1. Now just shy of 60 years old, the new island of Surtsey, off Iceland, holds clues to a fundamental mystery: What did the Earth look like when it was just born? How does life colonize bare rock? In 1963, a volcano erupted underneath the cold waters of the North Atlantic, 10 miles off Iceland’s southwest coast. The eruption lasted for four years. Eventually, the lava and ash cooled into a black-and-tan island named Surtsey, and the first fragile seeds of life started to wash ashore. Every year since the island came into being, scientists have visited Surtsey to track its ecological development. Visits to Surtsey require a permit—casual sightseeing stops are strictly prohibited—in order to preserve the island’s ecological integrity. Even today, a researchers’ red-roofed hut and an abandoned lighthouse foundation are the only buildings on Surtsey. (via Living Bird Magazine)
2. Hummingbirds rule: Yale ornithologist Richard Prum has spent years studying the molecules and nanostructures that give many bird species their rich colorful plumage, but nothing prepared him for what he found in hummingbirds. The range of colors in the plumage of hummingbirds exceeds the color diversity of all other bird species in total, Prum and a team of researchers report June 23 in the journal Communications Biology. “We knew that hummingbirds were colorful, but we never imagined that they would rival all the rest of the birds combined,” said Prum, the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. (via Yale News)
3. Birds trump fireworks this July 4th: Last year the high-pitched calls of least terns filled the air around the dunes at the southern end of Norriego Point. This year, as the Fourth of July holiday approaches, a much smaller, though still vocal, group of about 50 is nesting in the area, trying to feed and defend their young until they're old enough to fend for themselves. Many birds are re-nesting, including on Pensacola Beach, and this will be their final opportunity to successfully raise young this season. Pensacola Beach provides nesting habitat for several species of ground nesting, migratory shorebirds during the spring and summer — including least terns, snowy plovers, Wilson’s plovers and black skimmers. Least terns are migrating from as far away as Central and South America to raise their young on our beaches. (via Pensacola News Journal)
4. Troubling effects of neonicotinoids (hint: a widely used pesticide): Neonicotinoids are America's most used class of pesticides, found in the vast majority of the nation's corn crop and nearly half of soybeans. Given such pervasive use, their effects on songbirds—impacting critical functions like metabolism, reproduction, and migration—are troubling. With neonics, the toxicity of pesticides to invertebrates has increased dramatically, and those agricultural figures do not include the largely untracked application of residential lawn and garden insecticides. Nor do they include the single biggest use of neonicotinoids, as those handy seed coatings. Because of a loophole in federal pesticide regulations, seed coatings are not even considered “pesticides,” and their use is neither tracked nor directly regulated by the EPA. Yet the vast majority of corn planted in the U.S., and a significant percentage of soybeans and many other crops, are treated with neonics. (via Living Bird Magazine)
5. Ouch – birdfeed price is climbing: Birdfeed prices have skyrocketed. As with everything else, there are many causes. First, drought. Sunflower seed attracts a greater variety of birds than other foods, so what happens with sunflower seed – whether purchased alone or in mixes – affects almost all bird feeding. In the U.S., most sunflower seed comes from North Dakota. "We're experiencing drought conditions that we've not seen in the High Plains since the 1930s," said John Sandbakken, executive director of the National Sunflower Association. Crop failures that began two years ago likely will continue, seeing a 50 percent drop or more in production. Drought has likewise impacted safflower yield, which also grows in North Dakota but also in California and Montana. Ditto for millet, grown primarily in Colorado. (via Courier and Press)
6. Cornell Lab’s BirdNET app marries machine learning and citizen science: The BirdNET app, a free machine-learning powered tool that can identify more than 3,000 birds by sound alone, generates reliable scientific data and makes it easier for people to contribute citizen-science data on birds by simply recording sounds, according to new Cornell research. “The most exciting part of this work is how simple it is for people to participate in bird research and conservation,” said Connor Wood, research associate in the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and lead author of “The Machine Learning-Powered BirdNET App Reduces Barriers to Global Bird Research by Enabling Citizen Science Participation,” which published June 28 in PLOS Biology. (via Cornell Chronicle)
7. Hope for this kind of tape: A wildlife rehabilitation centre in Brookfield, N.S., has partnered with an American company to sell tape that helps prevent birds from flying into windows and harming themselves. Brenda Boates, the wildlife operations manager at the Cobequid Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre, said she started looking into the tape when a number of young birds including hawks, falcons and eagles were injured after colliding with windows last fall. "It's very distressing to see that because it's hard for them to grow up. They have a rough go their first year already so I looked into a solution," Boates told CBC Radio's Mainstreet on Thursday. She said birds often fly into windows because they're seeing a reflection of what's outside, not what's inside the building. (via CBC)
