1. Wonder-walls: The Scottish gannet colonies are wonder-walls through spring and summer. I can rhyme them off: Noss and Hermaness, Sula Sgeir, Stac Li and Stac an Armin, Ailsa Craig. These ones are ancient. There are also newish ones on the Aberdeenshire mainland at Troup Head, and on Westray in Orkney. There’s only one colony in England, at Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire. Silent and elegant at sea, gannets make a racket in their colonies, with breeding pairs crammed bickering on nests wreathed with seaweed and plastic crap. It’s a constant airlift as birds supply food and ever more nest material. From below, on a boat, you can gaze up through layers of birds as they hang in cruciform shapes above you like a fabulous mobile, giving you the cold blue eye. (via London Review of Books)
BNI (again!) highly recommends The Seabird’s Cry by Adam Nicolson and its wonderful chapter on Gannets.
2. “…the most aberrant of birds”: Birds are the most diverse vertebrates on land, and they have always been central to ideas about the natural world. In 1837, a taxonomist in London told Charles Darwin that the finches he had shot and carelessly lumped together in the Galápagos Islands were, in fact, many different species. Darwin wondered whether the finches might have shared a common ancestor from mainland South America—whether all of life might have evolved through a process of “descent with modification”—and he drew a rudimentary tree in his private notebook, beneath the words “I think.” The tree showed how a single ancestral population could branch into many species, each with its own evolutionary path. “On the Origin of Species,” published twenty-two years later, includes only one diagram: an evolutionary tree. (via The New Yorker)
3. How it all began: Hunting and collecting have long been obsessions among the wealthy, whether it be Egyptian pharaohs fowling in the marshes and filling their tombs with artifacts, Inca chiefs with their menageries, or early modern Europeans like Ole Worm and Francis Willughby cramming their cabinets with curiosities. The obsession with bird collecting in the 1800s and 1900s was a continuation of this trend but much more widespread, because by this date, a higher proportion of people in Europe had the wealth and time to collect. Both then and now, acquisition and accumulation often reflected deep-rooted cravings for status. (via Smithsonian Magazine)
4. Missing pigeons: Thousands of racing pigeons taking part in an international competition are still missing after becoming disoriented while flying over France, likely due to a storm near to where they were released. The race’s 26,000 birds were released into the sky in Narbonne (Aude) with their course set for Belgium. Belgian pigeon racing association l'Indépendante de Liège organizes and oversees the international event every year with representatives from Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, the Netherlands and France participating. Around 30km from the departure point, a storm was brewing – which organizers say disoriented many of the birds. Some landed in Germany, far from their intended destination but many others simply disappeared from the radar. (via The Connexion)
5. The color of preen oil: Spotless starling chicks make quite a sight when they’re hungry. Tucked inside their nest, the gray baby birds stretch their necks, stick their little faces up in the air, open their beaks wide and cry out insistently. Like many bird parents, all the adult starlings see when they look down at their chicks is a cluster of circular yellow mouths, each vying for a larger share of food. Now scientists know the color of those mouths results from a surprising trick that helps the chicks catch their parents’ attention: they make a bright yellow lipstick that shows off their immune health. This finding represents one of the first known examples of birds using cosmetics to communicate between parents and offspring. (via Smithsonian Mag)
6. Evolutionarily intertwined says Yale: Have you ever wondered what a dinosaur really looked like? If so, drop your reptile-centric, Spielberg-warped preconceptions for a second and just look out the window for signs of chirping. Birds aren’t just the descendants of dinosaurs — they are dinosaurs. Scientists found that Velociraptor, which is from the Late Cretaceous (100-66 million years ago), had bird-like feathers covering its body and other features that made it very related to modern birds. The fact that birds and dinosaurs are evolutionarily intertwined is reinforced by a fascinating new study, in which researchers at Yale University showed how developing baby birds have — just moments prior to hatching — hip bones that are like a tiny replica of a dinosaur’s pelvis. (via ZME Science)
