Posts
Bald Eagle with Young / USFWS Photo
Birds and birding news
- California hosted two rare gulls this week. First, an Ivory Gull showed up at Grover Beach in San Luis Obispo County. It was only the second state record for that species. Second, a Black-tailed Gull was found at Long Beach in Los Angeles County. You can read more about the rarities (including a Taiga Bean Goose) at Christopher Taylor's blog.
- Recent sightings patterns suggest that Ivory Gulls may be encountering ecological turmoil on their home range. Since 2005, there have been 12 records in the United States, compared to 28 over the past century.
- Open landfills in northern Alaska are causing a boom in the population of Glaucous Gulls. This is great for the gulls but not so great for other birds since Glaucous Gulls prey on the eggs and young of many nesting shorebirds.
- Staten Island hosts a small flock of Wild Turkeys that has been wandering around the Ocean Breeze neighborhood since 2000. The birds may not be completely wild since their plumage shows evidence of some domestic lineage.
- A roadkill Bald Eagle in New Brunswick, Canada, was banded as a nestling in Maine in June 1977; this makes it the oldest Bald Eagle recorded in the wild at 32 years, 10 months. Another Bald Eagle found dead in Maine lived to be 32 years, 4 months.
- Three men in Newfoundland were fined for selling Common Murres and Common Eiders.
- Early ripening and late ripening berries attract different sets of bird species. The latter are especially useful for overwintering birds.
- A rare Flores Scops-owl was recently photographed in Indonesia by visiting Danish scientists.
- Applying UV decals to the windows of the Baltimore Sun building seems to have reduced bird collisions.
- Net Results: Bird-Friendly coffee piece on NPR
- Sibley Guides: Questions about Starling migration
- Birdchick: I Hired A New Orleans Street Poet To Write A Titmouse Poem
- Birding in Maine: Hand Feeding Pine Siskins
- Avian Images: Brown Creeper!
- WolfeNotes: Cost Benefit Analysis For The Birds
- A new report argues that oil companies and governments are ill-prepared to deal with an oil spill in the Arctic.
- According to a local television station, some Turkey Vultures were found and rescued while coated in oil and floating in Florida's Biscayne Bay. The station does not report where the oil came from or how the vultures got there. (One possibility is that they were tired migrants.)
- Dead coral found on the seafloor around the site of BP's blown out well was probably killed by the oil spill.
- Oil from BP's well entered the food web by way of marine bacteria, which were in turn eaten by zooplankton. The latter will eventually be eaten by larger creatures.
- Entomologists recently recorded 6,619 ants of 13 species on the medians of major streets in Manhattan.
- The EPA issued guidelines about how it expects to enforce its new greenhouse gas regulations. Regulators will take technological constraints into account when deciding whether to require modifications of an existing carbon source.
- You can find more accurate information about climate change in The Onion than you will hear from my state's governor.
- The winners of the 2010 European Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition were announced this week. National Geographic has a gallery of the images.
