1. Whimbrel migration stars in last Sunday’s CBS Sunday Morning:
2. The remarkable Whimbrel: With a Swarovski birding scope beside him and a pair of Vortex binoculars hanging from his neck, Alan Kneidel was hoping to see some whimbrels, a large sandpiper known to frequent Wellfleet’s saltmarshes from July through September. And he was hoping to see one bird in particular: a juvenile whimbrel with a green tag on its leg reading EY6. Kneidel and Shiloh Schulte had tagged the bird the day before as part of a large-scale whimbrel study they’ve been working on for years. Both men are scientists with Manomet, a Plymouth-based organization that has been studying bird migrations in the Western Hemisphere for more than five decades. Tagging EY6 was a crucial step in the Manomet study. Using data from the transmitter, scientists hope to understand how many whimbrels there are and what lands they use. They want to forge partnerships with local and regional government and business forces to help sustain the bird populations. (via Cape Cod Times)
3. On any given day Ollie Olanipekun and Nadeem Perera might see herons or peregrine falcons; if they’re lucky, they’ll spot kingfishers and woodpeckers. “As soon as I lock onto a bird through my binoculars, my brain is clear of stress,” says Olanipekun, 36, who runs the global creative agency Futurimpose; Perera, 27, is a youth football coach. “Not even meditation gives me that space.” The pair launched Flock Together, the UK’s first birdwatching community for people of color, in 2020, having bonded over “birding” on Instagram, and met in real life only the night before their first walk. This summer sees Flock launch in Manchester, and migrate internationally to Tokyo, Toronto, Paris, Copenhagen and New York. The duo is also writing a book – a manual for the great outdoors. Other projects include a partnership with Timberland; a starring role in the Gucci x The North Face campaign; and a six-part birdwatching series for the BBC’s The One Show. (via Financial Times)
4. Nets, cages or nooses?: Hunters are planning demonstrations across France to denounce a court order that prevents them from catching birds in nets, cages or nooses. The protests have alarmed President Macron’s government, which is scrambling to rewrite a series of decrees to enable “traditional hunting” to continue. Bird lovers, however, are threatening court action against the decrees, in the hope that they will be struck down by judges. The issue is politically explosive. An estimated five million people hunt sometimes; 1.1 million do so regularly. Macron is popular among the wealthy urban elite but much less so among rural voters. He is keen to avoid angering the powerful hunting lobby before he stands for re-election next year. (via The Times)
5. More on the Cornel Lab’s Merlin app: In 2012, Heather Wolf moved back to New York and decided to document every bird species in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Four years later, she published “Birding at the Bridge,” a two-hundred-and-seventy-nine-page book that’s partly a bird guide, partly a memoir, and partly a triumph of nature photography. That same year, she was hired to do what has turned out to be her dream job (so far): Web development for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Merlin can identify birds by image and sound. When the app records a bird call, it generates a spectrogram, which looks like a tracing made by a seismograph during an earthquake. Different species’ spectrograms aren’t as individual as fingerprints, but almost. Sound ID is powered by an artificial-intelligence algorithm that bird-identification experts and lab staff have trained by feeding it thousands of spectrograms submitted by birders (through ebird.org, one of the lab’s sites) and annotated by bird-sound experts. (via The New Yorker)
5. Why we need “Lights Out”: Hundreds of birds migrating through New York City this week died after crashing into the city’s glass towers, a mass casualty event spotlighted by a New York City Audubon volunteer’s tweets showing the World Trade Center littered with bird carcasses. This week’s avian death toll was particularly high, but bird strikes on Manhattan skyscrapers are a persistent problem that NYC Audubon has documented for years, said Kaitlyn Parkins, the group’s associate director of conservation and science. Stormy weather on Monday night into Tuesday contributed to the deaths, she said. “It seems that the storm might have brought the birds in lower than they would have otherwise been, or just disoriented them,” Parkins added. “The effects of nocturnal light on birds is also quite strong, especially when it’s a cloudy night.” (via The Guardian)
6. Until now it was thought that migratory birds usually fly at altitudes of below 2,000m, and only in rare extreme cases fly higher than 4,000m. But now researchers at Lund University in Sweden have observed two different migratory birds – a songbird and a wader – regularly fly at altitudes of between 4,000m-6,000m when they continue their night flights into daytime. Until recently, most observations of flying altitudes in migratory birds were made by radar, which could only follow birds for a few minutes. But technicians at Lund have developed a new type of miniaturised datalogger that attaches to the bird. These loggers make it possible for us to track the birds’ behavior, altitude and location throughout their journeys. (via The Conversation)
