1. No surprise: Bird-watching has boomed during the pandemic, and all that extra interest has translated into citizen science initiatives seeing a huge swell in participation. “All of those observations that people are submitting, they go into very advanced modeling to create distribution maps for species, to look at trends of their populations,” says Andrew Farnsworth, a senior research associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology which maintains apps like Merlin and eBird. With the fall migration now in full swing, this army of avid birders is amassing a wealth of data about how weather, human movements, artificial lights, and city infrastructure can affect birds as they travel. Farnsworth notes that while both Cornell projects have grown every year since their inception over a decade ago, the increase in users, downloads, and data over the past 18 months was unprecedented. (via Wired)
2. Sadness: The “Lord God Bird” is dead. The ivory-billed woodpecker, a ghostly bird whose long-rumored survival in the bottomland swamps of the South has haunted seekers for generations, will be officially declared extinct by U.S. officials after years of futile efforts to save it. It earned its nickname because it was so big and so beautiful that those blessed to spot it blurted out the Lord’s name. Even the scientist who wrote the obit cried. “This is not an easy thing,” said Amy Trahan, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who reviewed the evidence and wrote the report concluding that the ivory bill “no longer exists.” “Nobody wants to be a part of that,” she added, choking up in a Zoom interview. “Just having to write those words was quite difficult. It took me a while.” (via The Washington Post)
For more on the extraordinary Ivory-billed Woodpecker, read Tim Gallagher’s The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker
3. 18,000 years ago: The earliest bird reared by humans may have been a cassowary — often called the world's most dangerous bird because of its long, dagger-like toe. Territorial, aggressive and often compared to a dinosaur in looks, the bird is a surprising candidate for domestication. However, a new study of more than 1,000 fossilized eggshell fragments, excavated from two rock shelters used by hunter-gatherers in New Guinea, has suggested early humans may have collected the eggs of the large flightless bird before they hatched and then raised the chicks to adulthood. New Guinea is a large island north of Australia. The eastern half of the island is Papua New Guinea, while the western half forms part of Indonesia. "This behavior that we are seeing is coming thousands of years before domestication of the chicken," said lead study author Kristina Douglass, an assistant professor of anthropology and African studies at Penn State University. (via CNN, PNAU)
4. Rightly so: The Biden administration said Wednesday it will draft rules to govern the killing of wild birds by industry and resume enforcement actions against companies responsible for deaths that could have been prevented, a longstanding practice that ended under President Donald Trump. The move came as North American bird numbers have plummeted in recent decades. That decline was punctuated by news Wednesday that the famed ivory-billed woodpecker and 22 other species of flora and fauna have gone extinct. Conservation groups, which have urged President Joe Biden to take stronger action to protect wildlife, said the planned rules were urgently needed to hold companies accountable for bird deaths. (via Eagle Times)
5. With the vast majority of California in “extreme” or “exceptional” drought, the habitat that these birds rely on in the Central Valley – our last remaining wetlands and the surrogate habitat created in agricultural fields like rice and alfalfa – have seen major cutbacks in water. The good news is that we are not unprepared for this drought: We learned from our last California megadrought which ended in 2017. Audubon participates in partnerships, including the Central Valley Joint Venture (CVJV) and the Migratory Bird Conservation Partnership (MBCP), that have created new science to help guide when and where we release water to have the largest benefit for birds (see the recently released 2020 CVJV Implementation Plan and Point Blue Conservation Science’s Water Tracker). (via Audubon)
6. Brazilian ornithologists have filmed an active nest of one of the world's rarest and most endangered birds. A total of three Cherry-throated Tanager chicks are being fed by up to six adults at a site in the state of Espírito Santo, with the birds observed as recently as September 28. Cherry-throated Tanager is classified as Critically Endangered, with fewer than 30 individuals feared to remain in existence. In June 2020 the species was observed for the first time in almost a year, quelling fears that it might have slipped to extinction, and the discovery of a nest in recent days is of great significance. For many decades it was known only from a single shot specimen in 1870, before its dramatic rediscovery in the 1990s. (via BirdGuides)
