Posts
Cape May Warbler / Photo by Steve Maslowski (USFWS)Bird and birding news
- Defenders of Wildlife is asking birders to sign a petition to preserve the boreal forest.
Horseshoe crabs have been nearly absent from well-known spawning beaches around Cape May this spring. Beaches in Delaware also have a shortage of horseshoe crabs.- A new report says that U.S. national wildlife refuges are underfunded by over $300 million annually.
- Stocking the Great Lakes with fish like trout and salmon has caused herring gulls' health to deteriorate. The introduced fish outcompete gulls for small fish like alewifes, and gulls are forced to rely on lower-quality food like garbage.
- Twenty-seven radio-tagged regent honeyeaters (Xanthomyza phrygia) have been released into the wild at Chiltern National Park in Australia to restore the species's population. The world population of regent honeyeaters may be as little as 1,000 individuals.
- An invasive mouse species on South Atlantic Island preys on seabird chicks and threatens to extirpate some species, such as the Tristan albatross.
- Last summer, birders in New Zealand conducted their first national survey of garden birds. Of the top ten birds counted, only two were native species.
- Signs and fencing to exclude off-road vehicles from a bird nesting area at Cape Hatteras were vandalized.
Beauty, an injured bald eagle, has a new prosthetic beak. More information here.- Five mallard ducklings died at the National Museum of the American Indian after they were sucked down a drain in one of the pools.
- Wildbird: Do you bird in a national wildlife refuge?
- Birdist: Birds at Large: Jeep Liberty Commercial
- City Birder: Big Day of Biking & Birding
- OC Warbler: Love Story
- Sitka Nature: Winter Wren Nest
- The Marvelous in Nature: A mouthful of mud
- A commentator for the Guardian finds problems with carbon-trading and carbon offsets. Offset programs are difficult to verify and allow polluters to keep sending emissions into the atmosphere.
- U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels rose 1.6% in 2007.
- Meanwhile, excess nitrogen is a growing concern. Nitrogen compounds in the environment can kill aquatic life; nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas. Ways to reduce one's nitrogen footprint include: reducing energy consumption, driving less, and eating more locally-grown (organic) vegetables and less (industrial) meat.
- Scientists in Michigan are girdling aspens to encourage their replacement by a more diverse forest, to test the influence of biodiversity on carbon capture.
- Maryland is cutting the state's female blue crab harvest by one-third, to preserve what remains of the Chesapeake's most famous crustacean.
- Some biofuel crops, like the giant reed (Arundo donax) and the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis Jacquin), could become invasive species.
- Audubon Magazine Blog: Part-time Environmentalism
- RealClimate: Climate Change and Tropical Cyclones (Yet Again)
