plover harassment on a beach last spring. (via The Times)
2. Many animals are known to use tools, but a bird named Bruce may be one of the most ingenious nonhuman tool inventors of all: He is a disabled parrot who has designed and uses his own prosthetic beak. Bruce is a kea, a species of parrot found only in New Zealand. He is about 9 years old, and when wildlife researchers found him as a baby, he was missing his upper beak, probably because it had been caught in a trap made for rats and other invasive mammals the country was trying to eliminate. This is a severe disability, as kea use their dramatically long and curved upper beaks for preening their feathers to get rid of parasites and to remove dirt and grime. But Bruce found a solution: He has taught himself to pick up pebbles of just the right size, hold them between his tongue and his lower beak, and comb through his plumage with the tip of the stone. (via The New York Times)
The remarkable Kea is featured in The Bird Way by Jennifer Ackerman.
3. Very concerning: The number of breeding seabirds in Scotland has declined by almost half since the 1980s, according to a new report. The figures are included in NatureScot's latest biodiversity indicator, which looked at 11 species of breeding seabirds. The results show that numbers fell by 49% between 1986 and the most recent estimate in 2019. Arctic skua numbers dropped by 81% and the number of common terns fell by 48%. However, guillemot numbers have increased by 17% since 2016. Reductions in the availability of sandworms and increased predation from great skuas are believed to have led to the sharp reduction in Arctic skua numbers. NatureScot said other species, including herring gulls, appear to be stabilizing, albeit at lower levels than the 1986 baseline year. (via The BBC)
No better book on seabirds than The Sea Bird’s Cry by Adam Nicolson.
4. More news from the “Lights Out” front: More than 1 billion birds are flying over the contiguous United States after dusk on Wednesday and Thursday, with an estimated 32 million flying over Illinois. Roughly 365 million to 988 million birds die in building collisions annually, and flying over Chicago is one of the more dangerous routes. Benjamin Van Doren, a postdoctoral associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, said light can attract birds but leave them feeling confused, exhausted, and disoriented midflight. “The easiest way to do that is to turn out the lights during the evening hours,” Van Doren said. “You can even close blinds or shades to prevent light from escaping into the atmosphere.” He suggests the hours between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. Birds tend to collide with illuminated buildings such as skyscrapers, but shorter buildings have also proved to be hazardous. (via The Chicago Tribune)
5. The scenes described of Indiana farmlands and elsewhere seem like they leapt from a page in a horror novel, with black vultures descending into the forests and pastures of the Midwest and beyond. Farmers tell of ferocious attacks on their animals: wakes of funereal, hunch-shouldered large black birds feasting on newborn calves as they emerge from their mothers, and sometimes preying on the mothers themselves. Vultures are often called “nature’s garbage disposals” because their highly adapted digestive and immune systems enable them to eat dead and diseased animal carcasses with impunity. While scavenging is considered a critical ecosystem service, reports of black vultures preying on live animals are relatively unheard-of, some experts say, and some expressed skepticism that predation is actually taking place. (via The New York Times)
6. The power of today’s tracking technology : Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and University of Konstanz in Germany have identified how large land birds fly nonstop for hundreds of kilometers over the open ocean—without taking a break for food or rest. Using GPS tracking technology, the team monitored the global migration of five species of large land birds that complete long sea crossings. They found that all birds exploited wind and uplift to reduce energy costs during flight—even adjusting their migratory routes to benefit from the best atmospheric conditions. This is the most wide-ranging study of sea-crossing behavior yet and reveals the important role of the atmosphere in facilitating migration over the open sea for many terrestrial birds. (via Science Daily)
An excellent book on how today’s tracking technology unlocks many mysteries of migration is A World On The Wing by Scott Weidensaul.
7. Another take on a Brid News Items last week: The Kivi Kuaka project is focusing on birds’ ability to hear infrasound, the low-frequency sound inaudible to humans that the researchers believe is the most likely signal birds would use to sense storms and tsunamis. Infrasound has myriad sources, including lightning strikes, jet engines, and the songlike vocalizations of rhinoceroses. Even the Earth itself generates a continuous infrasonic hum. Though rarely measured, it is known that tsunamis generate infrasound, too, and that these sound waves travel faster than the tsunami wave, offering a potential window in which to detect a tsunami before it hits. (via The Atlantic)
8. Songbirds usually need very little instruction to belt out the tunes of their kin, but the right melody doesn't necessarily come to them 'out of the blue' the moment they hatch. Instead, a new study suggests most baby birds start listening and responding to surrounding birdsong as mere embryos, while still tucked inside their eggs. Even when a species is considered an 'innate' singer – one with the correct genetics and brain wiring to produce the song of its species once hatched – researchers found some evidence of embryonic learning as well. With enough time and repetition, it seems unhatched baby birds commonly become accustomed to noises from outside their shell, and this forms an important part of their vocal development. (via Science Alert)
9. Louisiana wildlife officials say they have documented more than 100 oil-soaked birds after crude oil spilled from a refinery flooded during Hurricane Ida. The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries said Thursday that a growing number of oiled birds had been observed within heavy pockets of oil throughout the Phillips 66 Alliance Refinery in Belle Chasse, Louisiana, as well as nearby flooded fields and retention ponds along the Mississippi River. Jon Wiebe, a biologist running the state restoration program, said efforts to capture and save more birds are ongoing. The affected species include black-bellied whistling ducks, blue-winged teal and a variety of egrets. Other animals were also seen covered in oil, include alligators, nutria and river otters. (via The Associated Press)
10. Officials with the Canadian Wildlife Service are looking into the cause of a mass die-off of snow geese near Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. Waterfowl biologist Eric Reed said "a few hundred" dead snow geese were found at Starvation Cove, 30 kilometres west of Cambridge Bay in late August. The cause of the deaths is unknown. "There have been several other die-offs of snow geese in recent years, including another one near Cambridge Bay in 2017 and one near Gjoa Haven,” Reed said. But he added that there have been other reports of healthy populations, so until the most recent die-off can be better investigated, it's impossible to be certain about the cause. Reed said the previous two die-offs were caused by starvation related to poor weather conditions, which is a fairly regular occurrence. (via CBC)
11. For our New England and New York shorebird enthusiasts: Late summer is peak season for watching shorebirds in Massachusetts. While most songbirds are laying low as they wrap up raising their young and molting (i.e. growing new feathers), shorebirds like sandpipers, plovers, and godwits are already on the move for the fall. Mass Audubon protects locally-breeding shorebirds through our Coastal Waterbird Program, but our wildlife sanctuaries also provide habitat for the hungry migrants that pass through en route from their Arctic breeding grounds to points south. Here’s a shortlist of the best Mass Audubon wildlife sanctuaries to observe them. (via Massachusetts Audubon)
Bonus: From the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s excellent Bird Academy programs, The Joy of Birdwatching. (via All About Birds)
Bird Photo of the Week
Photo by Mike Hamilton, Bald Eagle.
Bird Videos of the Week
By New Scientist, “A captive musk duck named Ripper mimics sounds heard as a hatchling”.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Northern Royal Albatross in Flight.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - 220 days old.