1. We’ve been focused on “Lights Out” efforts in US cities. Check out this really cool story about lights and sea birds in a remote part of Newfoundland : On the southern shore of the Avalon Peninsula, a nighttime patrol is prowling the streets — but it's looking for puffins and Leach's storm petrels, rather than people. The Puffin & Petrel Patrol is back for its 17th year rescuing birds in the Witless Bay Ecological Reserve and the surrounding communities. Although tourism has not yet reached pre-pandemic levels, organizer Suzanne Dooley said as of Saturday, 850 volunteers had already registered to help out. The patrol consists of volunteers who search for stranded puffins and petrels in the late evening. The juvenile puffins — or "pufflings" — are tagged and released the next morning, while the nocturnal petrels are released at night. (via CBC)
2. A sigh of relief: New Zealand birdwatchers were ecstatic to hear the return of the famous kiwi in August, after fearing it had disappeared altogether from some regions. Twelve million kiwi birds once occupied New Zealand but their numbers have rapidly declined in recent years, especially outside of managed sanctuaries. Bird watchers gather to do a kiwi call count for just four nights every year, listening out for the famous birds’ calls to track their population across the region – 150 people have listened over the last 20 years in the hope that the national bird might come back in force. Amazingly, 50 percent of the sites which had been silent in 2016 had kiwi calling in them this year, showing that the bird was now populating new areas while still holding up in the areas it used to populate. (via Huffington Post NZ)
3. Great story out of Nashville involving a beautiful bird: Nashville-area bird researchers have ramped up their efforts to learn from one of the area’s most amazing showcases of the natural world. It’s been happening this month as more than 100,000 purple martins fly in to roost each night in the trees surrounding the Nashville Symphony. As part of their migration, the birds have been gathering annually around Nashville since at least 1996, and have occasionally been run off or relocated. That could have been the case last year, too, if not for the intervention of birders who realized what was happening outside the symphony. This summer, as the birds returned, a more robust corps of volunteers has come together to monitor the roost, gather basic research and, perhaps most importantly, to keep visitors informed as they marvel at the sight and wonder why it’s happening. (via Nashville Public Radio)
4. Sad news from Central Park: Barry the Barred Owl, whose majestic presence and unusually extroverted demeanor made her a beloved Central Park celebrity, died early Friday in a collision with a Central Park Conservancy maintenance vehicle. She was most likely just over a year old based on her feather color, according to Robert DeCandido, known as “Birding Bob,” who has guided bird walks in Central Park for more than 25 years. Birding experts had realized in recent months that Barry was female. Over the last year, as Barry made a home for herself on the branch of a hemlock in Central Park’s Ramble, she developed a cultishly devoted following of birders, photographers, joggers and other New Yorkers who came to depend on her for cheer and comfort during a year of grief for New York City. (via The New York Times)
5. BNI feels we kind of knew this (unfortunately): A new study from Tel Aviv University and the Weizmann Institute revealed that over the last 20,000-50,000 years birds have undergone a major extinction event, inflicted chiefly by humans, which caused the disappearance of about 10%-20% of all avian species. The vast majority of the extinct species shared several features: they were large, they lived on islands, and many of them were flightless.The vast extinction was caused primarily by humans, who hunted the birds for food, or by animals brought to islands by humans — that fed on the birds and/or their eggs. (via Science Daily)
6. An exciting new collaboration was started this spring between the Seal River Watershed Alliance, an Indigenous non-profit coalition of four First Nations and one Inuit organization, and Audubon’s Boreal Conservation program. The Seal River Watershed Alliance (SRWA) was started in 2019 by the Sayisi Dene First Nation, Northlands Dene First Nation, Barren Lands First Nation, and O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation and with support of the Arviat Hunters and Trappers Association. Together they are moving forward a proposal for the establishment of an Indigenous Protected Area for the incredibly vast and important 12-million-acre (50,000 km2) Seal River Watershed of northern Manitoba. (via Audubon)
