1. Since California flooding is headline news, we’ll start with one 18-year-old’s effort to reach and feed “rescue” parrots: As torrential rains and heavy winds swept across California this week, Jamie McLeod's mind was on her birds. McLeod, 60, owns and operates the Santa Barbara Bird Sanctuary, where raging floodwaters and dangerous mudslides led to mass evacuation orders on Monday. Once the storm started, there was no way she could leave. McLeod's assistant at the bird sanctuary, 18-year-old River Taff, was in the middle of his weekly errands, which included bringing produce to the parrots at the facility, as well as delivering McLeod's groceries to her home on top of the mountain. He was eager to drop off the groceries and "get the heck off the mountain," before conditions inevitably worsened. But as he turned around to make the journey back to Summerland, Taff said he was stopped by three feet of mud that was "basically impenetrable." McLeod and Taff said the parrots' well-being drove their determination to reach them despite the perilous conditions.
2. A “super-sneaky, cover-dependent, mud-loving, waterplant-hiding shorebird”: “Near-mythical” is how the ecologist Matthew Herring describes the Australian painted-snipe – one of this continent’s rarest birds. “Some of these terms get thrown around,” Herring says, “but they really are.” It is believed there are only about 340 individuals left, but that’s not all that makes them rare. Australian painted-snipes exemplify the saying “out of sight, out of mind”. Even birdwatchers with decades in the field forget they exist. “They’re a super-sneaky, cover-dependent, mud-loving, waterplant-hiding shorebird,” Herring says. A research project that correlated the evolutionary uniqueness of the world’s nearly 10,000 bird species against their conservation status, as a way of prioritising them, placed the Australian painted-snipe at No 29. (via The Guardian)
3. Resilience – good news!: In late 2016, mostly human-caused wildfires swept through the southern Appalachians, destroying over 2,000 homes and burning over 140,000 acres of land. Thousands of trees that had provided a habitat for wildlife also went up in smoke. But despite the massive habitat loss, birds in the most severely burned regions have made a big comeback, a study suggests. The study, published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, looked at forest structure and breeding bird communities in three burned and unburned areas of the Nantahala National Forest in western North Carolina between 2016 and 2021. Researchers measured the state of the forest there, including how much tree canopy and how many shrubs survived, and took a count of birds during their spring and early summer breeding seasons. (via The Washington Post)
4. Success in the Southwest (Pinyon Jays, Lights Out!, and others!): The Intermountain West is home to the smoky blue pinyon jay, a member of the corvid family of birds (which includes crows, ravens and blue jays). Over the last 50 years, the pinyon jay has declined by an estimated 85%. If actions are not taken now to conserve the bird, the species is estimated to lose another 50% of the global population by 2035. In April 2022, Defenders of Wildlife organizationformally petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to protect the pinyon jay under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). A social species, pinyon jays fly, forage and nest together. The pinyon jay is closely associated with Pinyon-Juniper woodlands and depends on piñon trees for its primary food source—the seeds—and the piñon trees rely on the pinyon jay to distribute their seeds throughout the west. (via Defenders of Wildlife)
5. Power of eBird – eBird data drives research into hybridization of chickadees: Three chickadees clung to a suet feeder outside Denver, but one of them looked different from the others. Unlike the two Black-capped Chickadees, an eBird user noted in December, this one had a faint white band above its eyes, characteristic of a Mountain Chickadee. Similar birds have popped up in Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, and other Rocky Mountain metros. Prior to eBird’s creation in 2002, the scientific literature held only three records of hybridization between Black-capped and Mountain Chickadees, each report more than 25 years old. But in the past few years, evolutionary biologists at the University of Colorado Boulder noticed that eBird users commonly spot hybrids of the two species in the West. The platform includes more than 800 such reports today, many of them from cities and towns. The researchers decided to look further into the phenomenon. (via Audubon)
6. Wintering nomads in Texas: At the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory, each year from Dec. 14 to Jan.5, staff members participate in several Christmas Bird Counts throughout the state of Texas. This year I participated in the San Bernard CBC, Freeport CBC, and Brazoria CBC. It was during the San Bernard CBC that our education intern, Adam Trujillo, and I encountered a rather elusive species, the sedge wren. Sedge wrens are only observed in Texas during their winter. They are considered one of the most nomadic terrestrial birds in North America. They have a widespread breeding range and are constantly moving which makes them difficult to study and therefore less is known about them. Their population numbers are also difficult to determine due to their nomadic behavior. (via Victoria Advocate)
7. Finches, pathogens, and “Stevenson’s eggs”: It's "Treasure Island" author Robert Louis Stevenson who is credited with coining the phrase, "You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs." For us humans, it's now cliché. For pathogens, it's words to live by. Or, rather, spread by. Like all living organisms, pathogens want to thrive. Using songbirds, a type known as finches, whose populations are affected by a pink-eye disease in nature, Hawley and a team of researchers from Virginia Tech and the University of Memphis in Tennessee have shown just how easily these pathogens — in this case, a form of conjunctivitis common in birds, but harmless to humans — spread. And they did it without having the pink eye pathogen itself spread from bird to bird.(via Science Daily)
