1. An elaborate hidden hierarchy: The interactions between birds in the park or at your backyard feeder may look like chaos, but they’re actually following the subtle rules of a hidden avian social order. Armed with a database of almost 100,000 bird interactions, experts known as ornithologists have decoded that secret pecking order and created a continent-wide power ranking of almost 200 species — from the formidable wild turkey at the top to the tiny, retiring brown creeper at the bottom. Their work illuminates an elaborate hidden hierarchy: Northern mockingbirds and red-bellied woodpeckers are pugnacious for their size, but both would give way if a truly dominant bird like an American crow descended upon the feeder. (via The Washington Post)
Sign up for Cornell Lab’s Project FeederWatch at https://feederwatch.org.
2. Female birds sing. That is one of the revelations 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 the Northern Hemisphere? It highlights a long-standing bias and helps us think about why that bias persists. (via Scientific American)
3. More on the lead story from last week: Ewan Wakefield had been sailing across the North Atlantic for days when the ocean suddenly greened. A phytoplankton bloom had emerged at the edge of an oceanic cold front roughly 1,000 kilometers south of Greenland, attracting precisely what Wakefield was hoping to find. Until recently, scientists knew relatively little about the lives of the birds that dwell on the open North Atlantic. Not knowing where they live or feed has made protecting the birds nearly impossible. But a group of about 80 scientists, including Wakefield, a biologist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, has been scouring the North Atlantic to find out more. In the process, they’ve identified an ocean habitat teeming with birds. (via Smithsonian Magazine)
4. A study examining eye disease in a common bird species shows how pathology and behavior interact in complex ways that determine how widely a pathogen can spread. The study, published recently in the academic journal Biology Letters, examined pairs of house finches to see how readily mycoplasmal conjunctivitis passes from one bird to another based on lesion severity and feeding behavior. By tracking the severity of disease in infected birds, the researchers noted trends that made transmission more or less likely. (via Iowa State University)
5. Local conservation in action: Birdsong is the soundtrack of life in the country, and a coalition of conservation groups aims to keep it that way. To do so in Virginia’s Piedmont and Shenandoah Valley pastures, though, requires working in concert with private landowners who care for the vast majority of local grasslands. These grassy expanses are used primarily to support livestock, as either grazing pasture or harvested feed. But they can also provide rich year-round habitat to a cadre of birds, from the yellow-bellied Eastern meadowlark to the rust-winged American kestrel. That’s the message of the Piedmont Grassland Bird Initiative, a collaboration started this year between the Piedmont Environmental Council and Virginia Working Landscapes (a program of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute). (via Bay Journal)
6. 700 years ago: The world's largest-ever eagle acted like a vulture-raptor hybrid, taking down prey before eating its insides. Haast's eagle was a 15-kilogram bird of prey that lived in New Zealand until around 700 years ago and is believed to have preyed on the moa, an extinct group of birds that could measure up to four metres tall. A new paper suggests that the challenges of tackling large prey led to the eagles' unusual body shape, which has baffled scientists for centuries. Dr Joanne Cooper, who is a Senior Curator of birds at the Museum and was not involved in the research, says, “It's always been a puzzle with Haast's eagle as the head end looks quite vulture-like while the feet end looks very eagle-like”. The findings of the international team of researchers were published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. (via National Museum of History)
7. There seems to be a perversity to human nature, in that we don’t really care about wild creatures until there are so few left that we can put a name to them. Think Martha, the last passenger pigeon, or the haunting images of Benjamin the last thylacine, pacing around its cage at Hobart zoo in 1936. The Action Plan for Australian Birds 2020 bandies a lot of names of birds you may never have heard of, which are now classified as on the path to extinction – 214 to be exact, around one in six of Australia’s bird species and subspecies. It can all be too much to take in. So here is a guide to six birds of which there are so few left in the wild that we could easily remember them all if they had individual names. (via The Guardian)
8. Growing up in Canadian cities with a bird-watching mom, Rosemary Mosco was no stranger to pigeons. “You can’t help but notice,” she says. Other kids sometimes even brought injured pigeons to Mosco, trusting her to shepherd them to a nearby wildlife care center. Today Mosco works as an illustrator and author (and caretaker of happily noisy pet parrots), and recently decided to swoop into pigeon biology, genetics, communication, flirting, and more. Her new book, A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching: Getting to Know the World’s Most Misunderstood Bird, is part ornithology guide, part ode. Flitting across continents and millennia, Mosco describes how pigeons have been domesticated, depicted in art (and the Bible), and recruited as allies in combat—and why some humans soured on them. (via Atlas Obscura)
9. Imitation as flattery: Like snowflakes, no two branches are alike. They can differ in size, shape and texture; some might be wet or moss-covered or bursting with offshoots. And yet birds can land on just about any of them. This ability was of great interest to the labs of Stanford University engineers Mark Cutkosky and David Lentink have both developed technologies inspired by animal abilities. Years of study on animal-inspired robots in the Cutkosky Lab and on bird-inspired aerial robots in the Lentink Lab enabled the researchers to build their own perching robot, detailed in a paper published Dec. 1 in Science Robotics. When attached to a quadcopter drone, their “stereotyped nature-inspired aerial grasper,” or SNAG, forms a robot that can fly around, catch and carry objects and perch on various surfaces. (via Stanford News)
10. This year conservation leaders, bird advocates, college students, ambassadors, volunteers, and scientists accomplished amazing things. Through early-December, more than 170,000 of us contacted decision-makers more than 1,085,000 times on behalf of birds. All of the accomplishments listed below come from the hard work and dedication of our members, chapters, volunteers, and staff. We're very proud of what we have been able to accomplish together over the past 12 months. In commemoration, Audubon highlights the most important ways that our flock worked together this year. (via Audubon)
11. For anyone gifting binoculars: Don’t give binoculars as a holiday present to anyone but yourself. The chances of selecting just the right pair for someone else are close to nil. I am frequently asked for a recommendation on the best optics to buy. I can’t answer that question, and neither can you, until you first answer this question: How will you use them? Binoculars come in many different configurations of magnification and light-gathering capability. It’s impossible to predict which pair is best, without knowing how they will be used. Every pair of binos is rated by two numbers: the magnification power and the size of the front lens. Thus, 10×50 binoculars are 10-power with 50-millimeter objective lenses. For birding, magnification between 7.5 and 10 is optimal. Generally, the second number, the objective size, should be around five times the magnification number. (via Bangor Daily News)
12. A book review for birders: Birders can be obsessed with seeing every living species of bird on the planet — but how can serious birders pursue their passion so rare birds and their habitats are protected? The current 20-months-long-and-still-counting pandemic lockdown has inspired many people to begin doing things they’ve never done, nor even thought about doing. Bird watching — birding as it’s more correctly known — is one of these activities that has enjoyed an extraordinary surge in popularity since lockdowns began. In the past, this mad pursuit often requires long-distance airplane flights and automobile drives. Birder, lister and author, Martin Painter, has spent a lot of time chasing rare or endangered birds. Apparently, all those long plane flights have provided him with a lot of time to think deeply about this particular obsession, as we learn whilst reading his book, Birding In An Age Of Extinction (Whittles Publishing Limited; 2021: Amazon US / Amazon UK). (via Forbes)
Bird Photo of the Week
Photo by Hap Ellis, Reddish Egret.
Bird Videos of the Week
By National Geographic, “Great Horned Owl on the Hunt”.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Ospreys Share a Meal.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Egg Watch.