Political row flares over 'brutal slaughter' of three million birds a year in Cyprus - Europe - World. Their main target is the blackcap, a dainty warbler known as the northern nightingale for its sweet fluting song. Now these pretty little creatures have flown into another messy situation: a political row over who's to blame for their slaughter, involving the British military, Cypriot villagers and a furious MEP. Struan Stevenson, a Scottish Tory member of the European Parliament, has told Europe to “stop blaming Britain” for the “cruel practice,” after the Environment Commissioner accused the Ministry of Defence of not doing enough to stop poachers on its bases on the Mediterranean island.
Together with Robins, Blackcaps are trapped to supply taverna restaurants with meat for the local delicacy, ambelopoulia, through black-market trading - despite the practice being illegal since 1974. “Instead of taking firm action, they turn a blind eye to the real problem and spinelessly attempt to place the blame with our military,” he said of the “brutal slaughter”. Albino hummingbird. Description: all white w/ pink beak and eyes.. 1 species ID suggestions Map DataMap data ©2014 Google Imagery ©2014 TerraMetrics Map Data Map data ©2014 Google Imagery ©2014 TerraMetrics Satellite Map New York, USA.
A Clear And Present Danger: How Glass Kills Birds. Hide caption Experts say glass buildings kill millions of birds every year; scientists at Powdermill Avian Research Center are studying ways to help prevent this. Here, a volunteer tags a hooded warbler in Rector, Penn., in May. Maggie Starbard/NPR Hide caption Luke DeGroote, the banding program coordinator, looks for birds trapped in fine-meshed mist nets. Nearly 70 nets cover a 24.7-acre area at Powdermill; they need to be checked every 30 to 40 minutes. Maggie Starbard/NPR Hide caption DeGroote collects a gray catbird caught in one of the nets. The 39-foot-by-8-foot nets are designed to safely capture birds. Maggie Starbard/NPR Hide caption Christine Sheppard (left), an ornithologist with the American Bird Conservancy, and her assistant, Cara Menzel, insert two panes of glass into a test tunnel.
Hide caption DeGroote examines the wing of a yellow warbler. First of a two-part series. Modern architecture loves glass. A lot of them do, and die. Testing Special Glass. Building For Birds: Architects Aim For Safer Skies. Hide caption This assortment of more than 1,500 dead birds, all killed by collisions with Toronto windows, was collected during the 2010 migration season by volunteers from the Canadian Fatal Light Awareness Program. Kenneth Herdy/FLAP Hide caption Visitors take in the views from the High Line, a Manhattan park developed on an old elevated railway line.
City parks attract birds to the city, but glass-fronted buildings pose a danger. John W. Poole/NPR Ennead Architects Hide caption A house sparrow eyes a visitor from the foliage of Manhattan's High Line park. John W. Poole/NPR Hide caption Architect Guy Maxwell holds a printout of his proposed design for the new Bridge Building at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. John W. Hide caption On Vassar's campus, this riparian, bird-friendly habitat is the future site of the Bridge Building designed by Maxwell and Ennead Architects.
Second of a two-part series. These collisions may seem like an intractable problem. Dead birds. Murmuration. Young Pelicans In Trouble This Year - Gazettes.com: Environment. Bird rescuers are reporting higher than usual numbers of baby pelicans dying or in distress this summer. Julie Skoglund, manager at International Bird Rescue’s Los Angeles Center in San Pedro, said record numbers of young, starving California Brown Pelicans are being reported by concerned beachgoers and threatening to overwhelm rescue centers up and down the coast. International Bird Rescue is asking the public to be on the lookout for birds in distress; also, the organization is asking for volunteers and accepting donations to help pay for the cost of treating the birds. Pelicans consume half their own bodyweight in seafood each day — typically four to five pounds of fish costing up to $2.05 per pound. With rehabilitation periods of several weeks to a month or more, the expenses — not including medicines and surgeries — multiply quickly, according to Skoglund.
“Our average really fluctuates every year, but 174 in less than two months is very unusual,” she explained. Bicknell's Thrush habitat preserved in Dominican Republic. By Nate Swick, on June 16, 2012 From an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, via DC Birding Blog That most cryptic of North American thrushes, the Bicknell’s Thrush, is known to be exceptionally range restricted in its breeding range. It nests only in a few sites in the northeastern US and eastern Canada, generally over 3,000 feet in elevation and generally associated with red spruce stands. What is perhaps less known is that the species is equally range restricted on its wintering grounds, with 90% of the population of Bicknell’s Thrushes wintering on the island of Hispaniola, which consists of the two nations of Haiti and the Domincan Republic. Haitt’s native forests are famously almost completely gone except in a few protected parks, but the Dominican Republic still has about 40% of its original forests remaining, though those are constantly under threat from development and agriculture, a common and sad refrain across much of the neotropics.