7. Introducing Yuanchuavis, an extinct bird that lived 120 million years ago in what is now China. Its elaborate tail feathers appear to contain a mix of functional and decorative characteristics, scientists say, revealing new insights into the evolution of ancient birds. Research describes Yuanchuavis, an early Cretaceous bird with a pair of tail feathers longer than its body. These feathers weren’t very aerodynamic and that they likely served an ornamental purpose to attract mates. But this bird was also equipped with a bundle of shorter tail feathers that likely enabled flight. For Yuanchuavis, it was a case of sexual selection being in tension with natural selection—a combination of pressures that resulted in an impressively distinctive creature. Paleontologist Wang Min from the Chinese Academy of Sciences is the paper’s first author. (via Gizmodo)
8. Good question: What Should I Do About My Bird-Killing Cat? I’ve been rather haunted by a prizewinning photograph by Jak Wonderly titled “Caught by Cats.” It shows the intricately arrayed bodies of 232 creatures, mainly the kind with beaks and feathers, that encountered a creature with claws and whiskers. The photograph draws attention to a still larger picture of predation. A few years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that in the United States alone, cats kill something like 2.4 billion birds a year. That’s a multiple of the estimated number killed by wind turbines; indeed, little else that humans are involved in — not tall glass-clad buildings, not impacts with motor vehicles — comes close to our pets as a source of avian mortality. (via New York Times Magazine)
9. Speaking of fossils: Today’s birds evolved from dinosaurs, which makes them dinosaurs! The same way bats are mammals, birds are a strange type of dinosaur that got small, evolved wings and developed the ability to fly. Birds evolved from ‘raptor’ dinosaurs – the Velociraptor family. The oldest fossil of a true bird, defined as a dinosaur that could fly by flapping its wings, is Archaeopteryx, which lived about 150 million years ago in the Late Jurassic. But because close ‘raptor’ cousins of birds are known from earlier in the Jurassic, it’s likely birds first took to the skies around 170 million years ago. (via Science Focus)
10. Different kind of light problem: Local conservation groups are planning to sue the Grand Wailea Resort in Maui for harming native birds, a violation of the Endangered Species Act. The groups say bright LED lights covering the resort’s 40-acre property attract ʻuaʻu, or Hawaiian petrel, who confuse the artificial light as the moon. Turtles also move towards the LED lights, confusing its blue hue for the moon. The case brought by Earthjustice says birds circle the light until they become exhausted and fall to the ground, injuring their wings and often dying. This process is known as "fall-out." "These incredible birds are endemic to Hawaiʻi, which means that they are found nowhere else in the world," said Maxx Phillips, the Hawaiʻi director of the Center for Biological Diversity. "It would be so heartbreaking to see a species like this go extinct because humans couldn’t make small changes." (via Hawaii Public Radio)
11. “The bird-to-student ratio”: I like birds. So does author and outdoor writer Matt Pawlik, who recently visited the little known Moore Laboratory of Zoology at Occidental College, which claims the “highest bird-to-student ratio.” Matt took a behind-the-scenes tour of the lab (and you can too) and sent this report: “Welcome to the Apple store for birds,” John McCormack, director and curator of the laboratory, said at the beginning of the ornithological museum tour. A (very amateur) birder myself, I was busy gazing at two dozen beautiful Steller’s jay specimens amid the 60,000 winged residents, including 50,000 from Mexico, the largest such collection in the world. Though the vast majority of birds were collected long ago, they still contribute to scientific study today. (via Los Angeles Times)
Bonus Lecture: The next installment in the St. Andrews University: Saints Talk series from Professor Will Cresswell, ‘Understanding Bird Migration' is on September 21, 2021 at 5:15pm, London time. A Professor of Biology at the University, Cresswell has been studying the ecology of migrant birds for the last 25 years. Cresswell’s research focuses on understanding how one third of the bird species that breed in Europe are actually African species, where they spend most of the year. But this annual migration marvel, that brings tropical species to our backyards each year also brings a number of scientific and conservation challenges: How do the birds make it to Africa and back? Where do they go in Africa? How can they cope with the different environments in Europe and Africa, and those along the way? Will's talk will describe some of his research to answer these questions. Register at the link here to join the online event. (via University of St. Andrews)
Bird Photo of the Week
Photo by Hap Ellis, Red-tailed Hawk.
Bird Videos of the Week
By BBC Earth, “Penguin chicks rescued by unlikely hero.”
Cornell Live Bird Cam - California Condors.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Cross-Canyon Cam.