Posts
House Finch / Photo by Dave MenkeNews and links about birds, birding, and the environment
- As of Tuesday, 556 birds had died as a result of the San Francisco oil spill. There is never a good time for an oil spill, but this one came at a particularly bad time, as fall migration brings roughly 360,000 shorebirds, 700,000 waterfowl, and 300,000 seabirds through the San Francisco region. Some argue that money spent on cleaning oiled wildlife would be better spent on spill prevention. For more links on the spill, see my posts from Saturday and Monday.
- In addition to the mess in San Francisco, birds coated in a clear oily substance have turned up on the Santa Cruz coast.
The president of the Russian Bird Conservation Union reports that the number of birds killed in this week's Black Sea oil spill is far less than the 30,000 reported in the press. For background, see my post earlier in the week.- BirdLife argues that the Baltic Sea Action Plan needs to address the effects of oil pollution on birds.
- Another 400 short-tailed shearwaters have been found dead near Esperance, Australia, the same town where 4,000 seabirds turned up dead from lead poisoning last year.
- Band-rumped storm petrels have provided an example of how two related species can evolve in the same place - with genetic populations separated by time of breeding rather than a physical barrier.
- The Hawk Mountain observatory has so far counted 18,570 birds of prey migrating past the mountain - an above-average year. New records have been set for southbound turkey vultures (631) and merlins (226).
- In Florida, Palm Beach County wants to destroy colonies of feral sacred ibises. Wildlife commissioners worry that the feral ibises pose a threat to native wading birds. The largest colony lives at a garbage dump.
- Red-bellied woodpeckers continue their northward expansion, with new territories in the area of Albany, New York, and a first-ever record in Alberta.
- A council member in New York City wants to impose a $1,000 fine for feeding feral pigeons.
- Someone let domestic pigs loose on Snake Island, Michigan, to destroy cormorant nests.
- A writer for the Cincinnati Post travels to Baja in search of exotic landscapes to describe but is irritated by finding house sparrows instead.
- A group of ecologists estimates that Katrina killed about 320 million trees and thus released about 105 teragrams of carbon - over half the carbon that U.S. trees absorb each year. The threat of increased storm activity due to climate change also threatens the use of forests as carbon sinks.
- The Drinking Bird: Exotic Birds in Urban Environments (Part 1)
- Life, Birds, and Everything: Free the Wisconsin Mango!
- Tails of Birding: Vultures are Storks, not Hawks
- Outside My Window: 'Your bird is out there above the dumpsters'
- Sibley Guides Notebook: A Simple Method for "Bird-Proofing" Windows
