1. You’ve heard of trash pandas: Raccoons raiding the garbage. How about trash parrots? Sulfur-crested cockatoos, which may sound exotic to Americans and Europeans, are everywhere in suburban areas of Sydney. They have adapted to the human environment, and since they are known to be clever at manipulating objects it’s not entirely surprising that they went after a rich food source. But you might say that the spread of their latest trick, to open trash cans, blows the lid off social learning and cultural evolution in animals. Not only do the birds acquire the skill by imitating others, which is social learning. But the details of technique evolve to differ in different groups as the innovation spreads, a mark of animal culture. (via The New York Times) Click here for the NPR coverage of this story
2. More on the growing appreciation for the importance of smell in certain species: The sharp eyes of an eagle, the extraordinary hearing of an owl - to successfully find food, the eyes and ears of birds have adapted optimally to their living conditions. Until now, the sense of smell has played a rather subordinate role. When meadows are freshly mowed, storks often appear there to search for snails and frogs. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior in Radolfzell and the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz have now studied the birds' behavior and discovered that the storks are attracted by the smell of the mown grass. Only storks that were downwind and could thus perceive the smell reacted to the mowing. This shows that white storks use their sense of smell to forage and suggests that the sense of smell may also play a greater role in other birds than previously thought. (via Max Planck Institute)
3. New findings from zoologists working with birds in Southeast Asia are shining fresh light on the connections between animal behavior, geology, and evolution — underlining that species can diversify surprisingly quickly under certain conditions. The zoologists, from Trinity College Dublin's School of Natural Sciences, sequenced DNA and took measurements and song recordings from Sulawesi Babblers (Pellorneum celebense), shy birds that live in the undergrowth on Indonesian islands. Although these islands were connected by land bridges just tens of thousands of years ago, and although the babblers look so similar that they are currently all considered a single subspecies, the new study shows that their DNA, body size and song have all changed in what is a very brief period of time from an evolutionary perspective. (via Science Daily)
4. When Friday began, Alfie the swan was on an avian version of death row. By the time evening came, it seemed he had won a reprieve — though not through the efforts of the people who were trying to save him or the government agencies they had pleaded with for help. Instead, his fate was reversed by an accident. Mayor John Ducey of Brick Township, N.J., who had been working with residents of his Jersey Shore community to try to find a resolution to Alfie’s plight that did not end with euthanasia, captured the turn of events succinctly. “This is crazy,” he said. Alfie, an adult male mute swan, has paddled the waterways in a part of Brick Township known as Seawood Harbor for a number of years. (via The New York Times)
5. A team of scientists based at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology published a report in 2019 announcing that the United States has lost 3 billion birds, equivalent to nearly 30 percent of the estimated North American total in 1970. Declines were noted in all regions of the country. The work of John Terborgh a Professor of Environmental Science at Duke University. David S. Wilcove is Professor of Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and that of many other scientists has shown how the fragmentation of our forests due to development and the intensification of farming in grasslands has harmed birds. We now wonder whether we overlooked another major culprit: the decline of the insects they eat. (via The Washington Post)
6. Nice Fast Company piece on The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Merlin app and the breakthrough addition of its sound recognition feature: If you’ve ever heard a bird sing and wondered how you could possibly figure out what type of bird it could be without laboriously searching through recordings, The Cornell Lab of Ornithology now has you covered. The lab recently upgraded its Merlin smartphone app, designed for both new and experienced birdwatchers. It now features an AI-infused “Sound ID” feature that can capture bird sounds and compare them to crowdsourced samples to figure out just what bird is making that sound. Since the feature launched late last month, it’s become the most popular feature in the app (which also features AI tools to identify birds in photos), and people have used it to identify more than 1 million birds. New user counts are also up 58% since the two weeks before launch, and up 44% over the same period last year. (via Fast Company)
