1. Let’s start with a great Romeo and, in this case, Julieta story from Rio: One recent afternoon, a smitten blue-and-yellow macaw grabbed a clawful of carrots and banana and took flight. He flapped to the top of the aviary at the Rio de Janeiro zoo and latched onto the netting. Just beyond, on the other side of the enclosure, was his love — the only wild macaw in a city that hasn’t seen a free one of their kind in two centuries. She beckoned to him. He went to her. On opposite sides of the netting, they rubbed beaks. He passed her his food. They clung together, grasping claws, and wouldn’t let go. Every day for more than two decades, zookeepers attest, the wild macaw has flown to the Rio de Janeiro zoo where dozens of her species are kept captive — including her partner. (via The Washington Post)
2. And then over to the Falklands for The Johnny Rook Project - and one smart falcon: If you heard there were faraway islands full of hyperintelligent birds, you would be forgiven for assuming that they must be parrots or crows — the superstars of the brainy bird world. But travel to the Falkland Islands near the Argentine coast, and you’ll find not parrots or crows but freakishly smart falcons called striated caracaras. “I kind of had a hunch that there is something special about these birds,” said Katie Harrington, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna. By adapting a series of tests originally designed to assess cockatoo cognition, Ms. Harrington found that the caracaras can problem-solve as well as parrots. The results were published Monday in the journal Current Biology. (via The New York Times)
3. Concerning news about the Wild Turkey: It isn’t hard to find turkey on Thanksgiving, with Americans cooking tens of millions of farm-raised birds every year. But in the wild? Turkeys aren’t doing so hot. Wild turkeys are on the decline in many parts of the country, baffling biologists who study the gobblers that Benjamin Franklin once lauded as a “Bird of Courage.” (via The Washington Post)
eBirds’ Status & Trends tells the Wild Turkey story.
4. Sad but no doubt true: Over the past few years, a widening group of urban ecologists has been fanning out to study the overlap between environmental justice and biodiversity conservation, fields that had previously tended to keep to their own corners. Dr. Schell said that, in his lab, researchers “oftentimes do our own version of ‘six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon’” to show how human actions ripple out to wildlife. “Air pollution isn’t just restricted to people,” he said. “Other animals have lungs. Why would we not expect them to also be inhaling the same amount of pollutants that we generate?” (via The New York Times)
5. Bird research-inspired music: The “Whimsical Concerto of Fanciful Birds” debuts with the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra: Vincent Ho’s latest concerto is truly for the birds — but his composition has been no flighty endeavor. Inspired by prairie literature, cutting-edge research on avian populations taking place at the University of Saskatchewan, as well as by the range and versatility of the saxophone, Ho’s Whimsical Concerto of Fanciful Birds will have its world premiere with the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra (SSO) on Saturday evening. “I was fascinated by the concept of bird migration, and how human involvement or human behaviors have impacted the migration patterns of various birds in North America,” Ho said. “That got me thinking about how this could be explored as a creative theme, and be expressed in symphonic form. (via The Star Phoenix)
6. More on birds and window collisions – this from The Atlantic: Every spring, as the daylight lengthens and the weather warms, rivers of birds flow north across the Midwest. They fly high and at night, navigating via the stars and their own internal compasses: kinglets and creepers, woodpeckers and warblers, sparrows and shrikes. They come from as far as Central America, bound for Minnesotan wetlands, Canadian boreal forests, and Arctic tundra. They migrate over towns and prairies and cornfields; they soar over the black tongue of Lake Michigan in such dense aggregations that they register on radar. Upon crossing the water, many encounter Chicago, where they alight in whatever greenery they can find—office parks and rooftop shrubs and scraggly street trees and the sparse landscaping outside apartment-complex lobbies. (via The Atlantic)
7. A (really old) new member of the Alvarezsauridae family found in the Gobi Desert: A team of paleontologists and biologists from Hokkaido University, Hokkaido University Museum, North Carolina State University and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, has uncovered a previously unknown species of dinosaur that appears to have slept in the same position as modern birds. In their paper published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, the group describes where the fossil was found, its condition, and the unique position in which the specimen had folded itself before dying. Until recently, members of the Alvarezsauridae family, a group of small therapods (carnivorous bipedal dinosaurs), were believed to be a kind of flightless bird—now, they are classified as Maniraptoran dinosaurs, a type that is non-avian but is still related to modern birds. (via Phys Org)
