1. Bird-watching has surged in popularity this year. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, birders set a world record on May 9 for Global Big Day, an annual bird-spotting event. Participants using the lab’s eBird platform reported more than two million observations — the most bird sightings documented in a single day — and recorded 6,479 species. Spring is always a busy season for bird-watching, said Marshall Iliff, a project leader at the Cornell lab. “But this year is sort of off the charts,” he said. At a time when humans are nervously tracking the spread of a virus as it seeps through communities and leaps across borders, new birders are finding relief in tracking the migratory patterns of great blue herons, mountain yellow-warblers or ruby-throated hummingbirds instead. (via The New York Times)
By Rick Bunting, Baltimore Oriole.
2. A U.S. judge has dealt another blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to increase domestic oil and gas output from public lands, saying officials failed to protect habitat for a declining bird species when it issued energy leases on hundreds of square miles. Judge Brian Morris said the Interior Department did not do enough to encourage development outside of areas with greater sage grouse, a ground-dwelling bird whose numbers have dropped dramatically in recent decades. The judge canceled energy leases on more than 470 square miles (1,200 square kilometers) of public land in Montana and Wyoming. That means officials will have to return millions of dollars in sales proceeds to companies that purchased the leases. (via AP News)
3. When it comes to cognitive testing, the Goffin’s cockatoos at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna are pros. Researchers have tested them on toolmaking, shape-matching and other tasks, and found that a cockatoo can learn how to solve a problem from watching another cockatoo do it just once. Now, researchers in Alice M. I. Auersperg’s lab, the home of the Austrian cockatoo colony, have created a new way to test the ability of animals to innovate, and might be used for a variety of species, in principle. As the researchers reported Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports, the wild birds were just as smart as the captive birds — but a good deal less interested in bothering with the experiment at all. (via The New York Times)
4. In July 2019 a game warden in Bridgton, Maine, got an unusual call: A bald eagle was floating lifeless in a lake. At the time, biologists suspected the animal might have been shot or poisoned by lead fishing tackle—all too common causes of death for wild birds. Now, tests have revealed the bird’s bizarre demise: A stab wound directly to the heart. The murder weapon? The dagger-like beak of a common loon. It’s the first time a loon killing an eagle has ever been documented, says Danielle D'Auria, a wildlife biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. A dead loon chick was found nearby, suggesting a defensive loon parent gored the eagle as it attacked the loon’s nest. This phenomenon is on the rise in New England, as bald eagles continue to bounce back from near extinction in the 1970s, she says. (via National Geographic)
5. His binoculars around his neck, Christian Cooper, an avid birder, was back in his happy place on Wednesday: Central Park during migration season. Mr. Cooper has fed his passion with birding trips to Central Park and around the world, and he is on the board of the New York City Audubon Society. As he has pursued his passion, he has been keenly aware of the fact that there appear to be few other African-American men invested in the hobby. He is aware that the image he cuts — as a man often shuffling the undergrowth after a rare bird, with a metal object, the binoculars, in his hand — can read differently for a black person than for a white person. It doesn’t stop him. “We should be out here. The birds belong to all of us,” he said. “The birds don’t care what color you are.” (via The New York Times)
6. A group of approximately 30 Black scientists, birders, and outdoor explorers have created a new awareness campaign to encourage birding among more people of color. The project is called #BlackBirdersWeek, and it will take place from Sunday, May 31, through Friday, June 5. Anyone who is interested should follow the hashtag #BlackBirdersWeek on Twitter and Instagram. Leaders of the initiative include Anna Opoku-Agyeman, an economist and co-founder and CEO of the Sadie Collective; Jason Ward of the “Birds of North America” YouTube series; Corina Newsome, a graduate student at Georgia Southern University studying the Seaside Sparrow; Tykee James, host of the podcast OnWord4Wildlife; and many more. (via Bird Watching Daily)
By Hap Ellis, Ruby-throated Hummingbird
7. One of the longest migrations recorded by any land bird is about to be completed. Using a satellite tag, scientists have monitored a cuckoo, named Onon, that has just flown more than 7,500 miles (12,000km) from southern Africa to its breeding ground in Mongolia. The bird has survived ocean crossings and high winds after traversing 16 countries. It has been, say scientists, "a mammoth journey". Onon is one of five Cuckoos that were satellite tagged in Mongolia last summer by the Mongolia Cuckoo Project - a joint venture between local scientists and the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) to monitor long-distance migration. Yet out of the five birds tagged, Onon is the only one to have been recorded as finishing its astonishing return journey. (via The BBC)
8. With factory farms “depopulating” birds raised for meat and suburbanites regretting “panic-buying” chicks like they did toilet paper, the niche world of domestic fowl rescue is unexpectedly inundated. Some cite an egg shortage for their ill-advised acquisitions, having not realized that chicks or ducklings won’t be mature enough to lay eggs for six months after purchase. Others say they thought baby birds would break the monotony of self-isolation but are now going back to work. Still more say they ordered hens, not roosters, in the mail and the result of their unfortunate gender reveal leaves them in violation of municipal code. (via Newsday)
Bird Photo of the Week
By Hap Ellis, Piping Plover. “Experts: Don’t forget to social distance from nesting birds, too” (via The Connecticut Post)
Bird Videos of the Week
By Fox59 News, “Frank the Peacock goes viral on Indy’s east”.
Cornell Live Bird Cam “White-tailed Tropical Bird”.
Cornell Live Bird Cam “Red-tailed Hawks”.