1. Birding the Bog: Bird News Items recently visited the Sax-Zim Bog in northern Minnesota in search of the illusive Great Gray Owl, North America’s largest owl. Led by expert guide Kyle Te Poel, and together with avid birder, Chris Ellis, we did indeed find the Great Gray. In fact, we found two. Sax-Zim is as large as it is beautiful, encompassing roughly 147,000 acres of bog, Aspen uplands, meadows and lakes. A small number of Great Grays are permanent (if illusive!) residents, and the bog is famous for wintering species that come down from the Arctic and sub-Arctic to enjoy Sax-Zim’s (often brutally) cold winter temperatures! Best to go in January/February, if you can handle the cold.
2. Good on ya’ mate: The Australian magpie is one of the cleverest birds on earth. It has a beautiful song of extraordinary complexity. It can recognize and remember up to 30 different human faces. But Australians know magpies best for their penchant for mischief. An enduring rite of passage of an Australian childhood is dodging the birds every spring as they swoop down to attack those they view as a threat. Magpies’ latest mischief has been to outwit the scientists who would study them. Scientists showed in a study published last month in the journal Australian Field Ornithology just how clever magpies really are and, in the process, revealed a highly unusual example in nature of birds helping one another without any apparent tangible benefit to themselves. (via The New York Times)
3. Can’t possibly overstate the importance of efforts like this: Shanghai’s Dongtan National Natural Reserve on Chongming Island is a key stop on a bird migratory flight path spanning from East Asia to Australia. As the home to a significant number of rare birds, the wetlands are applying for World Heritage status. Yicai Global paid a visit to admire the glory of the bird paradise in spring. The 241.55-square meter reserve, situated at the mouth of the Yangtze River, and 10 other bird sanctuaries are applying for inclusion into the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s world natural heritage list as the Migratory Bird Sanctuaries along the Coast of the Yellow Sea-Bohai Gulf of China (Phase II). (via Yicai Global)
4. They love their falcons: At first glance, the Souq Waqif clinic in the historic center of Doha, the capital of Qatar, could be any other state-of-the-art hospital. Nurses in blue scrubs move briskly through the bright wards, conducting rounds. Radiology and operating rooms whir with the beeps and blinks of monitors. Specialists squint at X-rays and masked doctors make incisions with all the high-tech tools of modern surgery on hand. There’s just one thing: The rooms are filled with falcons. In the tiny, wealthy emirate of Qatar, the desert birds are among the nation’s most pampered residents. Long revered across the Arabian Peninsula for their ferocity and hunting prowess, falcons today serve as sheikhly status symbols recalling a Bedouin past. (via The Washington Post)
5. The dance of the red-crowned cranes commenced, an impromptu pas de deux. The pair approached each other with a bow. They crossed back and forth, gliding up into the air and returning to earth with the effortless grace of parachutes. In a dramatic flourish, they spread their pristine white and jet-black wings wide and tilted their beaks to the arc of blue sky above. As this elegant courtship ritual unfolded, Kazuhiko Yamazaki, a vegetable farmer, drove a large red tractor onto a snow-covered field on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. From a green rotating funnel he dispensed about 40 pounds of corn to more than 50 red-crowned cranes, a bird revered in Japan as a symbol of loyalty and longevity. But thanks to a decades-long effort led by local conservators and subsidized by the Japanese government, the number of red-crowned cranes in Mr. Yamazaki’s town, Kushiro, has swelled to about 1,900. (via The New York Times)
6. New and already threatened: A new seabird scarcely bigger than a swallow and endemic to New Caledonia is described in the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club (11 March 2022) by a team including CNRS and INRAE scientists from the Chizé Centre for Biological Studies (CNRS / La Rochelle University). The discovery is all the more remarkable because the New Caledonian storm petrel, sighted since 2008, is represented by three "forgotten" museum specimens. It is believed that, with an estimated population of 100 to 1,000 pairs, the species is already endangered. There are currently a little over 10,000 known species of birds on the planet and, on average, one to five new ones are discovered annually. Among the 430 species of seabirds, a third are petrels, close cousins of the albatross. Because petrels are nocturnal, discreet, and primarily nest on secluded islands, we still know little about many of them. (via Phys Org)
7. Birds can be a mixed blessing for farmers. Sometimes birds increase yields by gobbling crop-eating insects and rodents. But they may also devour crops, ingest beneficial bugs, or harbor pathogens that pose a risk to human health when they show up in food. While hosting flocks in their fields has pros and cons for growers, Elissa Olimpi, a conservation biologist at Virginia Techs research suggests there are ways to tip the scales in their favor. In a recent study, published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, Olimpi and colleagues report that the amount of natural habitat around a farm—such as woodlands, shrublands, and wetlands—was the most important factor in determining whether birds offered more benefits than costs. Birds did less crop damage and carried fewer risky pathogens on farms with more wildness. (via Audubon)
8. Several stories on this subject lately: The arrival of spring has seemingly immutable rituals – lengthening days, blossoming plants and a surge in bees’ activity. But the onset of spring is now being warped by the climate crisis, with new research finding that many species of birds are nesting and laying eggs nearly a month earlier than they did a century ago. US scientists who analyzed the nesting trends of birds from egg samples collected in the Chicago area found that of the 72 species for which historical and modern data exists, around a third are now nesting much earlier in the year than before. These species, including bluejays, yellow warblers and field sparrows, are now laying their first eggs 25 days earlier, on average, than they were 100 years ago, the research found. (via The Guardian)
9. Now you know: The ostrich’s long, flexible neck is an important means of staying cool in the heat and keeping warm in cooler weather, and it may have evolved partially as an adaptation to wildly variable climatic conditions. Large animals are vulnerable to rapid temperature changes because their big bodies tend to hold on to heat. To investigate how they evolve thermal tolerance, Erik Svensson at Lund University, Sweden, and his colleagues looked to the world’s largest bird: the common ostrich. (via New Scientist)
10. Some good news from the UK: The UK's loudest bird, Eurasian Bittern, enjoyed another record-breaking year in 2021, with 228 booming males counted. This number was up from 209 in 2019, according to new survey results from the RSPB and Natural England. Recording in 2020 was impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. Bittern was extirpated from the UK in the 1870s due to a combination of over-hunting for food and draining of their favoured wetland habitats for agriculture. The species returned to Britain in the early 20th century, and restoration of wetlands has allowed their numbers to more than double in a decade, with the majority of them on RSPB reserves. (via BirdGuides)
11. And finally, news of a Caracara jail break: One of the world's rarest birds, with raptor-like talons, is still on the loose nine days after escaping from London Zoo. The Crested Caracara, named Jester, has a 4ft wingspan and escaped last week. It is prone to aggressive behavior. Jester was last spotted in Barnes Common yesterday, around 11 miles away from its home, and there have also been sightings in South Ealing and Richmond Park. While not a danger to the public, dog walkers have been warned to be aware because this type of US falcon walks on the ground looking for food and will steal food from larger animals in the wild like vultures. In addition to its preference to walking over flying, the long-legged bird are extremely territorial animals and act as "landlords" of the trees and land they occupy - often doing so in an aggressive manner. (via The Daily Star)
Bird Photo of the Week
Photo by Hap Ellis, Great Gray Owl – Sax-Zim Bog (St. Louis County, MN).
Bird Videos of the Week
By BBC, “ Giant Cassowaries are Modern-day Dinosaurs”.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Lance-tailed Manakin.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Full house!