Posts
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| Bald Eagle / Photo by Tom Koerner/USFWS |
- A new study constructs a new tree of life for songbird families. Among other things, it proposed a new family for two African bird species and found that songbirds originated in Australia rather than the Americas. Read the full study here.
- The bird photographer who rediscovered Night Parrots in 2013 appears to have fabricated most of his reports about Night Parrots since then.
- Hope the Whimbrel, who was fitted with a satellite transmitter in 2009 and then a coded leg flag in 2012, was likely killed by Hurricane Maria in 2017. Hope wintered at St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands and migrated to a breeding site near the MacKenzie River in western Canada by way of Virginia.
- Hybrids of Small and Medium Tree Finches seem to be better at resisting invasive flies, which are killing the chicks of many Darwin's finches.
- A new paper worked out the evolution of sex chromosomes in birds of paradise.
- A pair of California Condors is incubating an egg at Zion National Park.
- Here is a list of bird nest webcams in New Jersey.
- Vermont Center for Ecostudies: A Field Guide to April 2019
- Avian Hybrids: Mastering Malaria: The Hawaiian ‘Amakihi uses a variety of genes to combat avian malaria
- A project called Canid Camera uses volunteers to identify animals using New York's forests.
- A wolf pack has been detected west of the Cascades in Washington for the first time in decades; the pack has been living just southwest of North Cascades National Park.
- Silver Digger Bees were recently found at the Presidio in San Francisco, where they have mostly been absent since the 1960s. The find shows the value of removing invasive species and restoring habitat.
- Wild bees are attracted to areas that recently had severe forest fires, probably because the burned areas have more flowering plants.
- Scientists have identified a parasitoid wasp to combat the spread of Fall Armyworm moths in Africa. Fall Armyworms are native to North America but invasive in Africa.
- Flies have extraordinary diversity and pollinate many plants.
- The Trump administration lost more environmental cases in the courts last week, this time over offshore drilling and a land swap affecting Izembeck NWR.
- A test well drilled in 1986 in Arctic NWR turned up very little oil, which calls into question the justification for drilling there.
- Here is an interactive showing what remains and what was left out after the reduction of Bears Ears National Monument.
- Cities need a tree canopy of at least 40% to mitigate the urban heat island effect in summer.
- BLM wants to push ahead with leasing drilling rights in the Ruby Mountains but did not consult with the native peoples whose livelihoods and identity depend on the land there.
- Indigenous people have been fighting to protect the wildest parts of Panama from logging.
- New York passed a ban on single-use plastic bags, and environmentalists in New Jersey hope it will spur the state legislature to revive a stalled bill that would impose broader restrictions on plastic.
- An oil spill in the Solomon Islands has been stopped, but the damage to its coral reefs is yet to be determined.
- Last weekend a wildfire that consumed 11,000 acres of the New Jersey Pinelands started in an area known for illegal bonfires.