7. This bird is getting good press: After years of attempts to find one of the world’s 10 most wanted bird species, the Santa Marta sabrewing, an emerald green hummingbird, has been officially documented for only the second time since it was discovered in 1946. Like other species of sabrewing, it’s rather large for a hummingbird but the bird has remained elusive since its discovery, with previously only one other confirmed sighting in the wild in 2010. The rareness of the sabrewing has become so noteworthy that, in 2021, a coalition of conservation organizations added it to its top 10 most wanted birds to rediscover. The release of the list also heralded the start of the group’s new Search for Lost Birds initiative, led primarily by the organization Re:wild. (via New Scientist, Gizmodo)
8. Raptors to the rescue – again: Metro system riders in California's San Francisco Bay Area may have noticed a new station guard in recent months. A 5-year-old Harris's hawk named Pac-Man has taken up the perch at El Cerrito del Norte station, where he's on the look out - not for fare evaders, but pigeons. Ricky Ortiz, a falconer with Falcon Force and Pac-Man's handler, began patrolling with the bird at the station this summer, contracting with the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, or BART, to keep the pigeons at bay and protect commuters from pigeon poop. So far Ortiz has noticed a big difference. (via Reuters)
9. Rare bird alert- A new hybrid discovered: The offspring of a scarlet tanager and rose-breasted grosbeak—distantly related birds whose evolutionary paths diverged 10 million years ago—was recently found in Pennsylvania. A birder named Stephen Gosser recently took a stroll through the woods in Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, when he heard what he thought was a scarlet tanager. When the bird finally came into view, Gosser could tell it wasn’t a scarlet tanager. This bird had brown wings, a speckled chest, and a patch of red feathers on its throat not unlike that of a rose-breasted grosbeak. The mysterious bird Gosser found was a hybrid of a rose-breasted grosbeak and a scarlet tanager, and its discovery raises questions about how many other hybrids may be out there waiting to be discovered.(via All About Birds, National Geographic)
10. Not surprising: While the unusual quiet of the pandemic’s first months was hard on many people, it allowed birds in the Pacific Northwest to use a wider range of habitats, according to a newly published University of Washington study. In spring 2020, Sanderfoot and colleagues recruited more than 900 community scientists in the Pacific Northwest to monitor sites of their choosing — mostly backyards and parks where they could safely comply with public health orders — and recorded the birds they observed over 10 minutes at least once a week. (via Seattle Times)
11. More of this bipartisanship needed: Audubon Delta is celebrating a landmark victory for birds and people in Mississippi thanks to momentous action recently taken by the Mississippi Public Service Commission. In a bipartisan vote, the Commission adopted stronger renewable energy rules, which include key policies that boost opportunities for low and middle income residents to enjoy the cost-saving benefits of solar energy – and this climate-friendly move delivers a big payoff for birds too. Scientific studies show that climate change is the biggest threat to birds and people alike. Adopting robust renewable energy policy is critical to reducing pollution, lowering global temperatures, and preserving the places that birds, like Mississippi’s vulnerable Brown-headed Nuthatch, need to survive. (via Audubon)
12. An art studio “for the birds”: Sheida Soleimani speaks the language of birds, deftly contorting her lips and breath to recite lilting sounds with distinct avian fluency. As far as the Iranian American artist is concerned, it’s her second language after Farsi. “Before I could speak English, I used to listen to bird sounds on tape,” says Soleimani, 32. She would spend hours playing recordings in her childhood bedroom, specifically bird sounds from North America. “I didn’t really have friends at the time,” she adds. Soleimani, the daughter of Iranian political refugees who settled in what she calls the “corn and soybean world” of Loveland, Ohio, now lives in Providence, R.I., where she is the city’s only registered wild bird rehabilitator. (via The New York Times)
Bird Photo of the Week
Photo by Hap Ellis, “Fall Migration”, Semipalmated Sandpipers, Cape Porpoise, ME.
Bird Videos of the Week
By BBC Earth, “The World’s Longest Beak”.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Owl Nest Nap.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - “Extremist” Hummingbird.