Aves (birds)
Category archives for Aves (birds)
A New Field Guide to the Birds from The Smithsonian
Posted by Greg Laden on August 3, 2008 New Smithsonian Field Guide Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America by Ted Floyd is a newcomer to the bird field guide scene. This guide offers a new combination of features that may make it the best choice as the primary guide for a small number of birders, and as an excellent second…
Penguins adrift
Posted by Greg Laden on July 31, 2008 I noted earlier that hundreds of baby penguins are being washed, dead, onto beaches thousands of miles away from their native lands. Various causes have been suggested, including the idea that the penguins are swimming into unfamiliar and penguin-hostile waters in search of fish, diminished in supply owing to overfishing. Well, this phenomenon has continued,…
EU Fisheries Policy and Seabird Slaughter
Posted by Greg Laden on July 8, 2008 A dead Wandering Albatross Diomedea exulans drowned on a longline. Photo by Graham Robertson/Australian Antarctic Division From Birdlife International: BirdLife International presented the European Parliament with alarming data about the extent of seabird bycatch globally and in Europe yesterday. At the same time, BirdLife welcomed the long awaited first steps of the European Commission to…
Bird (and other) Conservation in Yemen
Posted by Greg Laden on July 8, 2008 The Golden-winged Grosbeak – Socotra Grosbeak Rhynchostruthus socotranus shown in image – has been chosen as Yemen’s national bird. Photo by Richard Porter The Golden-winged Grosbeak has been declared, by the Yemen Council of Ministers, to be the Yemen National Bird. This bird is endemic to the Saudi peninsula. The national mammal for Yemen is…
The Perfect Bird Family Tree…
Posted by Greg Laden on June 26, 2008 … is certainly still in the future. But we have seen a step in that direction in a new paper, coming out this week in Science. This research applies intensive and extensive genomic analysis to the avian phylogenetic tree. The results are interesting. This paper is summarized in a number of locations, most notably here…
How birds fly (Book review)
Posted by Greg Laden on June 21, 2008 Birds: Nature’s Magnificent Flying Machines is a book by Caroline Arnold and illustrated by Patricia Wynne for, I’d say, Pre-Elementary School kids and first/second grade. This is a good book to read to a pre-literate kid. Then put it away for later when the first grade academic report on birds is due … it will…
Interesting Behavior by a Bald Eagle
Posted by Greg Laden on June 10, 2008 The following is a description supplied by Amanda of an event she observed two weekends back at The Lake in North/Central Minnesota: There appeared to be an animal acting strangely on the surface of the water. On further inspection, it turned out to be a bald eagle moving across the surface using its wings like…
The Young Birder’s Guide: A Bird Book for the Middle Schooler
Posted by Greg Laden on May 30, 2008 Bill Thompson’s Young Birder’s Guide The Young Birder’s Guide to Birds of Eastern North America (Peterson Field Guides) is a book that I highly recommend for kids around seven to 14 years of age. (The publishers suggest a narrower age range but I respectfully disagree.) This is a new offering written by Bill Thompson III…
Joshua Klein: The amazing intelligence of crows
Posted by Greg Laden on May 17, 2008 Hacker and writer Joshua Klein is fascinated by crows. (Notice the gleam of intelligence in their little black eyes?) After a long amateur study of corvid behavior, he’s come up with an elegant machine that may form a new bond between animal (repost)
The Phalarope: Not just another polyandrous bird…
Posted by Greg Laden on May 17, 2008 MIT researchers found that phalaropes depend on a surface interaction known as contact angle hysteresis to propel drops of water containing prey upward to their throats. Photo by Robert Lewis The Phalarope starts out as an interesting bird because of its “reversed” sex-role mating behavior. For at least some species of Phalarope, females dominate males,…
Tricoloured Mega-colony Saved
Posted by Greg Laden on May 12, 2008 Audubon California has announced that it has reached an agreement with a farmer to safeguard a single colony of about 80,000 Tricoloured Blackbirds Agelaius tricolor – nearly a third of the world’s population of this Endangered species. The estimated global population of Tricoloured Blackbirds is 250,000 to 300,000 birds, with at least 95% of these…
Enigmatic Sex Ratio in a Nearly Extinct Bird
Posted by Greg Laden on April 27, 2008 Pterodroma magentae is the Magenta Petral (also known as the Chatham Island Taiko). There are between 8 and 15 breeding pairs in the New Zealand home range of this species. Indeed, this bird was thought extinct for quite some time before it was rediscovered in 1978. A recent study indicates something funny is going on…
Lyrebird … or should we say “liar bird”
Posted by Greg Laden on April 19, 2008 That was the lyre bird. This is the liar bird:
The White-necked Picathartes
Posted by Greg Laden on April 16, 2008 A survey of the Western Area Peninsula Forest (WAPF) in Sierra Leone has discovered two new breeding colonies of the Vulnerable White-necked Picathartes Picathartes gymnocephalus, in addition to the 16 sites already known. The survey was part of a one-year project carried out by volunteers from the Conservation Society of Sierra Leone (CSSL, BirdLife in…
Cambodia’s Water Birds
Posted by Greg Laden on April 11, 2008 Storks, pelicans, ibises, and other rare waterbirds from Cambodia’s famed Tonle Sap region are making a comeback, thanks to round-the-clock protection by a single team of park rangers. In a project established by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Ministry of Environment of the Royal Government of Cambodia, former hunters and egg collectors have…
Save the Great Cormorants of Lake Constance
Posted by Greg Laden on April 8, 2008 Nature And Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU – BirdLife in Germany) is protesting vehemently against the planned destruction of Lake Constance’s only colony of Great Cormorants Phalacrocorax carbo. “It is hard to believe that Freiburg local authority intends to commit such a destructive act, not only in a National Nature Reserve but especially within a European…
Agri-tourism could help save colorful prairie chicken
Posted by Greg Laden on April 8, 2008 This is a photo of a Tympanuchus cupido male drumming away on the lek to find a mate. The lek is the traditional breeding ground of the prairie chicken (and many other animals uses lek’s) on which the males display, and to which the females travel to pick a male with whom to mate. This…
Should you feed the birds?
