1. One cool pic: A bully greenfinch was beaten at its own game after squaring up to a smaller bird. A dunnock was perched peacefully on a branch before the finch approached and tried to pick a fight. As the finch tried to peck at its rival, the small brown bird used its foot to slam its mouth shut. Paul Sawer, a 50-year-old photographer from Saxmundham, Suffolk, said: "The dunnock faced the finch and crouched ready to make a move. The finch kept coming towards the dunnock which stepped back to avoid the beak." With perfect accuracy and timing, the dunnock raised a foot and slammed it on the finch's beak, jumping up at the same time to exert more power to push the finch away. The finch then flew off with her tail between her legs and the dunnock retained its position on the fence. (via The Telegraph)
2. Mystery of migration: As spring unfolds in North America, the days lengthen and warm, flowers push out of thawing soils, and green leaves bud on branches. Bees get busy, and birds court mates, build nests, and raise young. As any winter-hardened birder knows, many of those birds have been absent, passing harsh, cold northern months in warmer southern climates. Some have flown thousands of miles to arrive to their breeding grounds in the same place, at about the same time, as last spring and the spring before that. Why birds undertake these seasonal journeys seems at first intuitive: They seek to improve their chances, and their offspring's chances, of survival. But how bird migration at first evolved has, in fact, long been a topic that scientists have debated. (via Audubon Magazine)
3. Encouraging story on “Lights Out” efforts: Every 11 September at dusk, in memory of the 2001 attacks, New York City mounts the Tribute in Light, an art installation in lower Manhattan. And every year, as twin towers of light bloom skyward, they attract thousands of migrating birds, sucking in warblers, seabirds, and thrushes—along with predators such as peregrine falcons eager to take advantage of the confusion. On each anniversary, bird conservationists wait below, counting and listening to disoriented chirps. If the observers report too many birds circling aimlessly in the beams, organizers flip off the lights. In 2017, a group led by Cornell University ornithologist Andrew Farnsworth found that during seven previous anniversaries, the once-a-year installation had attracted a total of about 1.1 million birds. Within 20 minutes of lighting up, up to 16,000 birds crammed themselves into a half-kilometer radius. But when the lights flicked off, the dense clouds of birds on the radar screen dissipated just as fast, a finding later confirmed by on-site thermal cameras. (via Science)
4. When we humans hear birdsong, which many have appreciated more than ever during the pandemic, we can’t help but think about parallels to human music and language. We discern distinct melodies linking the clanks and buzzes of Song Sparrow songs, sentencelike structure in the Red-winged Blackbird’s pronouncement of conk-la-ree! and a cheery whistle in the wide-open-beaked songs of the White-throated Sparrow. Birdsong, which has intrigued scientists since Aristotle’s time, is traditionally defined as the long, often complex learned vocalizations birds produce to attract mates and defend their territories. Modern researchers categorize it in contrast to bird calls, which are usually shorter, simpler, innately known and used for a more diverse set of functions, such as signaling about predators and food. (via Scientific American)
5. Female birds sing. That is one conclusion of our 2020 study on one of the most abundant, widespread, well-studied bird species in the world: the barn swallow. Despite the well over 1,000 scientific publications about this species, female barn swallow song had never previously been the focus of a research article. Why does it matter that female song has been ignored in this bird that breeds across most of North America? It highlights a long-standing scientific bias and helps us think about why that bias persists. In fact, females sing in at least 64 percent of songbird species, and their songs can serve the same functions as male songs. (via Scientific American)
6. One beautiful bird: A striking bird that calls the sandy deserts of Central and Western Australia home, this species makes birdwatchers earn any wild encounter they might have, though their presence in aviaries is a lot more predictable. One of three members of the long-tailed parrot genus Polytelis (which literally translates to ‘magnificent’), the princess parrot is closely related to the superb parrot (Polytelis swainsonii) of south-eastern Australia, which has distinctive sunset hues on its face and throat, and the regent parrot (Polytelis anthopeplus) of southern Australia, known for its patchwork of colours, including red, navy and canary-yellow. As Australian ornithologist and bird watcher Chris Watson points out in this lovely blog post about the princess parrot, these colours might look dissonant and rather ‘thrown together’ in isolation, but that’s because we so rarely see this bird in its natural habitat. (via Australian Geographic)