7. The Bird Poop Lady (seriously): Heather Skeen has the kind of job that makes for an excellent icebreaker. “I go to the Bahamas and collect bird poop,” said Skeen, a Ph.D. student at the Field Museum and University of Chicago. The conversation starter typically meets with: “You what?” followed by: “Why?” We’ll get to the “what” in a minute. The “why” can be found in a study just published in the journal Molecular Ecology, with Skeen as the lead author. Turns out her work with birds, and yes, their poop, yielded some fascinating insights into the biology of migratory birds, and has broader implications in terms of the ways animals might adapt to climate change. The premise of her research was to look at the microbiome (aka, gut bacteria) of migratory birds to determine what, if any, changes occur when the creatures trade in their southern wintering grounds for their northern breeding grounds. (via WTTW News)
8. Another terrific tool from the Cornell Lab: If you’re like me, you’re probably easily fed up with the weather forecast. It’s often wrong or shows me what I don’t want to see. I’m here to tell you that there’s a better forecast out there — a forecast for birds. Called BirdCast, the forecast provides a three-day outlook of how many birds will be flying overhead across the country — and where. After sunset on Tuesday, for example, BirdCast estimates that 74,000 of them will journey through the skies of New York City. The tool, which was developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and a handful of other universities, also shows where large numbers of birds are cruising through the sky in close to real time. In other words: It’s radar, but for birds. (via Vox)
9. Common cuckoos aren’t known for being model parents. Rather than raise their own young, they fob the task off on other birds. This strategy is used by approximately 100 species of cuckoos and other so-called brood parasites. But it doesn’t always go according to plan; sometimes, the foster parents catch on. It turns out that which nests parasitic birds can successfully sneak their eggs into may partly depend on eye size, scientists reported this week. Researchers compared eyeball measurements from thousands of species of birds and found that parasitic birds tend to have larger eyes than the hosts that wind up raising their young. This could mean that the brood parasites, those that lay their eggs in other species’ nests, are targeting birds whose eyesight isn’t very keen. (via Popular Science)
10. A long essay but worth a read: Birds have always been small agents charged with carrying the burden of our feelings simply by following the logic of their own existence. The Irish imagined puffins as the souls of priests. The ancient Romans released an eagle when an emperor died in the belief it would "conduct his soul aloft." In the Abrahamic religions, doves are given powers of revelation. We have even been inclined, right up until the present, to imagine birds as the souls of our recently departed returned to us, if only for a moment. Even without being recruited into such labor, birds touch on our lives in small but significant ways. (via Phys Org)
11. Kenn Kauffman on “loop” migration: Migration can be fraught with hazards. As birds leave their familiar surroundings and begin to traverse new territory, they may run into all kinds of unknown dangers. We might expect them to minimize their risk by seeking out the shortest possible path between their summer and winter ranges, and then following the same routes north in spring and south in fall. But in fact, relatively few species actually travel by the shortest straight-line distance. And for many, their spring and fall routes differ dramatically. (via Audubon)
BNI highly recommends Kenn Kaufman’s A Season on the Wind: Inside The World of Spring Migration
12. The power of eBird: Around 80% of bird species examined in a new study were reported in greater numbers in human-altered habitats during pandemic lockdowns, according to new research based on data from the eBird program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. In the paper, “Reduced Human Activity During COVID-19 Alters Avian Land Use Across North America,” published Sept. 22 in Science Advances, researchers compared online eBird observations from the United States and Canada from before and during the pandemic. They focused on areas within about 100 km of urban areas, major roads, and airports. Vast amounts of data from a likewise vast geographic area were vital for this study. The researchers used more than 4 million eBird observations of 82 bird species from across Canada and the U.S. (via Cornell Chronicle)
Bonus: The Potoo!
Bird Videos of the Week
Video by Ted ed, “Surprising Secrets of Hummingbird Flight.”
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Tiaki’s Final Feast.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Hawk Highlights.