1. The Holy Grail of Australian birding: There had been no confirmed sightings of a live night parrot for nearly 140 years. So when the naturalist John Young produced evidence of the near-mythic bird in a remote corner of Australia’s outback in 2013, it was one of the greatest stories of species rediscovery in recent times. It was “the bird-watching equivalent of finding Elvis flipping burgers in an outback roadhouse,” Sean Dooley of BirdLife Australia, told the country’s national broadcaster at the time. It got stranger from there, when the discovery became tainted. Over the next eight years, the find set off a series of breakthroughs in tracking the “ghost bird,” as it is described in some Aboriginal storytelling. (via The New York Times, ABC News)
2. A respite for marsh birds: At Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Maryland, acres upon acres of dead tree trunks stand sentinel, their bases partially covered by salt water. Back in 2003, Hurricane Isabel struck the refuge before it could recover from an unusually dry summer. The storm surges brought salty ocean water into the already parched landscape and essentially choked the salt-intolerant trees to death. People tend to frame these changes in morbid terms: Aside from “ghost forests,” those rows of dead trees have been called “wooden gravestones,” evoking a sense of somber finality. But they are not necessarily an ending. Ghost forests are markers of a habitat in transition, an intermediate phase between a forest and a marsh. The forest may die, but in its place a marsh is born. (via Audubon)
3. Murmurations (pretty cool video): For a brief moment in Israel last week, an enormous black shape resembling a twisted teaspoon darkened the sky. This was not the work of a spoon-bending telepath, but arguably something much cooler: tens of thousands of migrating starlings, swooping and swarming through the sky together in a type of collectively steered flock called a murmuration. Albert Keshet, a wildlife photographer based in Israel, saw the stunning scene after spending more than five hours recording starlings in the northern Jordan Valley during the last week of 2021. At one point, he saw an entire flock of several thousand starlings take flight, dance through the sky and form an unmistakable spoon shape."They held it for a few seconds, then the shape changed to a bent spoon," Keshet told the BBC. A few seconds later, the flock had morphed again — then again, and then again. (via Live Science)
4. Keeping up with our Steller’s Sea-Eagle’s U.S. travels: As Chris Sayers picked up his tripod from the pier at Five Islands Harbor to head back to Boston on Friday morning, the bird biologist said goodbye to Maine Audubon naturalist Doug Hitchcox and asked if the Audubon chapter was having a New Year’s Eve party this year. More than one birder standing nearby – and there were hundreds – piped up: “This is the party.” The arrival of the first Steller’s sea eagle ever sighted in Maine – and likely the same individual that is the first ever seen in the Lower 48 – drew hundreds of birders to Georgetown on Friday. They were not disappointed. (via Press Herald)
5. “Climate change prisoners” – grim report from remote seabird islands in the Gulf of Maine: I was on islands managed by National Audubon’s Project Puffin. I have co-written and photographed two books with its founding ornithologist, Steve Kress. In an effort that began nearly a half-century ago, Kress directed the world’s first restoration of a seabird to an island where humans massacred them into local extinction. In 1973, he began years of bringing hundreds of puffin chicks down from Newfoundland. As U.S. Fish and Wildlife experts brought gulls under control, Kress and colleagues raised puffin chicks in makeshift burrows until they hopped into the ocean. He hoped that when it was time to breed two or three years later, his birds would select Eastern Egg Rock instead of Newfoundland as their home. Puffins began returning in 1977 and started breeding in 1981. In 2019, Eastern Egg Rock hit a record 188 pairs of puffins. Project Puffin spread to other islands, resulting today in 1,300 breeding pairs of puffins across islands in the Gulf of Maine. (via Grist)
6. But then you had to be in Singapore (and keen on vultures): When some bird watchers caught wind of the vultures appearing at the UNESCO World Heritage site, the news spread like wildfire among the birding community. On December 29, photographers spotted a panel of six majestic vultures perched on a tree as it started to rain. Although these migrants are rare, Himalayan Griffon Vultures sometimes make a stopover in Singapore during this time of year. Oddly enough, one of the six stuck out like a sore thumb. Can you spot the intruder? As the rain began to clear, Longtime ornithologist Martin Kennewell confidently identified the bird on the lowest perch as a black vulture, also known as the black vulture or black vulture, and reported his first known sighting in Singapore. (via The Bharat Express)