8. Good (if qualified) news from the UK’s RSPB: Confirmed incidents of the illegal persecution of birds of prey have fallen to their lowest levels for more than a decade, according to the latestRSPB Birdcrime report. But the conservation charity warned that the reduction in incidents to 61 in 2022 is distorted by a failure to examine dead raptors caught in the avian flu outbreak for signs of illegal killing. Since theH5N1 outbreak began in Britain in 2021, hundreds of dead raptors have been sent directly to Defra for testing. In most cases, if a bird tests positive for bird flu, no further postmortem tests are undertaken. Moreover rules prevent carcasses that test negative from being moved to other labs to be examined for signs of persecution such as shooting or poisoning. (via The Guardian)
9. Make that 441 – A Black-browed Albatross visits New Brunswick: New Brunswick has added three new species to the list of birds spotted in the province. The New Brunswick bird records committee recently added the black-browed albatross, bell's vireo, and western flycatcher to the official list, bringing the total number of bird species ever spotted in the province to 441, said Jim Wilson, a member of the committee. Wilson said the most interesting of the three is the black-browed albatross. "We don't normally have albatrosses in the North Atlantic at all," he said. (via CBC)
10. In praise of the LA parrots we noted in a story last week: Pandemonium found me when I moved to Alhambra in 2011. No, really — literal pandemonium, as in a flock of wild green parrots. We have crows too, so you could say murder and pandemonium greeted us when my wife and I moved into the house where we would raise children. And we love it. The parrots are noisy, seemingly disorganized creatures that don’t do anything on schedule. We tend to think of birds as gracefully in tune with nature, flying thousands of miles in tight formation to wherever the season will sustain them. These parrots seem only in tune with whatever they damn well please — they cackle and flutter from tree to tree, announcing their presence at 4 a.m., high noon or whatever time suits them. So when reports of a poacher trapping and killing parrots in nearby Temple City surfaced late last month, I couldn’t have been the only San Gabriel Valley resident to let out an audible gasp. Who would do this to our beloved birds? (via Los Angeles Times)
11. Everyone loves Cedar Waxwings: Many recall the white walls of hawthorn blossom which sang out this spring. Yet fewer perhaps will appreciate how they’re the source of a secondary display of beauty now. I’m not thinking of the current red-berry spectacular, but of the waxwings that have arrived to feed on it. The bird breeds in subarctic taiga (boreal forests), its range spreading as a tonsure around the planet’s northern crown. In years when Eurasia’s forests fail to fruit, however, waxwings come south, sometimes in huge numbers. These unpredictable irruptions were recorded as early as 1552 and, in the typical manner of our species, interpreted as a commentary upon human affairs. “Pestvogel” – plaguebird – and “deathbird” were two old titles. The names are doubly sad because no creature feels more like a blessing. (via The Guardian)
12. The case for green rooftops in NYC: As you walk through the apple orchard, with Honeycrisps and GoldRushes at your feet, a swallow flies by, then a kinglet and an Eastern phoebe, whose presence signals the start of the fall migration. Not far off, grape vines grow along a trellis, native wildflowers buzz with insect activity, and ripe tomatoes and ears of corn wait to be picked. Taking it all in, you could easily imagine being on a bucolic farm in upstate New York, far from the hustle of the city. But if you listen closely, you can hear the cars whizzing by on the West Side Highway 60 feet below. And if you turn around, you can see the Empire State Building to the east. This is the scene atop the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in midtown Manhattan, home to nearly eight acres of greenery, from short, low-maintenance sedum to tall grasses—making it one of the largest green roofs in the U.S. and a habitat for more than 60 bird species. (via Fordham News)
13. A papier mache owl becomes “a magpie god” – a silly TikTok clip starring the ever incorrigible magpie: A new South Wales, Australia, man attempted to keep birds away from his cat's food with a homemade owl sculpture, but "accidentally made a magpie god.” Giulio Cuzzilla said he learned that magpies can be deterred with owl sculptures, but he didn't want to spend a lot of money on one, so he made his own out of paper mache and feathers. "I now know it doesn't really look like an owl, but a dead cat rather," Cuzzilla wrote in a comment under his TikTok video. He said the magpies initially seemed to fear his sculpture, but they eventually started to approach it and engage in behaviors Cuzzilla said seemed like “worship." "I accidentally made a magpie god," he wrote. (via UPI)
14. Finally, “…experiencing the incomprehensible vastness and wondrous beauty of the tallgrass prairie” – the ah-ha moment for this birder: If people ask me when I got started in birding, I first explain that I distinguish between watching birds at a bird feeder versus actively going outdoors and looking for birds in trees, bushes, wetlands and grasses. To some people it may seem like a difference without a distinction, but to me the former is bird watching while the latter is birding. I can’t pinpoint when I started bird watching because it began when I was very young and my parents fed the birds that visited our backyard in the Buffalo suburbs, but I can pinpoint precisely when and where I became a birder. (via Ocean Times Herald)
Bird Videos of the Week
Video by @k8hig, “First Annual Turkey Parade on Bainbridge Island, WA”.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Turkey Cam.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Sneaky Squirrel.