1. For those that haven’t read (or possibly even heard of) Kirk W. Johnson’s wonderful book The Feather Thief, here is a fun podcast for you (and hopefully you will want to read the book): A flute player breaks into a British museum and makes off with a million dollars worth of dead birds. (via This American Life)
2. Microplastics, seabirds and new evidence that “…really shows the wide spectrum of adverse effects that we get from plastic pollution, and microplastics in particular.”: Microplastics are messing with seabirds’ microbiomes. Tiny pieces of plastic are everywhere. They’re in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. Microplastics have been found in human blood, placentas, and feces. But we don’t fully understand what all these minuscule bits of plastic are doing to us or other animals. Now, new research in seabirds hints that it might affect gut microbiomes — the trillions of microbes that make a home in the intestines and play an important role in animals’ health, including our own. Seabirds ingest plastic from the ocean, which we know can accumulate in their stomachs. The research shows it leaves the birds with more potentially harmful microbes in the gut, including some that can break down plastics. (via MIT Technology Review)
3. The apparent real story in 1961 that led to Hitchcock’s “The Birds” (spoiler alert: it was Sooty Shearwaters): It was all just a big misunderstanding. Sixty years ago this week, Alfred Hitchcock’s horror classic The Birds (streaming now on Peacock!) was released. The story of how the movie came to be is nearly as weird as the events we see onscreen. The screenplay, written by Evan Hunter, was adapted both from the 1952 Daphne du Maurier horror story of the same name and the real life bird attack of 1961. Du Maurier’s story, published in her collection The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Several Long Stories, sees a farmhand and his family attacked by a vicious flock of murderous birds. By the time readers turn the last page, they’ve learned that the attack isn’t isolated to this one lone farmhouse. Certain of the details differ between book and movie, but you can see the hollow bones of the story there. (via SyFy)
4. Last week we focused on the emergence of radar as an important tool in understanding migration. Here’s a good example from Sioux Falls, S.D.: If you know what to look for on radar, you can find very interesting details that’s not all weather related. Now that spring is here, we have bird migrations. On Tuesday, a KELOLAND News crew in Turner County spotted thousands of birds on the move mid-morning. We can even see the birds on radar. As the radar starts at around 7:20 a.m. Monday, we can see dense returns around Yankton and Vermillion. As we travel through time, you can see the mass moving north towards Lennox. Then around 10:45 a.m., we can see another flock moving in from Nebraska towards Yankton. As they reach the river, you can see the returns disappearing, meaning the birds are landing (via KeloLand News)
5. Crows v. lasers – no contest apparently in Sunnyvale, CA: A laser pilot program implemented by the city of Sunnyvale to deter its growing crow population has been eliminated after the birds apparently outsmarted the system. The crows are considered to be a nuisance because of their noise and droppings. They’re ranked as the second-largest problem among constituents just behind speeding drivers, and last month, the Sunnyvale City Council also listed the birds as the study issue of second-highest priority for potential funding as it continues to seek out a nonlethal solution to their boisterous presence. But for now, these crows won’t be gulled. (via San Francisco Gate)
6. Brain Science - How a neuroscientist’s team at Columbia study Black-capped Chickadees: Black-capped chickadees have an incredible ability to remember where they've cached food in their environments. They are also small, fast, and able to fly. So how exactly can a neuroscientist interested in their memories conduct studies on their brains? Dmitriy Aronov, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University, visited Duke recently to talk about chickadee memory and the practicalities of studying wild birds in a lab. The birds must instantly form a memory while caching the food, a process that relies on episodic memory. Episodic memory involves recalling specific experiences from the past, and black-capped chickadees are "champions of episodic memory." (via Physical Org)
7. A fun look at woodpeckers by the CBC: Small brains, ridiculous tongues and a passion for percussion. There are 239 species of woodpeckers, ranging in size from the tiny downy to the impressive pileated. Woodpeckers inhabit every continent except Antarctica and Australia, and their signature rat-a-tat is a familiar sound in forests and urban areas alike. But there's a lot you probably don't know about these ubiquitous birds. Woodpeckers: The Hole Story, a documentary from The Nature of Things, drills into what makes these creatures so fascinating. While they're not singers, woodpeckers can produce a variety of calls to warn others of danger, send signals to a mate or see off a rival. But their preferred mode of communication involves tapping out a tune on a hollow tree or stump. Each species has developed its own style of patterns, speeds and rhythms. (via CBC)
8. A short BBC piece for Osprey lovers on when, where and how long these “magnificent birds” travel: Most ospreys that breed in the northern hemisphere migrate south for winter, because when lakes freeze they can’t fish. British birds head to West Africa, mainly Senegal and Gambia, though a few now winter in Portugal and Spain. One tagged osprey flew an amazing 350km across the Bay of Biscay. Tagging studies show that ospreys winter along coasts and estuaries, switching their diet to salt-water fish. If holidaymakers on Gambian beaches look up, they may be treated to the magnificent sight of ospreys that hatched in Britain flying overhead to fish just offshore. Adult ospreys begin their return journey of over 4,500km in late February or March. Not only do they return to the same nest, they use the same familiar roosting trees at stop-overs during their migration. (via Discover Wildlife)