Do Unhatched Chicks Sleep and Wake In Their Eggs? | 80beats. Watch: Hummingbird 'snores' in its sleep. Hummingbirds are known for living fast, flitting around between flowers as their wings flap up to 200 times per second. But they still have to sleep, as this video shows: The clip above was posted to YouTube in December, but suddenly went viral in recent days thanks to Reddit. It stars a female amethyst-throated sunangel, native to the Andes, and was filmed at a research facility in Peru. According to uploader forrestertr7, the bird is in a machine that tests oxygen intake.
(As forrestertr7 also admits, "I know it's not actually snoring, it just kinda sounds like it. ") For anyone worried about the bird's well-being, forrestertr7 offers reassurance: "This experiment was performed with the guidance and supervision of some of the top experts in tropical ornithology. Due to their small size, hummingbirds burn lots of energy just to keep a constant body temperature — a problem that's alleviated by their high-energy nectar diet. Also on MNN: Giant Killer Mice Decimating Rare Seabirds. On a remote island in the South Atlantic, common house mice have become unrelenting killers, consuming millions of endangered baby birds a year, a new study confirms.
The massacre is taking place on Gough Island (map), a British territory almost smack-dab in between the tips of South America and South Africa. The only humans living on the island belong to a small team running a weather station. Gough Island has long been recognized as an important seabird colony, since it hosts roughly ten million birds of more than 20 species. The island is also thought to be the only breeding ground for the Atlantic petrel—2 million breeding pairs produce 1.6 million chicks a year. The new study, though, reveals that the petrel chicks are in constant danger from house mice, which have grown to supersize proportions since being introduced to the island 150 years ago. (Related: "Viking Invaders Brought Armies of Mice.
") The House Mouse Underground (Related: "Rat Invasions Causing Seabird Decline Worldwide. ") Night herons settling down in downtown Oakland. Downtown Oakland has no shortage of wildlife. Now it even has some of the nonhuman variety. A colony of giant, squawking, black-crowned night herons has taken up residence in the gritty urban core of Oakland, apparently thriving amid the tattoo parlors and Afghan restaurants, Occupiers and bus exhaust.
"Oh my God, I saw one walking right down 14th Street. I'm like, 'What is that? ' " said Jalima Morales, 26, who saw a few more of the striking blue birds as she was walking down Jackson Street recently. "Now I see them all the time. They're so loud. The herons - more than 2 feet tall and deep, steely blue - apparently relocated a few years ago from their historic nesting spot at the Lake Merritt bird sanctuary. In any case, they're roosting by the dozens downtown, with more arriving daily. "They sound like someone scraping a washboard," said Greg Meagher, 51, of Berkeley, who works at the Alameda County courthouse downtown and sees the birds regularly. Noise and mess Not everyone is a fan. San Juan Capistrano tries to seduce swallows back. Los Angeles -- A bird's call rings endlessly inside the adobe walls at Mission San Juan Capistrano as tourists wander through the courtyard - ablaze with flowers in full bloom - and a handful of fourth-graders snap pictures and take notes for class projects.
Hardly the sweet song of the nightingale, the sound is more like the croak of a distressed frog - or, by an expert's own description, a "rusty, squeaky door. " It's a last-ditch effort to lure back the cliff swallow, which put San Juan Capistrano on the map but has snubbed the mission in recent years. The mission has tried drawing them back with food. The birds, with their orange rumps and white foreheads, once arrived in such numbers that their swarms looked like storm clouds in the spring sky, a migration that inspired songs, paintings and a yearly parade. But urbanization and disruptions from a preservation effort at the church have chased them away, and the once-familiar cliff swallow's mating cry is no longer heard.
