Loose Feathers #742

American Robin / my photo

Birds and birding news

• Watching even common birds like geese can distract from the coronavirus for a little while, and so can paying attention to the arrival of spring.
• This week was the 19th anniversary of the time Randy Johnson hit a Mourning Dove with a pitch, and Newsweek asked a group of ornithologists to discuss the event. 
• Conservation for the Red-fronted Macaw focuses on getting communities involved in protecting the birds and stopping their capture for the pet trade. 
• Commercial bird seed often contains the seeds of invasive weeds mixed among the sunflower and millet seeds.

Science and nature blogging

• The Meadowlands Nature Blog: Don Torino's Life in the Meadowlands: The Promise of Spring
• Avian Hybrids: Shake your tail feather! Courtship displays and genetic analyses uncover extensive hybridization between Allen’s and Rufous Hummingbird
• iNaturalist: Exploring Nature When You're Stuck at Home
• Steve Happ Photography: Spoonbills and Ibis
• Arachnofiles: Arachnews: March 23, 2020 
• Backyard and Beyond: Timber! It’s Timberdoodle Season
• Wing Beat: Scytalopus Tapaculos, a Continental Non-Adaptive Radiation 

Biodiversity and conservation

• The Great Barrier Reef suffered its third major coral bleaching in the past five years.
• White Fringetrees seem to be able to recover from Emerald Ash Borer attacks.
• Researchers want to find out where western Monarchs go in early spring because many that survive the winter are not making it to their breeding grounds.
• A lot of species in the Andes are declining, but Andean (or Spectacled) Bears are doing well.

Climate change and environmental politics

• A court struck down the permits for the Dakota Access pipeline and ordered the government to conduct a full environmental impact statement. 
• The EPA decided to use the coronavirus as an excuse to relax air pollution rules, even though air pollution seems to be an aggravating factor for the disease. 
• Likewise, the Interior Department is using the coronavirus as a cover for numerous attempts to undermine environmental laws and regulations, including the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
• The best way to keep plastic from polluting the environment is to stop it at the source, the fossil fuels that plastic is made from.
• Since the end of Colombia's civil war, its national parks have been threatened by deforestation and oil exploration.

Loose Feathers #741

Brown-headed Cowbirds / my photo

Birds and birding news

• Due to the coronavirus pandemic, many spring birding festivals have been canceled. The National Park Service is leaving outdoor spaces open but visitor centers and other buildings may be closed. New Jersey state parks are still open, but visitor centers and other facilities are closed. New Jersey Audubon has closed its nature centers, but trails are open at most preserves.
• A fossil skull found in Belgium appears to be close to the most recent common ancestor of waterfowl and gamebirds. The bird lived in the Late Cretaceous and probably foraged in coastal habitats.
• The Mexican Duck is difficult to identify and has an uncertain taxonomic status.
• The Manumea, or Tooth-billed Pigeon, has been decimated by market hunting, and it may be too late to save it.
• The Tibetan Plateau seems to prevent hybridization between two subspecies of Barn Swallow because it separates their migration routes and wintering areas. 
• Little Ringed Plovers that nest in Japan primarily use rice paddies as stopover areas during their spring and fall migrations.
• Veterinarians managed to save most of the Kakapo population from an outbreak of aspergillosis.

Science and nature blogging

• American Birding Association: 2020 AOS Classification Committee Proposals, Parts 2 and 3
• corvidresearch: What are crows thinking when they see death?
• awkward botany: The Dispersal of Ancient and Modern Apples by Humans and Other Megafauna 
• Avian Hybrids: Are there still “pure” Hawaiian Ducks?
• 10,000 Birds: Birding Mkuze
• earthstar: 79/366 The twister
• Arachnofiles: Arachnews: March 16, 2020
• On The Wing Photography: Perched Broad-tailed Hummingbird Male

