Posts
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| White-crowned Sparrow / Photo by Roy Lowe (USFWS) |
- A study of Wood Thrushes shows that individual birds have surprisingly consistent migration times. Migratory birds time their migrations to arrive at migratory stopovers and their breeding grounds at optimal times for food availability. This means that climate change may throw off their migration schedule in the future.
- Piping Plover numbers are rising on Cape Cod thanks to beach closures that allow nesting to take place without human interference.
- Even when an endangered bird is listed, the US Fish and Wildlife Service may not designate sufficient critical habitat.
- Brown Pelicans have been attacking a Common Murre colony at Yaquina Head in Oregon, leading to the deaths of hundreds of murres. The pelicans either eat the chicks or shake them until they regurgitate their food. The attacks by the pelicans have encouraged further attacks by gulls and crows once the parent murres have been chased from the nest.
- Hummingbirds are able to fly in the rain by changing their flight posture and beating their wings more quickly.
- Breeding populations of wading birds in the UK continue to decline.
- While much of the US is mired in drought, the UK has experienced an unusually cold and wet summer, which means a bad breeding season for Common Swifts.
- A recent study used the fable of a crow dropping stones into a water jar to explore cognitive differences between crows and young children.
- A recent study argues that Northern Spotted Owls would benefit from more active fire management.
- Past Olympics included pigeon shooting — real pigeons, not clay pigeons.
- The Smaller Majority: My rainforest portrait studio
- 10,000 Birds: AOU 53rd supplement: Highlights and near misses
- 10,000 Birds: Plovers, they’re harder than you think.
- BugBlog: Moth bat detectors and the evolution of butterflies
- BugBlog: Some day-flying moths
- Sibley Guides: Why are Yellowlegs hard to identify?
- Audubon Guides: The Color of Poison
- Not Exactly Rocket Science: Revising the polar bear’s evolutionary past… again
- Audubon Guides: Did You Know? Moth Facts
- Bug Eric: Wasp Wednesday: Not Wasp VIII
- Wild About Ants: Chocolate and Ants: An Experiment
- This month, nearly the entire Greenland ice sheet experienced some degree of melting. Such widespread melting is highly unusual; in most summers only about half of the ice sheet's surface area experiences melting.
- The World Wildlife Fund issued a scorecard for 23 countries based on their compliance with CITES.
- Images from 40 years of LANDSAT show the disappearance of the Aral Sea, one of the worst manmade environmental disasters.
- Despite ample warnings about the toxicity of the Anacostia River, many DC residents continue to fish there and consume fish from the river.
- You can watch brown (i.e., grizzly) bears try to catch salmon in Alaska's Brooks River on a live webcam.
- Monarch butterflies fly better when they have darker wings.
- There is talk of buildings a CSA on top of a former Superfund site in Portland.
