Loose Feathers #697

Willet / Photo by Tom Koerner/USFWS

Birds and birding news

• Tomorrow is New Jersey Audubon's World Series of Birding, an annual big day competition that is now in its 36th year. Once again I will be competing with the Middlesex Merlins as we try to break our previous record in Middlesex County. If you would like to make a donation to NJ Audubon in our team's name, here is our team page.
• Among the birds we will be looking for are the colorful wood warblers.
• Penguin poop feeds communities of plants and invertebrates in Antarctica. 
• Adding UV lights to power lines could help cranes avoid hitting them.
• The flightless Aldabra Rail is the second flightless rail to evolve on the island of Aldabra; an earlier flightless species there had been wiped out when the island was inundated.
• Bird flocks can move together if birds within the flock follow the neighbors by identical rules. Jackdaws are an exception because pairs stick together within the flock. 
• A rare American Flamingo has lingered in St Marks NWR since last October, shortly after Hurricane Michael's landfall.
• Birds evolved flightlessness multiple times, but each time they used a similar genetic basis to do it.
• An interview with a sound editor for Game of Thrones discusses how bird sounds get picked for movies and television.

Science and nature blogging

• Shorebirder: YELLOW RAIL in CT - May 9, 2019
• The Meadowlands Nature Blog: Don Torino’s Life in the Meadowlands: Old Boots, Books and Binoculars 
• Vermont Center for Ecostudies: Field Guide to May 2019
• The Prairie Ecologist: Trade-offs in Prescribed Fire: Safety vs. Objectives
• The Metropolitan Field Guide: The Metropolitan Field Guide Diary of an Urban Wild Garden: The Small Carpenter Bee 
• Dakota Birder: Solved! One of life’s 3 big mysteries
• Wanstead Birder: Local birding, but not as you know it …. 
• Feathered Photography: A Weird Experience With A Coyote On Antelope Island
• Avian Hybrids: The head of the finch: A small genetic region controls colour morphs in the Gouldian Finch
• Backyard and Beyond: Skinks  
• Mia McPherson's On The Wing Photography: Cliff Swallow Surfing A Phragmites “Wave”

Conservation and biodiversity

• A new report details how rapidly humans are changing ecosystems, with losses of 20% of biodiversity in most land habitats in the past century. That figure is mostly without climate change, so we can expect many more extinctions in the next century.
• Japanese Knotweed is one of the most difficult invasive species to control, both in North America and in Europe.
• Sea level rise is starting to kill coastal forests via saltwater intrusion, which may benefit some coastal and shrubland species. 
• Scientists found baldcypress trees over 2,000 years old in a swamp in North Carolina.
• A new pitviper species was described from India.
• A brown bear was seen in Portugal for the first time since the 19th century. 
• Since the removal of the San Clemente Dam on the Carmel River in California, steelhead trout have slowly made their way back up the river to spawn there again.

Climate change and environmental politics

• So far only two of the many Democratic candidates for president have detailed climate change plans.
• Ireland became the second country to declare a climate emergency in the wake of the Extinction Rebellion protests, but the resolution is largely symbolic.
• The last reactor at Three Mile Island is shutting down. 
• If New Jersey gets around to passing its single-use plastic ban, the bill may include a ban on paper bags as well.