Posts
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| Black-billed Magpie / Photo by Tom Koerner/USFWS |
- New Caledonian Crows can tell how heavy an object is by how it behaves in the wind.
- Some hummingbirds have bills that are better for fighting than feeding.
- Radar and eBird data suggest that 2.1 billion birds pass through the Gulf of Mexico each spring, and the timing of spring migration has remained consistent over the past 20 years despite climate change.
- Last year there were 37 active Peregrine Falcon nests (pdf) in New Jersey, and those nests produced 75 young.
- Syncrude will pay $2.7 million in fines for the deaths of 31 great blue herons at one of its tar sands mining sites.
- One feral cat wiped out almost an entire breeding colony of Fairy Terns in Western Australia.
- A set of lawsuits is challenging how water management and farming practices affect birds at the Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge Complex in California.
- Vermont Center for Ecostudies: Move over Monarchs: VCE and Colleagues Reveal Astonishing Dragonfly Migration
- 10,000 Birds: Puerto Rico's Birds after Hurricane Maria
- iNaturalist.org Blog: A Merlin Fly-by: Observation of the Week, 1/4/19
- Bourbon, Bastards, and Birds.: 2019: The Year of The 5MR
- I Used to Hate Birds: Cheers to the 5MR!
- Elev. 401: Wintering waterfowl
- Outside My Window: Casting A Pellet
- Feathered Photography: Ruffed Grouse Have Built-in ‘Snowshoes’ And They’re Not Made of Feathers
- Avian Hybrids: A hybrid between Black-browed Tit and Sooty Tit
- Laura Goggin Photography: Rounding out 2018 and looking forward to a new year of birds
- Cool Green Science: One Square Meter of Prairie
- While the eastern population of Monarchs seemed to have a good year last year, the western population did not, and the number of Monarchs wintering in Mexico continues to fall.
- New studies found evidence that plants can hear and produce sounds.
- Strange sounds recorded at the U.S. embassy in Cuba turned out to be Indies Short-tailed Crickets. (The cause of the staff's symptoms is still unknown.) The news is a reminder that animals make a lot of strange sounds, and humans are mostly unfamiliar with them.
- Hawaii's endemic snails are disappearing rapidly, with the latest extinction in the first week of this year.
- A wildlife crossing over I-90 near Snoqualmie Pass in Washington is already being used by wildlife even as construction work continues.
- The life cycle of the rare Bulloak Jewel Butterfly, which feeds on mistletoe, depends on protection from ants.
- A newly-discovered frog species has extra claws for self-defense on its thumbs.
- During the government shutdown, the Trump administration left many national parks open with no one to staff them, leading to significant damage at some parks. This includes Joshua trees cut down and new illegal roads for off-road vehicles at Joshua Tree National Park. (The park service backtracked on whether that park would close.) Meanwhile, park superintendents are not allowed to talk publicly about the issue.
- The shutdown is also making weather forecasts worse and possibly making the food supply less safe.
- A wall may be of questionable effectiveness anyway.
- The administration allowed a road to be built through a wilderness are at Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, and the road seems to be mainly for transporting seafood even though the public justification is medical transportation.
- In climate new, greenhouse gas emissions rose in 2018 in the U.S.
- Thermal expansion will raise ocean levels by about a foot by 2100, in addition to the rise from melting glaciers.
- Meanwhile, fights are beginning over who owns land submerged by rising sea levels.
- Vertical solar panels on mountain peaks can increase the amount of solar energy available in winter months.
- A company that was accused of faking soil tests was awarded the contract to clean up the sites burned by the Camp Fire in California.
- Record rainfall increased the amounts of nitrogen and phosphorous that entered the Chesapeake Bay last year.
- In New Jersey, 2018 was the wettest year on record.
- Microplastics are present in the Raritan River's headwaters, especially downstream from wastewater plants.
- Sea Isle City floods often, so it is installing a 24-hour livestream to monitor one of its frequently flooded streets.
