Posts
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| Northern Pintails in flight / Photo by J. Kelly (USFWS) |
- A banding project is tracking the winter travels of Atlantic Puffins that nest in Maine. After breeding, the puffins headed north, to the Gulf of St. Lawrence or the Labrador Sea, and then eventually flew out into the Atlantic Ocean, almost as far as Bermuda. There is a map of one puffin's travels at the link.
- A new study reports that two-thirds of adult California Condor deaths are due to lead poisoning.
- Older male White-crowned Sparrows see young males as less of a threat to their territories than other older males. This suggests that males can gauge the age of a rival from the rival's song.
- Mycoplasma gallisepticum, a deadly parasite that infects songbirds, evolves much more rapidly than most bacteria. This gives it an evolutionary advantage in overcoming resistance in songbirds, but it also lost some of its ability to fight off viruses in the process – a weakness that scientists may be able to exploit.
- The University of Wyoming is reviving its research collection of zoological specimens, which includes 2,500 birds.
- Gardens in the U.K. have seen an influx of birds in the past week due to extreme winter weather.
- The New Zealand Storm-petrel may actually breed in New Zealand, mostly likely in Hauraki Gulf Marine Park. The species was thought extinct until 2003 and remains Critically Endangered according to the IUCN Red List.
- CT scans of a mummified ibis showed that ancient Egyptians included food materials like grains for the ibis's nourishment in the afterlife.
- The populations of ravens and crows have boomed in the San Francisco Bay Area in the past 20 years.
- Blue Marble: Birds Near Fukushima Hit Harder Than at Chernobyl
- Extinction Countdown: Artificial Beaks Helping to Save Hornbills from Extinction in India
- Audubon Guides: Nuthatches: A Different Perspective
- Earbirding: Eastern and Western Blue-gray Gnatcatchers
- Outside My Window: Winter Trees: Black Cherry
- BESG: Mangrove Pitta handling crabs
- BugBlog: The impact of Harlequins on native ladybird fauna
- Wild About Ants: Gardening For Pollinators: How to Encourage Bees
- Sibley Guides: A quiz on bird wing feathers
- Beetles in the Bush: A Living Jewel – Madecassia rothschildi
- Hawkwatch at the Franklin Institute: Nest activity and Sunday hawks
- Laelaps: Everything You Wanted to Know About Dinosaur Sex
- This week Russian scientists drilled into Lake Vostok, a freshwater lake buried deep beneath the East Antarctic ice sheet. The scientists hope to determine whether life survives in the lake. Other teams of scientists are attempting to penetrate underground lakes elsewhere on the continent.
- A new map shows the areas with the highest risk of Lyme disease; unsurprisingly, the disease is most rampant in the northeastern U.S.
- Check out the insect wallpapers provided by Alex Wild.
- The EPA announced that digging in sand at the beach poses a higher threat of contamination than going into the water.
- According to a recent poll, 6 in 10 people would sacrifice having a big house for a walkable neighborhood, a sentiment I can identify with.
- Here are some ways to attract flashy moths to your garden. The planting recommendations are geared towards attracting British moths, but the general principles should work elsewhere.
- A study of stress hormones in whale feces found that the noise of ship engines and propellers greatly boosts stress in baleen whales, which communicate in low-frequency wavelengths.
- Peru created a new 970,000-acre ecological preserve in the Amazon basin.
- Scientists are trying to reintroduce the threatened Bay Checkerspot into Edgewood Park on the San Francisco peninsula, a park it disappeared from in 2o02. The park also holds the only known population of the endangered San Mateo Thornmint wildflower.
- Scientists were able to recreate the sound made by a Jurassic katydid.
