Posts
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| Tufted Puffins at Alaska Maritime Refuge / Photo by Steve Ebbert, USFWS |
- The Blakiston's fish owl (the world's largest owl) is an indicator species for the health of Russian old-growth forests. These owls are only present when there are a sufficient number of large, old trees and healthy stream corridors.
- Pennsylvania may remove the Bald Eagle from its state threatened list, and New Jersey may do the same next year.
- Chile is investigating why 20 Andean Condors turned up dead.
- A wildlife biologist connected to wind developers in California was sentenced this week for banding eagles without a permit. His permit had been revoked three years ago because he was not turning over his banding data to the USFWS, as is required of all bird banders.
- As the bony tails of birds shortened, their legs became more diverse.
- Female Blue Tits with bright blue crowns tend to take better care of their chicks.
- The Navy is trying to improve conditions for breeding Burrowing Owls at the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station in California while also making sure the owls do not eat the endangered Least Terns that also breed there.
- Some Ospreys from Scotland are being released in Spain to boost the latter's breeding population.
- Additions to a nature reserve in Peru will help protect the Long-whiskered Owlet.
- A study of Ostrich necks suggests that the necks of sauropods may not have been as flexible as commonly thought.
- Six Northern Bald Ibises from Turkey are migrating south.
- ABA Blog: Eastern Kingbird and Peregrine Falcon aerial battle
- Rebecca in the Woods: Butterflies as Pests?
- 10,000 Birds: The Remotest Endemic Birds
- Greg Miller Birding: 2013 Impatient Birder’s Cheat Sheet to North America!
- Raptor Politics: Hen harrier on the brink of ‘extinction’ in England
- Notes of Nature: Ivy on Walls
- Beetles In The Bush: Tips for photographing shiny beetles on yellow flowers
- View from the Cape: Checking your identifications...
- New Mexico is in the midst of a serious water crisis.
- The White House is currently getting a set of solar panels installed. Previously, Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed, but those were removed during the Reagan administration and never replaced.
- Scientists found a new species of carnivore in the Andean cloud forest. The olinguito (Bassaricyon neblina in family Procyonidae) had been missed because appears very similar to another species in the same genus even though specimens of the new species had been included in museum collections since the early 20th century.
- During the epoch preceding the last ice age, the sea level suddenly rose by 17 feet in response to climate change. That sudden change suggests that there may be instability in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets that result in sudden melting.
- D.C.'s Congressional Cemetery has hired goats to eat poison ivy and invasive species like kudzu.
- Chad has suspended a Chinese oil company due to oil spills. Oil spills and oil-related pollution are serious environmental and public health problems in Africa, at a scale that dwarfs most contemporary spills in North America.
- Speaking of oil pollution, there are elevated levels of toxins downstream from the Lac-Mégantic explosion. The railroad company involved in the disaster has been banned in Canada and has gone into bankruptcy.
- Earlier this week there was a story about an invasive, testicle-eating fish in Denmark, but that story was overhyped.
- Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, claims that he can build a pneumatic transportation system from San Francisco to Los Angeles for a tenth of the cost of the high-speed rail proposal, but there are reasons to be skeptical of Musk's claims.
- The Greater Newark Conservancy is an urban oasis.
- Another dead dolphin was found on the Jersey shore, part of a continuing trend this summer along the Atlantic coast.
- Barnhart, Texas, ran out of water due to drought exacerbated by overuse of water for fracking.
