Posts
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| Gulls fighting over a crab / Photo by Bill Thompson (USFWS) |
- Vultures have a harder time than other birds avoiding wind turbines because they have blind spots in their vision above and ahead of them when they are flying.
- A Snowy Owl that spent the winter in Butler County, Kansas, recently was struck and killed by a car near the site where it wintered. At death, the owl weighed only 876 grams – or about half the normal weight for that species (1,612 grams for males or 1,707 grams for females). Even though it survived the winter and seemed to be well-fed, it was severely malnourished.
- BirdLife International has updated its State of the World's Birds website for 2012. It draws on 280 case studies as well as past publications. New this year are country profiles, which are meant to help governments and NGOs meet the goals of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
- According to recent research, 47% of the world's seabirds are in decline and 28% are threatened or endangered.
- Poisonings of raptors in Scotland fell by half in 2011.
- Tetrapod Zoology: Living the pelagic life: of oil, enemies, giant eggs and telomeres (petrels part II)
- The Drinking Bird: The books that make us birders
- Extinction Countdown: Endangered Australian Cockatoo Loses One Third of Population in Just 1 Year
- Ars Technica: Animal magnetism: modeling flocks of birds using simple attractions
- Safari Ecology: Why do birds sing in the morning?
- Nemesis Bird: The Purple Swamphen
- Bird Ecology Study Group: The Black-throated Sunbird Aethopyga saturata of Malaysia
- Not Exactly Rocket Science: Stuffed in a vacuum and bombarded by electrons, a tick waves hello
- Outside My Window: Winter Trees: Speckled Alder
- Compound Eye: Transform Your iPhone Into a Microscope: Just Add Water
- Scientists have found a new species of frog in New York and New Jersey. The species was first documented at a site in Staten Island where some frogs were singing a vocalization distinct from both Northern and Southern Leopard Frogs and was subsequently found at some locations in northern New Jersey. Its range may also extend into Connecticut and northeastern Pennsylvania, but no definite records have been made yet in either state. The species has yet to be given a formal name.
- Rising sea levels are a significant risk for about 3.7 million Americans according to a new study. The entire coastline is at some risk, but the threat is greater in a few states than in others, especially Florida (where half of the at-risk population lives), Louisiana, California, New York, and New Jersey.
- Tar sands mining in Alberta emits even more greenhouse gases than previously estimated if one takes the destruction on peatlands into consideration.
- Monsanto's scientists thought that weeds would not become resistant to its pesticide Roundup because they had such a hard time creating Roundup Ready crops.