Biodiversity and conservation

• The Forest Service is finishing work on removing 81 dams from watersheds within Cleveland National Forest in California to reopen the streams for spawning fish. Most of the dams are small and date to the mid-20th century. Like small dams removed elsewhere, many had become safety hazards.
• Like other marine animals, sea turtles may eat plastic because it smells like food. The odor is probably caused by algae or other microbes growing on the plastic.
• Lack of experience with nature leads some people to fear it and hampers conservation efforts. 
• At least some toads can heal themselves of a chytrid infection by basking in the open and raising their body temperatures to a point that kills the fungus.
• Tracking data from seabirds and marine mammals is being used to find biodiversity hotspots in the Southern Ocean.
• Seattle is redesigning its seawall along Elliott Bay to make it more hospitable to marine life.
• Monarch migration to Mexico dropped by 53%.

Climate change and environmental politics

• The threat of coronavirus and bans on large public gatherings has forced climate activists to cancel their regular Friday protests for the foreseeable future. 
• Last summer, meltwater from Greenland's ice sheet raised global sea levels by 2.2 mm in only two months. 
• This winter was the warmest on record across the northern hemisphere. 
• Scientists are increasingly worried about the potential carbon release from an abrupt thaw of permafrost.
• Rutgers is planning to move most of its research and education programs from its marine field station to Tuckerton because sea level rise causes Great Bay Boulevard to flood more frequently.

Loose Feathers #740

Black-capped Chickadee / Photo by David Ellis/USFWS

Birds and birding news

• 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.

Science and nature blogging

• 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 

Biodiversity and conservation

• 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.

Climate change and environmental politics

• 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.

Loose Feathers #739

American Robin / my photo

Birds and birding news

• Migrating warblers with more body mass tend to sleep facing forward, while thinner ones sleep with their heads tucked, which saves energy but also makes them more vulnerable.
• Conservationists are playing recordings to attract seabirds to a protected breeding site on Kauai. There and elsewhere, experiments have shown the importance of soundscapes for breeding birds.
• Half of the plants pollinated by sunbirds are also useful to humans.
• Late winter is a good time to clean out nestboxes for birds to use in the spring.
• Here are some suggestions for responsible bird feeding.

Science and nature blogging

• Vermont Center for Ecostudies: Field Guide to March 2020
• Arachnofiles: Arachnews: March 2, 2020 
• Avian Hybrids: Babblers provide evidence for “speciation cycles” in the Himalayan-Hengduan Mountains
• incidental naturalist: Where to see a Woodcock in Manhattan
• 10,000 Birds: Pirates of the Caribbean

Biodiversity and conservation

• Spring is starting significantly earlier than usual in North America this year due to an unusually warm winter. The downside is that it could disrupt the food web and other ecological relationships. 
• Insect declines are also disrupting food webs, and the best solution is to protect or restore the habitats that insects need.
• As their population increases, cougars are coming into closer contact with people.
• Six new gecko species were recently described from Australia. Even though some of them are common, they avoided notice because they looked similar to other species.
• A virus causes honey bees to start foraging too early. 
• Mexico's cloud forests are home to significant biodiversity and need protection.
• Long-horned Ticks have been found in Virginia.

Climate change and environmental politics

• While fossil fuel companies are finally acknowledging the problem of climate change, they intend to keep producing fossil fuels for as long as they can. 
• One way that they can stay profitable is by turning fossil fuels into plastics. 
• The Trump administration is creating more limits on what kind of science can be used to support regulations.
• Drilling for oil under the Congo basin would mean draining the largest tropical peatlands and the release of a massive amount of carbon dioxide.
• A new building in Philadelphia is designed to be its own solar energy plant.
• An illustrator created posters for national parks based on their worst online reviews.

