Posts
Lewis's Woodpecker / Photo by Dave Menke (USFWS)News about birds
- Warmer temperatures are leading many British birds to lay their eggs earlier in the spring. This could lead to problems if the chicks hatch when their expected food source is not available.
- Bird lineages with proportionately large brains have a greater capacity for adaptive evolution. A study compared the relative body sizes of 7,209 species and found that families with a high degree of body size diversity tended to have relatively large brains. The large-brained birds included woodpeckers, hornbills, parrots, owls, lyrebirds, and crows.
- Invasive brown tree snakes killed off most of Guam's birds, and now the lack of birds is altering the island's flora.
- BirdLife is promoting a new Standard Lexicon for Biodiversity Conservation to improve communication and cooperation among conservationists around the world.
- A new study refutes claims that hen harriers were causing declines among ground-nesting shorebirds.
- An oil company in Montana pleaded guilty to killing migratory birds in open oil pits.
- The Marvelous Spatuletail, a rare hummingbird, is being seen regularly at feeders in northern Peru.
- Snowy egrets have created a large rookery in a city park in Willows, California, leaving residents around the park unhappy. (Even if you don't like the premises of the news story, check out the photo gallery that accompanies it.)
- Substantial restoration work, including the clearing of invasive species, has brought nesting herons back to the Stone Harbor Bird Sanctuary (NJ).
- Round Robin: Thursday: Can We Have Wind Power and Birds, Too?
- Behind the Bins: Roadrunner vs. Flammulated Owl
- BES Group: Albino House Sparrow being fed by an adult bird
- BirdingGirl: Identifying Birds
- Guadalupe Storm-Petrel: China Month 2. Satellite Tracking of Siberian Cranes
- Conserving biodiversity requires government action, but also depends to a great extent on action by individuals to reduce their impact on the environment.
- Warmer temperatures are slowly killing trees in California's mountain ranges. White fir, Jeffrey pine, and California lilac are particularly affected. Changes in average temperature shift the growing zones of the trees higher up the mountains.
- Older people will need extra help to deal with climate change.
- The number of dead zones in coastal estuaries has doubled every decade since the 1960s. Dead zones occur when fertilizer runoff and airborne pollution cause algae blooms, which, in turn, deprive the water (and everything in it) of oxygen.
- More cities are considering reviving streetcars to reduce automobile traffic.
- The break down products of hard, clear plastics may make lobsters susceptible to shell diseases.
- Air pollution, some of which comes from the U.S., is expected to kill 20,000 Canadians this year.
