Birds
Be nice to crows and their cacophonous relatives---otherwise, you'll have made yourself a lasting enemy. That's the lesson of a neat study that Michelle Nijhuis reports in this week's Science Times.
In my last post, I wrote about Beijing's attempts to go green during this summer's Olympics. Audubon's reporter Jess Leber has also zeroed in on another essential component of the games: The National Stadium, aka "Bird's Nest" stadium. In an Audubon web exclusive, she finds out if the sports complex lives up to its nickname.
By "The Tern" Jessica Leber--California’s recent and continuing wildfires have already devoured more than 600,000 acres, threatened some 10,000 residences and forced evacuations of large swaths of some counties. But the burning has also ensnared one of the rarest birds in the world.
By "Tern" Alexa Schirtzinger--"The best thing the piping plover has going for it is its extreme cuteness," wrote Janet Egan on her blog, "Plover Warden Diaries," this June.
The "Tern" Jessica Leber--Did you know that parrots and passerines are closely related to falcons? Don’t sweat it if you didn’t—neither did the world’s ornithologists, until this week. Now, a new genetics study published in the journal Science has shaken several bird groups off their perches on the avian tree of life.
By "Tern" Jessica Leber -- Either this bird really loves the limelight or is simply the most persistent pigeon ever. Boomerang, fittingly named, made headlines in 1998 when she flew from southern Spain to England–a solid 1,200 miles–to return to her owner. Retiring racing pigeon breeder Dino Reardon had given her away to a friend. It took him another two tries to finally get rid of her that same year--or so he thought.
It’s usually Hawaii’s stunning scenery that gets the media attention, but this time it’s the sexual preferences of our Laysan albatrosses, which arrive each winter to partake in courtship and chick-rearing rituals.
As Steven Colbert observed in a recent spoof on Comedy Central, a number of female-female couples have been documented among the seabirds nesting on Oahu.
"I'd like you to meet my friend, John Jones. And this here is John's wife."
Hello? I didn't get that. Is there a man with brain so numb that he'd make such an introduction today? Yet that's how the field guides present songbirds to us.
"Behold, this resplendent organism is a vermilion flycatcher. And this dingy creature skulking in the background is the female."
A wedgetail shearwater fledgling prepares for its first flight. [Photo: Hob Osterlund]
I was walking along a north Kauai coastline the other day when I paused to peer into a wedgetail shearwater’s burrow, prompting a friend to admonish: “Look, we woke it up. It was sleeping.”
The Red List of Threatened Species, published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), is one VIP roster you don't want to be on. This year, however, more than a thousand bird species have unfortunately made the cut, given a boost by climate change.