7. Condor news: Tucked among tall redwood trees in a remote part of northern California, four young California condors await their chance to take to the skies. The fluffy juveniles – housed in a facility where they playfully peck at each other and jump between perches – will help usher in a new era. Referred to as prey-go-neesh by the Yurok people who called this land home, the sacred scavengers are the first group to be reintroduced to their native range since they disappeared from the region more than a century ago. “For countless generations, the Yurok people have upheld a sacred responsibility to maintain balance in the natural world,” said Joseph L James, the chairman of the Yurok Tribe. “Condor reintroduction is a real-life manifestation of our cultural commitment to restore and protect the planet for future generations.” (via The Guardian)
8. Concerning: An outbreak of avian flu that has been spreading across the United States and Canada over the past six months only seems to be getting worse. First appearing in Canada last fall, the flu has ravaged industrial flocks and has now been detected in a wide variety of North American wild birds, raising alarms among ecologists. A particularly viral strain known as highly pathogenic avian influenza A (H5N1), or HPAI, the flu has already killed millions of domestic North American fowl, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). To date, more than 28 million domestic poultry in 29 stateshave died either through infection or preventative culling. In Canada, seven provinces have detected the virus in commercial and backyard poultry. (via Audubon)
9. Even Bald Eagles: With millions of chickens on commercial poultry farms sickened and dying from a highly virulent strain of avian flu in recent months, it might have escaped notice that some of the nation’s most stunning wild birds have also been felled by the virus. Bald eagles hunt living prey and scavenge carcasses, which offer a possible route of transmission for the virus. “If the waterfowl are dying, then eagles can pick it up from eating those dead waterfowl,” said Krysten Schuler, the co-director of the Cornell Wildlife Health Lab. The U.S.D.A. has reported 41 dead bald eagles infected with the virus since February, a number that does not include two more bald eagles. This month, bald eagles have been infected in Ohio, South Dakota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Vermont, Maine and North Dakota. (via The New York Times)
10. For you bird photographers: I spend most of my time focused on bad news. Every morning at dawn I review lists of new studies about endocrine-disrupting chemicals like bisphenol A (BPA). It can be brutal. I can take only so much of this. My retreat is bird photography. It makes me focus on the wonders of evolutionary adaptation to difficult challenges. My pretentious goal in this effort is to become a bird version of Georgia O’Keefe. OK … I know I’ll never get that good, but I can try. I deeply enjoy helping the casual observer see intimate views of a bird they normally would never see. I have no choice but to shut out of my mind all the bad stuff, and focus my mind and the camera on the bird in front of me, hopefully RIGHT in front of me, at minimum focusing distance or close-there-to. My favorite subjects are shorebirds, especially sandpipers and most especially sanderlings, a species I focused upon while doing a Ph.D. on its behavior and ecology while at U.C. Berkeley in the 1970s through 1981. (via Environmental Health News)
11. Another cool tool for birders from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology: The BirdCast program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is exploring bird migration – one of the greatest, mostly unseen spectacles of nature – with its new Migration Dashboard, which reveals bird movements in localized detail previously unavailable to the general public. “With this new Migration Dashboard, you get facts and figures about what’s going on in the skies above you at the county level in near-real time,” said Andrew Farnsworth, senior researcher with BirdCast. “In recent years, we’ve been able to visualize and forecast the movements of migrating birds on a continent-wide scale, using weather surveillance radar. (via Cornell Chronicle)
12. Feel good piece: The first time Jason Batchelder, the chief game warden for the state of Vermont, heard the proclamation that we are living in a “new golden age of wildlife in New England,” he admits he did a double-take. The region is certainly experiencing a boom in point-and-shout animals — Deer! Turkey! Coyote! Fox! Eagle! Bear! — but the declaration of a golden age is another thing entirely, and he might have dismissed the bold claim had it not come out of the mouth of Louis Porter, at the time the commissioner of the Vermont Fish & Game Department. “It stuck with me,” Batchelder said. “And it’s tricky to speak in absolutes, but if you start looking into it, you’ll see that for the most part, it’s true.” So let’s look into it, into the long story of how science-based wildlife management, based on a set of principles developed in the 19th century, brought New England wildlife from its darkest days into an era in which state agencies are pleading for hunters to eat more animals. (via The Boston Globe)
Bird Photo of the Week
Photo by Hap Ellis, Scissor-tailed Flycatcher – Ellis County, TX.
Bird Videos of the Week
By PBS Nature, “Meet the Smallest Bird on Earth”.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Savannah Great Horned Owls.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Sleepy Eyes.