8. Ecophysiology: Songbirds learning from nearby birds that food supplies might be growing short respond by changing their physiology as well as their behavior, research by the Oregon State University College of Science shows. After receiving social information from food-restricted neighbors for three days, the red crossbills in the study raised their pace of consumption, increased their gut mass and maintained the size of the muscle responsible for flight when their own eating opportunities were subsequently limited to two short feeding periods per day. Findings of the study by OSU suggest that birds can use social information about food shortages to effect an adaptive advantage for survival. (via Phys Org)
9. Decades of decline: The evening grosbeak, a noisy and charismatic songbird, once arrived at Oregon State University in springtime flocks so vast an OSU statistics professor estimated there were up to a quarter million of the birds on campus daily. Gone is the era, however, when the birds were so numerous that students, staff and faculty felt the need to take cover from grosbeak droppings. The number of evening grosbeaks using the campus as a migration stop-over site has gone down an average of 2.6% per year over the last four decades. The bird has been experiencing decades of decline throughout its range, which includes most of the United States, said Douglas Robinson of the OSU College of Agricultural Sciences. (via Oregon State University)
10. Another example of birds informing flight technology: Most small birds will use a few wingbeats to hover before touching down on a branch, but raptors like Harris hawks are too large and heavy to use this method. Instead, they make an abrupt dive and upward swoop just before perching, which reduces the chance of a clumsy landing. Young hawks appeared to learn the behaviour though experience, improving their perching skills after around two dozen attempts. To better understand how and why hawks use this dramatic swooping motion, Graham Taylor at the University of Oxford and his team observed the birds in slow motion. The team started by breaking down the flight patterns of four Harris hawks(Parabuteo unicinctus) perching at different distances. (via New Scientist)
11. Racing to understand: Understanding how birds respond to climate change is a critical area of research that Elizabeth Derryberry, associate professor in the UT Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and her colleagues are racing to understand, including the increased prevalence and intensity of heat waves. Heat waves can be lethal for warm-blooded animals, but behavioral and physiological effects are missing from recent high-profile studies on climate change. In a new study published online in Molecular Ecology, the researchers examined how heat impacts the behavior and physiology of Zebra finches. (via Science Daily)
12. Grim: Wildlife biologists are finding whole colonies of birds dead or dying on islands in Lake Michigan. They's Caspian terns, which are listed as threatened in Michigan and endangered in Wisconsin. “Caspian terns are magnificent birds. They've got that striking black cap and they fly along, looking down at the water while they fly and then suddenly plunge into the water to catch fish. They're exciting to watch,” said Lisa Williams, a contaminants specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In recent years, the bird’s population has been growing. In 2018 it peaked at about 10,000 Caspian terns in the Great Lakes region. Then high water levels made nesting difficult for the birds. Now it appears that Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza — bird flu — is killing hundreds and hundreds of the birds. (via IPR)
13. Hopefully the two sides can come together: Oil industry groups and wildlife conservation advocates are squaring off over Biden administration plans to adopt new federal rules for the accidental killing of migratory birds. Supporters say the measures being weighed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will encourage companies and developers to take steps to prevent the inadvertent killing of birds. (via The Wall Street Journal)
14. Oh Canada: A retired ornithologist, aptly named David Bird, believes Canada needs a national bird and he’s lobbying federal ministers to name one. He’s got a special bird in mind, of course. Bird says the ideal candidate is the Canada jay, also known as the whisky jack. Beyond having “Canada'' in its name, these hardy songbirds are found in every province and territory. They are perhaps best known for landing on the heads or outstretched hands of birdwatchers. A member of the jay and crow family, the whisky jack is arguably one of “the smartest birds on the planet,” says Bird. (via The National Observer)
BNI Book Recommendation – a new translation of a 13th century poem: Simon Armitage has translated a number of medieval poems into modern English, including “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” “The Death of King Arthur” (an anonymous work, not Malory’s long prose version) and “Pearl.” Both “Sir Gawain” and “King Arthur,” composed in the old alliterative line of heroic poetry, are full of battle scenes, violent hunts and winter weather. “Pearl,” rendered in complex rhymed stanzas, is a sad poem, an elegy on the death of a young girl. His new translation, “The Owl and the Nightingale,” is a venture of a different kind. Written around 1200, the original poem was composed, like Old French romances, in octosyllabic rhymed couplets. The title characters are two birds who, in Mr. Armitage’s words, “hurled abuse at one another, / taking turns to slate and curse / what in the other bird was worst.” The poem is a masterclass in the art of dishonest debate and twisted logic. The birds will say anything to win the argument—who sings better, who is more popular—and the more outrageous their reasoning, the better for the joke. Especially if it has some real-life basis in ornithology. (via The Wall Street Journal)
Bird Photo of the Week
Photo by Hap Ellis, Sooty Shearwater, off the coast of Kennebunkport, ME.
Bird Videos of the Week
By BBC Earth, “Can Penguins Fly?”
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Panama Fruit Feeder.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Hawk Cam.