Birds:
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...
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Posted on July 8, 2008 4:09 PM • 0 Comments •
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...
Posted on July 8, 2008 12:01 PM • 0 Comments •
... 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...
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Posted on June 26, 2008 10:59 PM • 6 Comments •
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...
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Posted on June 21, 2008 8:56 AM • 0 Comments •
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...
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Posted on June 10, 2008 3:18 PM • 13 Comments •
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...
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Posted on May 30, 2008 10:15 AM • 10 Comments •
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)...
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Posted on May 17, 2008 6:39 PM • 1 Comments •
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...
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Posted on May 17, 2008 8:34 AM • 0 Comments •
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...
Posted on May 12, 2008 4:08 PM • 0 Comments •
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...
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Posted on April 27, 2008 7:05 PM • 1 Comments •
