1. Let’s start with this: There is nothing like a good nap – but how about thousands of naps in a day?: Penguins are champion power nappers. Over the course of a single day, they fall asleep thousands of times, each bout a few seconds long, a new study has found. Although animals have a wide range of sleeping styles, penguins easily take the record for fragmented sleeping. “It’s really unusual,” said Paul-Antoine Libourel, a neuroscientist at the Neuroscience Research Center of Lyon in France who helped make the discovery. “This just highlights the fact that we don’t know much about sleep, and all animals are not sleeping like the way we read in textbooks.”The study was published on Thursday in the journal Science. (via The New York Times)
2. BNI has highlighted the Motus Wildlife Tracking System and its importance for tracking migratory species. Well, Motus again! Twice each year, members of a subspecies of red knots — salmon-colored sandpipers — migrate thousands of miles between their wintering grounds in northern Mexico and breeding sites in the Arctic tundra, encountering myriad obstacles along the way. Thought to migrate during both day and night, brightly lit cities likely disrupt their nighttime journeys, and rising sea levels and invasive species threaten the wetlands they rely on for refueling at stopover sites. The red knot is one of some 350 North American bird species that migrate. Yet there remains much to learn about the details of their journeys. It’s a critical information gap given the loss of an estimated 3 billion birds in North America since 1970, according to a 2019 study. (via Undark)
3. A cool idea from Maine Audubon – virtual winter birding: This winter, join us virtually to improve your birding from the comfort of home, with Virtual Birding, a free online program taking place every other Monday evening, December through February. Through the magic of live-streamed bird feeder cameras, I will guide viewings of birds in Maine and throughout the world. Each program, we will watch videos from several locations and discuss the species and behaviors we are observing. Wishing you had booked a tropical vacation to escape the cold? No worries—you can observe birds in Panama and South Africa from your couch during Virtual Birding. Likewise, you don’t need to be out in the cold to observe birds in northern Maine and Ontario—we will go there virtually! (via Maine Audubon)
4. 3.8 million eBird (and Birdata) hours inform this study: Louis Backstrom from UQ's School of the Environment led the research and said the Coxen's fig-parrot was the bird that was most elusive to Australian birdwatchers, based on the data found in the eBird and Birdata databases. "Coxen's fig-parrots are small, dumpy, green parrots with very short tails, and historically they were scattered in rainforests between Bundaberg in Queensland and the Hastings River in New South Wales," Mr Backstrom said. "They've been sighted only once in every 81,000 citizen science bird surveys on the east coast of Australia. "But there are so few recent sightings that this mysterious little bird could be extinct.” Senior author on the research paper, Professor James Watson, said being on the 'least known' list did not automatically mean the bird was rare. (via Science Daily)
5. The power of Cornell Lab’s eBird data (yet again): Australia is one of the greatest places to see birds. We are fortunate to have more than 800 different bird species across the nation. At least 370 species are found nowhere else on Earth. They range from the iconic Australian magpie to the migratory short-tailed shearwater, the golden-shouldered parrot and the delightful superb fairy-wren. Every day, thousands of birdwatchers are out spotting birds. Yet despite this enthusiasm, there’s a lot still to learn. More than 200 species are already listed as threatened with extinction but others may also be struggling and we just don’t know it yet. In our new research, we used citizen science data to rank Australia’s birds in terms of how well they are known. (via The Conversation)
6. Rare Bird Alert - An Ancient Murrelet in Tennessee (what!): How far did you travel for the Thanksgiving holiday? It probably wasn't as far as an out-of-town visitor that's currently drawing a crowd at Chickamauga Lake. Bird watchers from around the country have been flocking to Chattanooga to spot a rare treat: An ancient murrelet, who calls much of the northern Pacific Ocean region home, particularly in the Aleutian Islands off of Alaska. No one knows how the bird got so far off course. But they're not complaining. Dozens who go out to Chickamauga Lake have snapped photos of it. You can see some of those photos here. (via News Channel 9 Tennessee)
7. Yet another example of bioacoustics in action: How do you look for an animal you don’t even know exists anymore? The last sighting of the purple-winged ground dove (Paraclaravis geoffroyi) — a small, bamboo-loving dove native to the South American Atlantic Forest in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay — was in 1985. But, researchers wondered, was it possible to capture the elusive bird’s sound in the wild to find out if any individuals are left? It’s not an unheard-of idea. Scientists have used bioacoustics — a subfield of ecology that relies on sound to make environmental analyses — for everything from recording dolphins’ communication patterns to studying bats from afar to avoid virus spillover from humans. With artificial intelligence, it is now possible to use large audio datasets to train algorithms to spot different animal sounds within the cacophony of a natural background. (via Science News)
8. If it wasn’t a Rufous-vented Ground Cuckoo, not sure we would have noticed: Although I’m a big fan of birds, I think I fall short of being a birder. I don’t don one of those floppy wide-brimmed hats with the flap in the back and string around my neck, and I don’t own one of those scopes that you put on the tripod to spot distant birds. I think without those items, I fall short of the official birder level, but if I were a real birder, I would be very excited about the rufous-vented ground-cuckoo. The rufous-vented ground-cuckoo (Neomorphus geoffroyi) is known as the Cuco Hormiguero in Spanish. This bird is awesome for two main reasons. First, it just looks cool. Second, it’s extremely rare. When you come across the rufous-vented ground-cuckoo, you stop and take notice. (via Tico Times)
