Posts
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| Merlin / Photo by Bill Thompson (USFWS) |
- About 103 Spoon-billed Sandpipers were recorded recently in China at a site north of the Yangtze Estuary. The site was only recently discovered to be an important shorebird staging area and is currently not protected.
- The West Nile Virus has done so well in North America because it mutated to be spread more easily by the local mosquitos and found a reservoir among American Robins.
- A new study on how woodpeckers avoid brain injury argues woodpeckers' brains are protected by the looping shape of their hyoid bones, a lower mandible longer than the upper mandible, and a spongy bone structure to distribute the force of the blows.
- One unexpected effect of oil exploration in the Arctic is that predators use the infrastructure for dens and nesting and then use that as a base to prey on the nests of migratory birds. The rise in predation has particularly hurt Laplan Longspurs and phalaropes.
- Conservationists are trying to remove the house mouse population from Farallon Islands because the mice are causing Burrowing Owls to stay longer on the islands through the fall and winter, which in turn puts stress on Ashy Storm-Petrels.
- Tests on Bald Eagle eggs show that the species has benefited greatly from the regulation of dioxin discharged in paper mill wastewater.
- Two birders are competing to set the new big year record in New Jersey.
- Duke Farms is restoring a 500-acre wetland to provide more suitable habitat for marsh birds, especially the Northern Harrier.
- A scientist tells of sampling bird populations at Yanaba Island in Papua New Guinea.
- Sibley Guides: Does technology make birders lazy?
- The Drinking Bird: Birder Jargon Project: Along came a Sparrow
- Round Robin: See the Only Known Images of the Lost Imperial Woodpecker [Video]
- Greg Miller: Who’s The Best Birder In The World?
- The Nemesis Bird: Photo Study: Yellow-rumped Warbler
- Extinction Countdown: Please Don’t Feed the Endangered Eagles?
- A new study has officially linked white-nose syndrome in bats to the fungus Geomyces destructans and demonstrated that bats can pass the fungus to each other. The finding opens a way forward for combating the disease, perhaps through a vaccine. There is some evidence that the fungus originated in Europe and spread to North America, where bats had not evolved resistance to the fungus.
- The federal government has designated 140 square miles of critical habitat for endangered black abalone snails along the Pacific coast of California. Their numbers crashed during the 1980s due to disease.
- The Obama administration wants to impose a 20-year ban on new mining claims around the Grand Canyon.
- The Condit Dam on Washington's White Salmon River became the second-largest dam to be removed to restore fish passage. The dam blocked the annual migrations of salmon, steelhead, and Pacific lamprey for spawning.
- A new study confirms interbreeding between the eastern population of coyotes and wolves in the Great Lakes region. The study also showed that coyotes colonized the east via two routes: one around the Great Lakes and the other through southern states. The coyotes in Northern Virginia followed the northern route.
- Poachers killed the last living Vietnamese rhinoceros, a subspecies of the Javan rhinoceros.
- There are fewer American martens in California than in the past, which may be linked to a reduction in suitable forest habitat.
- Here are the results of another environmental photography contest.