9. Here’s the answer: “You can throw everything you got at it”; read on to see what the disturbing challenge is: As darkness fell on Nov. 28, 2016, residents of Butte, Montana, heard the unmistakable honking of some 60,000 snow geese circling the Berkeley Pit, a defunct mine now flooded with toxic water. A snowstorm hit that night after an unusually warm autumn, and the geese, caught on a late journey from Canada to California, were forced out of the sky. They blanketed the surface of the water. Onsite staff tried to frighten them off, but an estimated 3,000 birds died. Two companies — Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO, now a British Petroleum subsidiary) and Montana Resources, which operates the still-active adjacent mine — are responsible for managing the pit, which is a Superfund site. They’d had procedures in place since 1996 to keep birds off the acidic water, which can kill some species within 12 hours. “Wailers” blasted obnoxious alarms year-round to discourage birds from landing; when they landed anyway, staff fired precision rifle shots at the water to scare them off. The measures were extremely effective: Of the thousands of ducks, geese, swans, grebes and more that landed briefly during spring and fall migrations, nearly all continued on. But the 2016 die-off exposed what engineers had overlooked: bird behavior. (via Discover Wildlife)
10. Not good news: Chile detected the first case of bird flu in a human, the country's health ministry reported on Wednesday. The case was detected in a 53-year-old man who presented severe influenza symptoms, according to a statement issued by the ministry, but they noted the patient was in stable condition. The government is also investigating the source of contagion as well as others who were in contact with the patient. Chilean health authorities noted the virus can be transmitted from birds or marine mammals to humans, but there is no known human-to-human transmission. (via Reuters)
11. On a lighter note, backyard bird enthusiasts go “next level”: Birding has long been a hobby for nature lovers, but the pursuit has recently gone more mainstream—boosted by the rise of ecotourism and the surging interest in a safe and relaxing pastime during the pandemic, along with user-friendly apps that bird lovers can use to record and track different species. Now, some enthusiastic hobbyists are springing for landscape redesigns, specialty bird food and high-tech bird feeders to attract and photograph feathered visitors. One birder recently designed and built a $4 million house in Palmetto Bluff, a luxury gated community in Bluffton, S.C., with bird watching in mind. Although there was space on the 0.4-acre lot for a larger home, Mr. Bostwick built a relatively modest, 2,700-square-foot house with four bedrooms to avoid cutting down trees, a natural bird habitat. (via Wall Street Journal)
12. Paul Simon said there were “50 ways to leave your lover”. In Colorado Springs there are more than 60 ways to “commune” with birds May 18-21: For bird lovers, that is, when the arrival of spring brings waves of new, and sometimes unexpected, migrating birds to the Front Range. And here to celebrate every last house finch, Western tanager, white-tailed ptarmigan, burrowing owl and curve-billed thrasher is the eighth Pikes Peak Birding and Nature Festival with more than 60 field trips, workshops, seminars and more for new and experienced birdwatchers and birders. The event isn’t until May 18-21, but early bird registration opened at 10 a.m. Saturday. Some of the field trips sell out within 20 to 30 minutes, but others will likely be available until registration closes April 30. (via The Gazette)
13. Can’t we all just get along? Superb Fairy-Wrens do!: What do people and fairy-wrens have in common? We live in groups. But what are the advantages of group living? In the case of superb fairy-wrens, there’s safety in numbers. Well, probably. A recent study has found that, upon hearing a distress call, superb fairy-wrens, are more likely to help individuals within their closest social circles than those whose calls they don’t recognize. This complex social arrangement is known as a multilevel society. The social relationships between these groups are stable and predictable. Although multilevel societies are often structured around kinship, helping behavior itself can be independent of kinship. Even more interesting is that personal risk-taking in these tiny songbirds follows the same rules seen in groups of human hunter-gatherers. (via Forbes)
14. An interesting article on the scientific information collected from birds that die from window collisions: Every year, millions of birds crash into windows in cities along their migratory path. For decades, scientists and volunteers have risen at dawn in spring and fall to collect the fallen birds, rehabilitating the injured and documenting the dead. The bodies of the birds killed in these collisions are a treasure trove of scientific information, especially when compared year after year. A new study in the journal Molecular Ecology makes use of these specimens to help understand the relationship between birds and the microbes living in their guts—which appears to be wildly different from mammals and their microbiomes. The scientists' work involved DNA sequencing, and a whole lot of bird poop. (via Phys Org)
15. We’ll close with this beautiful Instagram post of a female Great Gray Owl, filmed by Gerrit Vyn, the best of the best when it comes to bird photography (along with colleague, Tim Laman):
Years ago Gerrit Vyn authored a comprehensive audio collection “Voices of North American Owls” and listened to thousands of owl recordings to compile the known (and previously unknown) vocal repertoires of North American Owls. In many cases he had to rely on limited written accounts to decipher the meaning and context of different owl vocalizations and the Great Gray Owl was one species he had rarely heard in the field. It has been wonderful in recent years to experience many on the vocalizations he had only listened to on head phones in a studio. Hearing them in person, in the forest, and observing their associated behaviors has confirmed many of the interpretations he made many years ago. (via Instagram)
Bird Photo of the Week
Photo by Hap Ellis, Rusty Blackbird – Millennium Park, Boston, MA.
Bird Videos of the Week
By Badgerland Birding, “The Dark Side of Birding: Top 5 Birding Controversies You Need to Know”.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Lance-tailed Manakin.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Owl Cam.