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Golden Eagle / Photo by Donna DewhurstBird and birding news
- Bird remains from the airplane that crash-landed in the Hudson are being sent to the Smithsonian's Feather Identification Lab for identification. Last year the lab processed remains from 4,600 bird strikes.
- China has a new bird species, the Nonggang Babbler (Stachyris nonggangensis), found in Guangxi Province. The new babbler forages for insects at ground level.
- The Emperor Penguin is likely to experience a significant decline, and possibly extinction, in the face of climate change. Current models show the colony at Terre Adelie shrinking from 3,000 birds to 400 by the year 2100.
- Electronic tags attached to Manx Shearwaters show that the seabirds often make a two-week layover somewhere along their long migration routes.
- The Rossmoor retirement community in California is ready to go ahead with killing 50 Acorn Woodpeckers for damaging houses.
- White eyes, birds in the family Zosteridae, diversify faster than any other birds. Most species in that family evolved fairly recently when members of the family arrived in new territory.
- Modern bird lineages may have survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous due to their larger brains compared to other avian ancestors.
- This sounds like a bird blogger's dream: a group of scientists found an unknown oasis by examining Google Earth footage. The recently-discovered forest in Mozambique provides habitat for at least seven Globally Threatened bird species.
- The 2009 Great Backyard Bird Count will begin in two weeks.
- The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering removing the Hawaiian Hawk ('Io) from the federal Endangered Species List.
- A new study throws cold water on the idea of "fertilizing" the ocean with iron filings to reduce climate change. Plankton do not sequester nearly as much carbon as originally thought. (However, the BBC takes a more positive view of the study.)
- A push to restore wolves to Olympic National Park is based on the premise that the lack of a top predator has allowed the elk population to grow to unsustainable levels.
- Climate models predict a major expansion of ocean dead zones.
- Canadian scientists are studying the boundary between forest and tundra for any sign of an advancing treeline.
- NOAA reports that the effects of elevated carbon dioxide levels will linger for the next 1,000 years, even if carbon emissions are completely stopped. The higher the peak carbon levels, the worse those lingering effects will be.