Loose Feathers #738

Mallard / my photo

Birds and birding news

• Three native honeycreeper species on Kauai are starting to sound like each other because their populations have declined so much. The loss of distinctive songs could make it harder for them to find mates and worsen their chances for survival.
• A recent article describes three new tapaculo species from Peru.
• Industrial krill fishing off the Antarctic Peninsula makes life harder for penguins. 
• The Saltmarsh Sparrow is the only bird species unique to East Coast saltmarshes, and its survival is threatened because sea level rise is steadily turning the high marsh where it nests into low marsh.
• Black-throated Blue Warblers are migrating about five days earlier than they did in the 1960s.
• Raptors that eat from higher levels of the food web accumulate more mercury in their bodies. 
• Sea lions in Chile suddenly started preying on the largest breeding colony of Black-necked Swans, raising questions about whether this would affect the swans' population and if the predation could be stopped.
• Harriet Tubman used bird calls (especially Barred Owl) as a signal to people she was helping to escape from slavery.
• A new report on the state of India's birds found that 50% of species had declined over the past two decades and 79% had declined within the past five years.
• Toxic chemicals can build up in the bodies of seabirds that have eaten plastic.
• The US Fish and Wildlife Service is attempting to eradicate house mice from the South Farallon Islands to protect a breeding colony of Ashy Storm-Petrels.
• A viral story about a poodle being carried off by a hawk is probably false. 
• Electrocution has become one of the top threats to Bald Eagles and other raptor species in New Jersey.

Science and nature blogging

• Avian Hybrids: Ecological speciation in the saltmarshes
• Nemesis Bird: The Snowy Owl's Supper, a Pellet Mini-Mystery by Tim Healy 
• Feathered Photography: Peregrine Falcon Circling Prey
• The Prairie Ecologist: Another Example of the Value of Thistles 
• Cool Green Science: Reducing the Speed Limit Won’t Make Roads Safer for Wildlife
• The Freiday Bird Blog: Threats to NJ Birds: The Upshot
• Backyard and Beyond: Oaks to Caterpillars to Birds
• On The Wing Photography: Male Red-winged Blackbirds Are Displaying On Territory
• Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey: Ospreys Continue to Thrive in New Jersey
• Arachnofiles: Arachnews: February 24, 2020
• Birds Korea Blog: Opinion: New Airports and Climate Change  
• Colin Purrington: Spotted lanternfly control tips

Biodiversity and conservation

• Conservationists are worried about the potential for extinctions if a chytrid fungus spreads among the many salamander species in Appalachia.
• Bolivia and Paraguay are developing a joint conservation plan for wild guanacos.
• Delaware has a plan to remove or modify the ten remaining dams on its section of Brandywine Creek to restore fish migration. 
• The number of Monarchs that winter in California remained critically low for the second straight year.
• Planting native plants can help reverse insect declines.

Climate change and environmental politics

• The Supreme Court heard arguments this week over whether the Atlantic Coast Pipeline could cross the Appalachian Trail without Congressional approval. (The land is within a national forest, but the trail is administered by the National Park Service.) The case could set a precedent for trails elsewhere in the country.
• Meanwhile, a pipeline developer cancelled plans to build a natural gas pipeline through the Catskill Mountains, and a proposed tar sands mining development in Alberta collapsed because investors were concerned it might not be profitable. The cancellation of the latter project saved thousands of acres of boreal forest.
• Unusually warm summers in coastal Alaska caused major changes in the distribution of marine life. 
• Climate change is also making shellfish toxic for indigenous Alaskans.
• The EPA is asking the public (including polluters) which regulations to get rid of.
• The Trump administration abruptly shut down a study of potential storm surge solutions for New York Harbor and Raritan Bay. Environmentalists opposed the centerpiece of the study, a six-mile barrier across the mouth of the bay because it would concentrate pollutants and sediment in the estuary and possibly harm marine life.
• This year California's new groundwater regulations will begin to go into effect. Wells will still be allowed, but pumping will be limited to sustainable levels.
• This winter is on track to being one of the least snowy winters in New Jersey on record. 
• A fire burned through part of Worthington State Forest in the Delaware Water Gap this week.