7. Grim: One wildlife rehabilitation center in rural Oregon says it got “three months’ worth of birds” in three days. Another, in northern California, declared a “hawkpocalypse” in June. And earlier in the summer, Portland Audubon, a nonprofit environmental organization, took in more than 100 Cooper’s hawks over four days as temperatures soared to record highs in the 110s. Normally, it might get a dozen in a year. Around the West, young birds of prey have been jumping out of their nests before they can fly to escape historic heat, landing helpless on the ground and in some cases suffering injuries so serious they are euthanized. With more scorching temperatures coming for the northwestern United States and Canada starting this weekend, experts worry extreme weather fueled by climate change is set to take a growing toll on wildlife. (via The Washington Post)
8. Hopeful: Some environmentalists thought that federal wildlife officials made a serious mistake when they decided, in 2015, not to list the Greater Sage-Grouse as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Given all the habitat the species has lost in its 11-state range since then, plenty of advocates still think the feds should list it. In reality, however, designating the bird as threatened or endangered wasn’t an option back then, and it still isn’t today. In 2014, Republicans in Congress prohibited the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) from listing sage-grouse under the ESA by tucking a snippet of text to that effect into a sprawling bill to fund the federal government. Despite environmental groups’ repeated efforts to pry it out of subsequent budgets, the rider has remained stubbornly in place ever since. But maybe not for long. (via Audubon)
9. 120 million years ago: Researchers from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have discovered a 120-million-year-old partial fossil skeleton of a tiny extinct bird that fits in the palm of the hand and preserves a unique skull with a mix of dinosaurian and bird features. The two-centimeter-long (0.75 inch) skullof the fossil shares many structural and functional features with the gigantic Tyrannosaurus rex, indicating that early birds kept many features of their dinosaurian ancestors and their skulls functioned much like those of dinosaurs rather than living birds. Their findings were published in Nature Communications on June 23. (via Phys Org)
10. Conn. birders take note: Breeding has been confirmed of a bird species of special concern in the state this month, which the Connecticut Audubon Society says is a critical stepping stone for the species. Cathy Hagadorn, director of the Connecticut Audubon Society’s Deer Pond Farm sanctuary, said the property has confirmed breeding of purple martins. She said the newly established colony is “an important achievement for our bird conservation efforts.” he sanctuary has two towers with 12 nesting gords on each, Hagadorn said. The nine chicks were given leg bands by a group led by Laurie Doss, purple martin conservation association board member and licensed bird bander under the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection’s Wildlife Dvision. (via The Connecticut Post)
11. Topical UW study given the huge Bootleg Fire in neighboring Oregon: More frequent and intense wildfire — and all the associated smoke — changes what birds are seen and heard, according to a new University of Washington study. While that’s a rather intuitive finding, it could have implications for bird conservation and future studies looking at air pollution and bird health. In particular, the study collected reports from eBird, and compared those with air quality metrics in Washington state between the wildfire seasons of 2015 to 2018. Researchers discovered that smoke concentrations of PM 2.5 or higher decreased the detection of 16 species but increased the detection of 10 others. (via The Seattle Times)
12. BNI’s book review of the week: It’s a good storytelling trope: Take a globe-trotting journalist, put him on a North Carolina farmette, throw in three needy peacocks and watch him scramble around in the slanting light of self-deprecation. In Why Peacocks? An Unlikely Search for Meaning in the World’s Most Magnificent Bird, Sean Flynn recounts his misadventures as the naive new owner of a trio of Indian peacocks, and we can’t help rooting for him. Having been caught in the unrelenting grip of macaw ownership for 23 years myself, I get it. You start with a vision of what it would be like to own a parrot—or, in Mr. Flynn’s case, peacocks—only to be confronted with the reality of your decision. Along with the magnetic fascination of exploring the “who” of such an exotic and otherworldly creature, there comes a truckload of real-world problems. (via The Wall Street Journal)
Bird Photo of the Week
Photo by Hap Ellis, Eastern Bluebird.
Bird Videos of the Week
By The Hindu, “2020: Indian bird watchers’ paradise”.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - American Goldfinch.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Little Blue Heron.