Grasshopper Sparrow / Photo by Dominic Sherony
Birds and birding news
- Bird species that adapt well to urban areas tend to have bigger brains; the large brains may make them more resourceful in finding food, shelter, and nesting sites if the types of food and nesting sites they use in the wild are not available.
- Radiation from the Chernobyl reactor affects the populations of birds with orange plumage more than other birds; the chemicals that produced orange coloration may be especially susceptible to the type of stress caused by radiation.
- National Geographic profiles John James Audubon, who was honored with a Google Doodle this week for his 226th birthday. If you missed it, you can see an image of it here.
- A Peregrine Falcon killed and devoured a vagrant White-faced Ibis that an ornithology class was watching on Plum Island, Massachusetts. (That link goes to a video, which I found via the ABA Blog.)
- This photo set documents the Scissor-tailed Flycatcher that recently appeared in Cape May.
- Cameras are recording Barn Owls flying back and forth across a laboratory room so that scientists can learn more about how owls fly.
- Here is a gallery of owl images. (not related to the previous link)
- The U.K. is planning to cull Monk Parakeets from the wild due to fears of damage to crops and utility infrastructure.
- Some petrels may be able to detect related birds and avoid incest by smell.
- Another paper claims to have documented Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, this time along the Pearl River in Louisiana. A PDF of the paper is here. If the author's name sounds familiar, it should, since he has been posted reports of his Ivory-billed Woodpecker searches on fishcrow.com for several years.
- Biodiversity Heritage Library: Book of the Week: The Illustrations of The Ibis
- ABA Blog: Better Birding is Made in the Shade
- Laura's Birding Blog: Visit to the Sharp-tailed Grouse blind
- March of the Fossil Penguins: World Penguin Day
- Punctuated Equilibrium: What do bacon, tits and a computer keyboard have in common?
- The Chernobyl nuclear disaster started 25 years ago this week when the reactor exploded on April 26, 1986. Here is a comparison between it and other prominent nuclear disasters. Here is a gallery of photos of the catastrophe by Igor Kostin, a Russian photographer. Here is a photo essay on animals affected by the disaster. Here is another gallery about Chernobyl, including documentary photos of life near Chernobyl today by Diana Markosian and Michael Forster Rothbart.
- Despite that disaster and the recent meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi, coal still poses a greater threat as an energy source, because of its greenhouse gases and because of its health effects on the people who mine it and through air and water pollution.
- Some suburban residents in New Jersey are upset about the small solar panels mounted on utility poles and call them eyesores. PSE&G is installing the panels to increase the amount of electricity it generates through alternative energy.
- The Energy Information Administration projects slow growth in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions over the next two decades. Emissions had fallen because of the economic recession, but even as the economy recovers, their growth will be slowed by increasing reliance on alternative energy.
- Climate change makes events like the recent severe droughts and floods more likely. The southwestern U.S.will become considerably drier, with less water flow in the Colorado River, Rio Grande, and San Joaquin River, all of which are important drinking water sources for the region.
- An IUCN report suggests 13 areas of the Arctic for protection from industrial activities and development.
- Record high numbers of Antarctic krill and humpback whales were found during an expedition to bays along the Western Antarctic Peninsula.
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