The Billion Bird Migration.
Bird News Items
1. With coronavirus restrictions dragging on, interest in bird-watching has soared as bored Americans notice a fascinating world just outside their windows. Downloads of popular bird identification apps have spiked, and preliminary numbers show sales of bird feeders, nesting boxes, and birdseed have jumped even as demand for other nonessential goods plummets. The trend coincides with peak migration for hundreds of species and nesting season, giving newfound birders a front-row seat to some of nature’s biggest shows. Birds are their most active — and noisy — now, and, like Brown, many Americans no longer in an office or classroom all day are taking notice. (via Edition)
Photo By Hap Ellis
2. On May 1, 150,000 migratory birds flew over Dallas. Thousands of them don’t make it out alive. And former first lady Laura Bush wants us to help them. Every spring, 3 billion birds migrate into the U.S. from Central and South America, one-third of them through Texas. A 19-day period ending May 7 accounts for half of all spring migration, up to 1 billion birds of more than 200 species. But light pollution is disrupting the superhighway. As counterintuitive as it sounds, birds have a harder time navigating with lots of artificial light. They’re attracted to light but they get disoriented and they make mistakes. Laura Bush has added her voice to an awareness campaign called Lights Out Texas encouraging property owners to turn off nonessential lighting during these nights of peak migration. (via Dallas News)
3. Since the mass production of plastics began around the mid-20th century, more than 8.3 billion metric tons of the stuff have been sent out into the world, with much of it ending up in the sea. Bearing that bad news is a bird—the Northern Fulmar, which has the dubious talent of being a natural plastic detector. Fulmars eat so much plastic that the birds themselves can contribute to local pollution in the Arctic. As they deposit guano on the steep seaside cliffs where they breed, fulmars may be creating polluted halos of excreted microplastics around their breeding colonies. But in the Northern Fulmar, researchers have found an extraordinarily cost-effective and labor-saving tool for plastics monitoring. Essentially, the fulmars are spreading out and sampling most of the circumpolar Arctic on scientists’ behalf. (via All About Birds)
4. Scientists have known for some time that teamwork exists in the bird world. Yet new research is pointing to surprising sorts of avian esprit de corps: collaborative deeds demanding emotional and practical intelligence once thought the special domain of humans. A recent experiment at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany showed that African gray parrots will spontaneously help a partner get a walnut by supplying the other bird with a little metal token that can be exchanged for the nut, with no apparent benefit to themselves. In parrot praxis, one good turn may deserve another: These highly social birds live in big flocks in central Africa’s rainforests, and aiding a fellow parrot might boost a bird’s reputation, helping it to get support later if it needs to find food or shoo away a predator. (via The Wall Street Journal)
5. With tourists home, boats docked and factories silenced under a coronavirus lockdown, Albania's pink flamingos and curly pelicans are flourishing in the newfound tranquility of lagoons dotting the country's western coastline. Beating their pink and black-lined wings, a growing flock of thousands of flamingos have recently been soaring over and splashing in the glistening waters of Narta Lagoon, an important site for migratory birds on the Adriatic coast. Their numbers have increased by nearly a third up to some 3,000 since January, according to park authorities. (via Phys Org)
6. A friendly reminder that it’s spring here in the northern hemisphere. It’s been hard to remember because of Covid-19. But outside, trees are blossoming, and birds are out and about—including corvids, which have been unfairly brought into the world of global health all the sudden by the unfortunate single-letter difference in their name. Corvids are a family of birds that includes crows, ravens, and magpies—and many are abundant this time of year. If you’re unable to go outside and see them this year, fear not—they’re around every year, and wonderfully unaware of any all-consuming events taking place in the human world. Take a break from thinking about Covid-19 and test your knowledge on these incredible creatures with the following 19 questions. (via Quartz)
7. The white-tailed eagle, the largest bird of prey seen in the U.K., has been seen in flight in England for the first time in over two centuries. A small number of eagles were taken from Scotland, where they had already been reintroduced into the environment, by the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation and Forestry England and placed on the Isle of Wight. They have since been seen in Norfolk, Kent and Somerset. It has a wingspan of up to 2.5 meters (8 feet 2 inches) and has not been seen in England since 1780. (via Newsweek)
Bird Photo of the Week
Photo by Hap Ellis. The Baltimore Oriole.
A Note from the Editor:
Spring is the time over a billion birds migrate north to breeding grounds throughout the U.S., Canada and the Arctic. An excellent daily guide to migration’s progress can be found at birdcast.info provided by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Real-time analysis maps show intensities of actual bird migration as detected by the US weather surveillance radar network. View the Live Migration Map here.