7. What can’t crows do: Practically every animal that scientists have studied — insects and cephalopods, amphibians and reptiles, birds and mammals — can distinguish between different numbers of objects in a set or sounds in a sequence. They don’t just have a sense of “greater than” or “less than,” but an approximate sense of quantity: that two is distinct from three, that 15 is distinct from 20. This mental representation of set size, called numerosity, seems to be “a general ability,” and an ancient one, said Giorgio Vallortigara, a neuroscientist at the University of Trento in Italy. Now, researchers are uncovering increasingly more complex numerical abilities in their animal subjects. Crows rank at the top of the list. (via Quanta Magazine)
8. From the Artful Migration Project: “What’s fascinated me is how much has to be in place when the birds arrive in Scotland from Africa each March,” says filmmaker John Wallace. The video artist spent a year studying ospreys and the fragile ecosystem they inhabit for a fascinating new documentary that tells how one of the rarest birds of prey was re-introduced to an area in the Scottish borders after being wiped out 100 years ago. Ospreys are listed globally by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as a species of Least Concern. While not endangered on a worldwide level, in Europe where persecution has historically been worst, they are extinct or threatened in most of their former range, and are only now recovering. (via The Herald)
9. Hoping BNI subscribers would not make this mistake: Several social media posts have been popping up lately claiming to show flamingos wading in the Lowcountry marshes. Unless some flamingos have recently escaped from a nearby zoo, the posts are wrong. Instead, the birds are more likely Roseate Spoonbills. Roseate spoonbills are medium-sized birds, reaching up to 2.5 feet in height, according to the Smithsonian National Zoo. American Flamingos, however, are much larger, with an average height of 5 feet. Like flamingos, roseate spoonbills have pink feathers. Both birds are believed to get their coloring from their diets, which consist largely of crustaceans. Unlike flamingos, roseate spoonbills have a large spoon-shaped bill, compared to the flamingo’s small beak. (via NBC Charleston)
10. You have to stay with this to get the bird angle: In addition to being visually stunning, schools of herring, herds of wildebeest and countless other groups of organisms that act in concert can help complex ecosystems maintain their diversity and stability. Published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution, the study demonstrates that when individuals band together to consume resources as a collective group, the surrounding ecosystem is prone to be more resilient and able to support a wider range of species. The findings could be an important step toward understanding how living systems stay on an even keel; collective behavior is ubiquitous on the planet, playing a prominent role in everything from bacterial biofilms to human cities. (via Phys Org)
11. For BNI friends in Philly: For Linda Widdop, a belted kingfisher at Pennypack Creek was her “spark bird,” which got her into birding. It’s a striking bird — mostly blue with a white collar, and a proud, spiky mohawk. Its call, a loud avian rattle that you can hear for hundreds of yards, is almost otherworldly. And if you’re lucky, you might see it zip into a small hole along the mudbank where it nests. If your interest is piqued, the Philadelphia area is a great place to start. Ornithology’s roots run deep here, thanks to renowned bird scientists like John James Audubon, John Bartram, and Alexander Wilson, who did much of their early work in the region. (via The Philadelphia Inquirer)
12. A bit of bird humor from The New Yorker: What’s the best way to find a good bird translator? As with most trades, word of mouth! Eavesdrop on bird conversations. Sure, you don’t actually speak Bird, but that doesn’t mean you can’t glean any information from bird conversations. Pay attention to bird greetings, as they may contain a name. Replicate the name sound and see if the bird turns and looks at you. If it does, you’ve likely said the bird’s name. Either that, or you just shouted an expletive at some birds, which they’re used to. Win-win. (via The New Yorker)
Bird Photo of the Week
Photo by Hap Ellis, Ruby-throated Hummingbird.
Bird Videos of the Week
By BBC Earth, “How Does An Owl Fly So Silently?”
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Hummingbirds.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Red-bellied Woodpecker.