Posts
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| Black-capped Chickadee / Photo by David Ellis/USFWS |
- The discovery of a skull of a bird ancestor, named Oculudentavis, trapped in fossilized amber shows that birds attained their smallest sizes as early as the Cretaceous. (News about the fossil also spurred a debate about the ethics of Burmese amber.)
- A study found links between intensive agriculture for corn and soybeans and the population decline of Mourning Doves. The doves did better in places with small-grain crops, like oats.
- Grassland birds benefit farms that grow corn since they eat the insect pests of corn, but in soybean fields they mainly eat predatory insects that would control soybean pests.
- Sage-grouse have lost much of their habitat to oil and gas development, so the Bureau of Land Management is cutting down piñon and juniper forests to create new sagebrush habitat.
- The Darién region of Colombia serves as a bottleneck for migratory birds traveling between North and South America.
- The City Birder: Coney Island Creek Bio-Blitz
- On The Wing Photography: Juvenile, Immature And Adult Sage Thrashers
- BugTracks: Introducing Grapholita thermopsidis
- Arachnofiles: Arachnews: March 9, 2020
- Tetrapod Zoology: Minuscule Hummingbird-Sized Archaic Birds Existed During the Cretaceous
- Avian Hybrids: Different migration strategies contribute to reproductive isolation between Barn Swallow subspecies
- Matthew R. Halley: Feeling stiff? How to spread your wings after 80 years
- Bug Eric: Pesticide Preemption: Another Tool for Industry to Protect Itself
- Climate change is causing much of Kenai National Wildlife Refuge to shift from boreal forest to grassland, and refuge managers are trying to decide what to do about it. One option under consideration is to introduce species that are common in warmer grassland habitats in North America.
- Conservationists have been trying to stop the decline of coconut crabs, which are threatened by overfishing and tourism.
- People in Nagaland, a global biodiversity hotspot in northeastern India, are setting up conservation areas and reducing market hunting, which had reached unsustainable levels.
- The jaguar population is increasing in the area around Iguazú Falls.
- Urban bumblebees in Poland avoid most non-native flowers in favor of native plants.
- A captive-breeding program is seeking to return the rare Taylor's Checkerspot to parts of its historical range in British Columbia.
- City-dwelling lizards in Puerto Rico have adapted to urban heat island effects.
- A new shrew species was discovered on Sulawesi.
- Camera traps placed near gaps in the border wall show wildlife crossing between the US and Mexico.
- The ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting six times faster than they were in the 1990s.
- The remaining Democratic presidential candidates would do well to borrow from Elizabeth Warren's climate plans.
- People involved with climate change see parallels with the reaction to the coronavirus outbreak.