7. Israel is acting to contain a severe outbreak of avian flu that has already led to mass culling of infected poultry and has caused the deaths of about 5,000 migratory cranes in a popular nature reserve in the north of the country. The minister of environmental protection, Tamar Zandberg, described the outbreak, identified as the H5N1 type, as “one of the worst blows to wildlife in Israel’s history” after a visit to the Hula Nature Reserve this week. Hula is a wetland that is a central stop on the winter migration route to Africa. Ms. Zandberg was working to suspend the rest of the hunting season in the country, which normally runs until the end of January. The fear, the ministry said, was that gunshots from bird hunters could cause the wild birds to fly off to other locations, spreading the disease, which it said could also be spread by contaminated car tires on hunters’ vehicles or on the soles of their shoes, or by the dogs retrieving their prey. (via The New York Times)
8. Gotta love American Kestrels: It’s a diminutive falcon at about 10-inches long — just about the same size as a mourning dove. Despite its small body, a kestrel is as fierce a predator as the mighty peregrine falcon, which is nearly double the kestrel’s size. And just as peregrines fly like rockets to capture ducks and pigeons, kestrels swoop down to seize mice and insects. The spunky little falcons were initially named “sparrow hawks.” But the name was a misnomer. The bird is in the Falcon family rather than the Accipiter family, which includes Eurasian sparrowhawks and our own Cooper’s hawks. That’s why the American Ornithologists Union changed the bird’s name to kestrel in 1983. It’s a member of the same falcon family as the Eurasian kestrel, which is somewhat larger than our American kestrel. Yet our petite kestrel holds its own among all falcons big and small in its beauty and flight. (via Houston Chronicle)
9. For the second year in a row, researchers have spotted purple-crowned fairywrens – small birds that dwell near creeks and rivers in northern Australia – reproducing outside their usual breeding season. The findings indicate that the reproductive behaviour of the birds is more flexible than we had previously thought. Purple-crowned fairywrens (Malurus coronatus) are light-brown birds with pale bellies and long blue tails. Breeding males can be identified by their vibrant purple crown and black cheek patches. Females have grey heads and reddish-brown cheek patches. The birds typically breed during the Australian wet season, between December and April. However, Niki Teunissen at Monash University in Melbourne and her colleagues have found that dry season breeding has become more widespread among the western subspecies of the bird (M. coronatus coronatus) in recent years. (via New Scientist)
10. Manhattan a “giant bird killer”? – more on bird collisions: The narrow stretch that separates Quay Tower from a thatch of bamboo and oaks in Brooklyn Bridge Park doesn’t look like much, especially in winter. Unless you’re a bird. To a bird, the copper-colored building’s glass is a mirror, reflecting the thick grove of trees and suggesting that the wilderness continues across the road. To a bird, that can be a deadly mistake. The surprising uptake of birding as a pandemic hobby, along with social media and data collection tools like eBird and dBird, has created new visibility for bird collisions with glass, which kill as many as 1 billion birds in the U.S. per year. At the same time, a new generation of urban parks has given birds more places to roost in highly populated areas. But something else has followed these parks as well: real estate capital. (via Bloomberg City Lab)
11. Where the Condor soars: A trio of Andean condors were released back into the wild last month after years of rehabilitation at a rescue center an hour southeast of Chile's capital Santiago, the Ministry of Agriculture said. The three condors - among the world's largest birds that are able to fly - had been undergoing rehabilitation in the Melimoyu Ecosystem Research Institute (MERI) Foundation rescue center near the mountainous town of San Jose de Maipo. One pair of the birds had been born in captivity to other rescues and had to learn to fly over two months around wild birds, the latest of about a dozen birds MERI has released back into the wild in recent years. (via Reuters)
Bonus: Beautiful pictures of Australian birds in wild: With a strong focus on endemic species, Australian Birds in Pictures, compiled by the late wildlife photographer Matthew Jones and the bird photographer Duade Paton, showcases a range of wildlife in their natural habitats. (via The Guardian)
Bird Photo of the Week
From a great tweet by Annie Jacobsen entitled “No wonder DARPA scientists watch nature videos.” #peregrinefalcon
Bird Videos of the Week
By Lesley the Bird Nerd, “Birds to Watch for in Winter 2022”.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Big visiter.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Downy Woodpeckers.
Best way to start my weekend. Thank you so much. Every week.