Posted by Greg Laden on April 7, 2008 It is a little ironic that all nature enthusiasts know that it is “bad” to feed the animals … they become dependent on the food, and in some cases will become a nuisance or dangerous, prying open cars or breaking into homes to get more food. Then the animal has to be put down or…
Boreal and South American Birds
Posted by Greg Laden on March 31, 2008 Fall, a very sunny, very breezy day on the lake, Amanda and I sitting in the cabin minding our own business. Suddenly, …thwack… … well, it was a sort of tiny miniature thwack, but a thwack nonetheless. Peering outside through the window, we could see the the last death throws of a tiny greenish bird…
Power Line Safety for Hungary’s Hawks
Posted by Greg Laden on March 30, 2008 Power lines kill raptors. Tens of thousands of raptors a year die on power lines. But there are ways to avoid this. On 26 February, the Hungarian Ornithological and Nature Conservation Society (MME; BirdLife in Hungary) signed an agreement with the Ministry of Environment and Water (MEW), and all relevant electric companies in Hungary, to…
Saving the Red Breasted Goose
Posted by Greg Laden on March 28, 2008 Branta ruficollis is endangered. The Red Breasted Goose International Working Group (RbGIWG, which is unpronounceable) has a new species action plan to save this critter. Here’s some info from Redbrested Goose Central: Red-breasted Goose (Branta ruficollis) is a charismatic globally threatened species highly dependent on wetlands and farmed areas. In the last 50 years, the…
Philippine Eagle
Posted by Greg Laden on March 27, 2008 Don’t mess with me, man, I’m a Philippine Eagle, Pithecophaga jefferyi. You can call me Jeff. This bird is almost extinct.
Saving the rare Azores Bullfinch
Posted by Greg Laden on March 25, 2008 Azores Bullfinch, known locally as Priolo, is confined to eastern São Miguel in the Azores, Portugal. It has suffered through widespread loss of native forest and invasion by exotic vegetation, which has largely overrun the remaining patches of natural vegetation within the species’s breeding range. These funds will enable the continuation of crucial habitat restoration…
Is there a limit on the number of species in a clade?
Posted by Greg Laden on March 25, 2008 A “radiation” (sometimes called an “adaptive radiation”) is when a single ancestral species gives rise to a number of novel species, often in a fairly short (geological) period of time. Following this radiation event, it seems often to be the case that subsequent speciation is less common. In fact, many living clades that have only…
Sandhill Crane Cam
Posted by Greg Laden on March 21, 2008 Well, it is migration season for many birds. The other day as we drove north to the cabin, we came across a flock of what I’m pretty sure were tundra swans resting on their long journey north. We are lucky to spend a lot of time in a major flyway for migratory birds, and we…
Birds Saved from Volcano
Posted by Greg Laden on March 13, 2008 Ten Short-tailed Albatross Phoebastria albatrus chicks have been moved by helicopter, from their current stronghold on Torishima Island to the site of a former colony 350 km to the South-east. The potential for future volcanic events on Torishima is among the most serious threats to this Vulnerable species. Currently, 80-85% of the world population breeds…
Extinct Petrel Not!
Posted by Greg Laden on March 13, 2008 A bird that was known only from two records from the 1920s has been discovered in the Pacific after a gap of 79 years. Sightings of the Critically Endangered Beck’s Petrel Pseudobulweria becki – published by the British Ornithologists’ Club – have finally proven the species is still in existence, and delighted conservationists. A voyage…
The Loonacy Must Stop
Posted by Greg Laden on March 9, 2008 Loons are the fish eating canaries of secluded northern lakes. Actually, over the last several decades, loons seem to have gotten more used to people then they used to be, but are still not really big on development. My personal belief (based on anecdotal observation) is that loons can identify, to at least some degree,…
The Origin of the Chicken
Posted by Greg Laden on February 29, 2008 Where and when were chickens domesticated? From whence the humble chicken? Gallus gallus is a domesticated chicken-like bird (thus, the name “chicken”) that originates in southeast Asia. Ever since Darwin we’ve known that the chicken originated in southeast Asia, although the exact details of which one or more of several possible jungle fowls is the…
Rare Birds Yearbook 2008
Posted by Greg Laden on February 28, 2008 Rare Birds Yearbook 2008: The World’s 189 Most Threatened Birds is, according to BirdLife International, proving to be a great success. Last year’s Rare Birds Yearbook photo competition was a huge success with more than 1,000 images being submitted and the best were presented in Rare Birds Yearbook 2008, with each published photographer receiving a…
, which is now available for the 