8. As if Deepwater Horizon and other threats aren’t tough enough on Black Skimmers: Black skimmers were among the hardest-hit bird species after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded on April 20, 2010, spewing 134 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over the next 87 days. More than 1 million birds died in the largest marine oil spill in U.S. history. In the nearly 13 years since, other threats have chipped away at the black skimmer population, said Julie Wraithmell, executive director of Audubon Florida. Those include natural predators and coastal development, along with just regular people enjoying the beach, unaware they’re scaring birds away from their nesting territory and forcing them to leave their eggs unattended and vulnerable. On Monday, black skimmers contended with another foe: a rogue hotel golf cart. (via The Washington Post)
9. A murder story in Italy (spoiler alert: victim is a homing pigeon): Director Michael Bay was forced to give exactly the sort of press statement you hope to never have to give today, declaring, for all the world to see, that he did not murder an Italian bird. While making a movie in Rome, the story goes, a dolly allegedly hit and killed a homing pigeon—which, like all pigeons, are apparently a protected species in Italy. A photographer supposedly took a picture of the aftermath and submitted it to the authorities, who’ve been after Bay ever since. (The Wrap notes that the government apparently offered to let Bay off with a small fine…but he refused to take any plea that involved pleading guilty to harming an animal.) (via AV Club)
10. Helping birds in Bangladesh: The village of Khariakandi in is a typical farming community. Its lush green environment also makes it an ideal habitat for different types of birds. As a result, like in other wildlife-rich areas, hunters have long been drawn here, leading to a drastic fall in the number of birds. Some residents of Khariakandi, however, decided to protect the birds from the hunters and raise public awareness to discourage hunting. Today, the village, with a human population of just 800, is now also home to thousands of birds. (via Mongabay)
11. Unclassified UFO report: some could be , well, birds: A new unclassified document on unidentified sightings, or U.F.O.s, reported to the U.S. military found that a majority have ordinary explanations, though dozens remain officially unexplained. With the release of any government report on U.F.O.s, officials hope the information will quell speculation around the unexplained incidents. But such hopes are inevitably dashed because incidents that cannot be categorized fuel new rounds of speculation and conspiracy. Of the newly documented incidents, 26 were found to be drones, 163 were balloons, and six more were airborne clutter, such as birds or trash. The remaining 171 incidents have not yet been attributed.
12. State of wintering birds in the UK sadly similar to other population reports: Every winter’s evening, from November to February, one of the most dramatic of all our natural spectacles takes place on the Avalon Marshes, up to half a million starlings – refugees from the far north and east – gather together in the skies, before roosting in the reedbeds below. Over the past few years, this has become quite a tourist attraction. On busy weekend afternoons, hundreds of people come to witness the starlings’ mesmeric aerial displays, known as murmurations, as huge numbers of birds twist and turn against the setting sun. Yet if you talk to birders who’ve lived here for many years, you’ll soon discover that this impressive display is a mere shadow of the what it used to be. (via The Guardian)
13. But then this – wintering wigeons in the UK a true highlight of winter: The name “wigeon” can puzzle new birders, who perhaps expect a cousin of the pigeon, rather than a duck. Both names are borrowed from medieval French, with wigeon thought to derive from a verb meaning to whine or shout – which, given the bird’s tuneful sound, does seem rather unfair. Only about 200 pairs of wigeon breed in Britain, making it scarcer than the firecrest, Dartford warbler and little egret. But almost half a million birds arrive here in autumn from Iceland, Scandinavia and Arctic Russia to take advantage of our mild winter climate and plentiful food. As well as feeding in shallow water, wigeon also graze on land, plucking tender shoots of grass with their short, stubby bill. (via TheGuardian)
14. Quick! Which state is closest to Africa? A shoutout to the Pine Tree state: “Maine Is Weird.” That is the title of a video I produced for my Bob Duchesne YouTube channel last summer. Much to my surprise, the video attracted triple the usual number of views. I listed eight reasons why Maine is weird, though there are certainly more reasons than that. One oddity really surprised me. Which state is closest to Africa? Like most folks, I figured it must be Florida. Wrong. It’s Maine. Specifically, Quoddy Head State Park is 3,154 miles from El Beddouza, Morocco. The two sites used to be much closer. In fact, they were conjoined 350 million years ago, when drifting continents collided to form one big supercontinent. Thus, the present day Maine seashore is endowed with plentiful nooks and crannies, bays and coves, and a treasure trove of offshore islands. Small wonder that so many sea birds like Atlantic puffins nest here, and many more Canadian birds winter here. (via Bangor Daily News)
Bird Photo of the Week
Photo by Rick Bunting, Bald Eagles - Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, Seneca Falls, NY.
Bird Videos of the Week
By Voice ofAmerica, “Birds of Prey Give Former Prisoner's Life New Wings”.
Cornell Live Bird Cam- Cahow Eggs.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Tufted Titmouse.