9. Important work on Whooping Cranes in Indiana: Conserving cranes: With their large frames, bright red patches and unique calls, whooping cranes are hard to miss. However, research completed by Purdue University and the International Crane Foundation, or ICF, found that most people don't even know whooping cranes exist. That's because just a few decades ago, North America's tallest bird was almost gone for good. Before European settlers began draining wetlands and plowing prairies, North America was home to an estimated 10,000 whooping cranes. The bird's historical range extended all the way to the Arctic; Indiana would have been a breeding ground for whooping cranes. The remaining birds all followed the same migration route, called a "flyway," breeding in Canada and traveling to coastal Texas in the winter. (via NWI News)
10. Not just any footprints, 60 million year-old footprints: Footprints preserved in stone in Lesotho appear to have been made by animals that walked on birdlike feet around 215 million years ago, long before the earliest known birds. The earliest fossils recognised as ancestors of modern birds, including the famous Archaeopteryx, date back 150 million to 160 million years. Miengah Abrahams and Emese Bordy, both at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, studied an 80-metre-long stretch of footprints at a site called Maphutseng, as well as casts and sketches made by previous researchers at four other sites in Lesotho. (via New Scientist)
11. First time in 150 years – can it be a kiwi chick in NZ’s capital? Conservationists have discovered two kiwi chicks in Wellington, the first wild births recorded for the bird in the New Zealand capital in over 150 years. The two new chicks come just a year after the Capital Kiwi Project reintroduced the country’s iconic national bird to the city of around 400,000 people. Their birth in Makara, a suburb just 25 minutes from Wellington’s city center, takes the local total to 65 North Island brown kiwi. Another 18 brown kiwi chicks are expected to hatch as part of the Capital Kiwi Project, which hopes to restore a large-scale wild population of kiwi to New Zealand’s capital. (via CNN)
12. As you read this, consider that the tip speed of a rotating wind turbine blade can be 100+ mph: As the debate over wind turbines heats up in Dickinson County one of the go-to arguments against them is the effect they have on birds. Organizations have produced myriad reports over the past couple of decades to back one side or the other. There are some absolutes; however, that both sides agree on — bird kills associated with turbines are well documented. One flyer, which is often quoted by those who oppose the turbines, passed around by county residents states, “Wind company reps deny that turbines have an impact on wildlife. However, the American Bird Conservancy has utilized data from the U.S. Wind Turbine Database to determine that approximately 538,000 wind turbine-caused bird deaths occur each year.” (via Abilene-RC)
13. Well, maybe it’s the hotel that isn’t welcomed!!!: Caesar’s Republic Scottsdale, an 11-story boutique hotel, hopes its $600-3,000 per night rooms will attract high-flying tourists. But not high-flying birds. In a pun-filled – if not fun-filled – Design Review Board meeting, the $110 million hotel’s owner and his attorney asked for a fairly significant change, even though “construction of the hotel was started in early 2022 and is now mostly complete.” An out-of-state architect and “miscommunication” leading to a delayed city response combined for the request being addressed this late in the game. Owner Rick Huffman and his attorney, John Berry, asked the board to approve a significant change – largely because a similarly-designed hotel in Oklahoma has an issue with what might be called uninvited guests. (via Scottsdale Progress)
14. Stanford birding team for the win: On Nov. 11, the Birding Big Game between Stanford Birdwatching Club (SBC) and Berkeley’s Bears for Birds took SBC members to the O’Donohue Family Stanford Educational Farm. The Nov. 11 matchup was the third of its kind between the two birdwatching clubs, with the first taking place in 2014 and the second this past spring. The objective of the competition is simple: to identify the most bird species on each campus’s grounds. This year, Stanford spotted 86 species and Berkeley found 48. Stanford surpassed their baseline of 83.5 while Berkeley fell short of theirs of 64, making SBC the clear victor. (via The Stanford Daily)
15. Avian Bird Flu update - for our poultry farmers: With winter approaching, birds are migrating south to escape the cold and take advantage of more abundant food sources. But birds aren't the only ones taking advantage of this migratory ritual. Avian influenza viruses, more commonly known as bird flu, can spread across the country if migrating birds carry the viruses with them on their pre-winter journey. As a result, Dr. Isabelle Louge, a clinical assistant professor at the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, advises poultry owners to remain vigilant against the spread of bird flu this winter because it can be deadly for our avian counterparts. (via Phys Org)
16. Finally, BNI has been to Skagit, WA, and can confirm the Snow Goose fall migration is amazing – but not so much for farmers; we get that: In late autumn on the cusp of cool winter days, snow comes early to Washington when thousands of aloft avians, snow geese, land here in a flurry of white feathers. "We call it a snow storm, they just will move as one," said birder Julie Hagen. "It's just this chaotic whirlwind of birds, they move like a cloud and then they just lift up in the air.” In late October, as the snow geese began landing in the Skagit Valley, Hagen went out to enjoy the sight that many Western Washington birders look forward to each year. Lucky and patient observers might get to see the spectacle Hagen calls a snow storm, when the birds take off in a group. The individual birds become indistinguishable from each other within all those white feathers. (via La Conner Weekly News)
Bird Videos of the Week
By Badgerland Birding, “The Unbelievable Bird I’ve Never Seen.. Until Today!”
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Blue Jay.
Cornell Live Bird Cam - Flame-rumped Tanager.