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Fairy Penguin Chicknappers Caught and 'Dirk' is Rescued. - Three Australian men who stole a fairy penguin released the bird into shark-infested waters. - Dirk the fairy penguin was found by a couple who used their smartphone to google 'lost penguin'. Dirk, a fairy penguin stolen from an Australian marine park, has been safely returned, but not before being hounded by a dog and chased by another animal, possibly a shark. Police allege three young men broke into Sea World on Queensland's Gold Coast on Saturday night, swam in the dolphin enclosure and then stole seven-year-old Dirk as they made their escape. BIG VID: London Penguins Get Olympic Diving Board The little bird was found, exhausted but otherwise well, on Sunday after a couple spotted him in a nearby shallow estuary.
"They heard a scuffle in the water, and this penguin came out onto the sand," Sea World's director of marine sciences Trevor Long told reporters. "They thought it was very, very unusual, so they got on to their iPhone and googled 'lost penguin'. Bird Thought Extinct Found Living On Pacific Islands | Blog | eNature. Bird Thought Extinct Found Living On Pacific Islands Posted on Monday, February 27, 2012 by eNature Bryan's Shearwater © Smithsonian Institution Location of Ogasawara Islands Several Bryan’s Shearwaters, thought by many to be extinct, have been found alive on remote islands near Japan. A New Species The pelagic (ocean dwelling) bird was first noted in 1963 and thought to be a Little Shearwater (Puffinus assimilis) at the time. DNA analysis conducted in 2011 on the bird collected years earlier confirmed that it was actually a separate species, the first to be found in over 35 years.
The specimen of the bird tested had been found in a burrow among a colony of petrels on Midway Island during the Pacific Ocean Biological Survey Program in 1963—but no other confirmed specimens had been found since then until now. What Do We Know Of This Species? Who Found This Newly Discovered Population? And if you’re wondering, the species is named to honor Edwin Horace Bryan Jr. who was the curator of the B.
S.F.'s parrots join flight to the suburbs. The wild parrots of Telegraph Hill, apparently jaded by city life, have headed for the suburbs. The goofy, green birds are now the mild parrots of Brisbane. "We've got a pool, a park, and now we've got parrots. They make more noise than the airplanes," said Ron Davis, a Brisbane real estate agent and longtime resident. San Francisco's famed flock of cherry-headed conures, immortalized in an award-winning movie and book, has become so populous that about 100 or so birds have fled San Francisco for the verdant slopes of San Bruno Mountain, where they're feasting on juniper and hawthorn berries and delighting the locals with their acrobatics.
Another 100 or so are still flapping around the northern edge of San Francisco, but the flock appears to have branched beyond the foggy confines of the waterfront, probably in search of food, said Mark Bittner, author of the best-selling "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. " His advice to the bird-lovers of Brisbane: "Just enjoy them. They're fun. Scrapes, Granaries & Bowers: The Wide World of Avian Architecture | Living World. iStockphoto / Terry Wilson Peter Goodfellow's recent book, , captures a lifetime of not just observing birds but the unsung structures they create. Bird nests can be simple or elaborate, as small as a hazelnut, like this hummingbird nest, or enormous, weighing several tons. They can last a few weeks or a century, and can be isolated or one among a half million of similar nests.
Divided into 12 chapters based on types of nests and other avian construction, the book revives Goodfellow's "schoolboy excitement of 'bird nesting'" with case studies from around the world accompanied by intricate line drawings and blueprints, as well as hundreds of photos. "It is the architectural ability of birds to build a variety of nest types," Goodfellow writes, "that has enabled them to diversify into so many habitats--from the desert to the Antarctic, from high trees to underground, from open ground to out on the water--and which creates some of the best engineered structures in the world.
" When Good Tweets Go Bad | Animal Intelligence. Language seems to set humans apart from other animals, but scientists cannot just hand monkeys and birds an interspecies SAT to determine which linguistic abilities are singularly those of Homo sapiens and which we share with other animals. In August neuroscientists Kentaro Abe and Dai Watanabe of Kyoto University announced that they had devised the next-best thing, a systematic test of birds’ grammatical prowess. The results suggest that Bengalese finches have strict rules of syntax: The order of their chirps matters. “It’s the first experiment to show that any animal has perceived the especially complex patterns that supposedly make human language unique,” says Timothy Gentner, who studies animal cognition and communication at the University of California, San Diego, and was not involved in the study.
Finches cry out whenever they hear a new tune, so Abe and Watanabe started by having individual birds listen to an unfamiliar finch’s song. Reference: Kentaro Abe and Dai Watanabe. BBC Nature - Bird sings song with heavy wings. Brightly colored bird bills indicate good health. Rare white kiwi survives surgery. Thousands of birds make crash landing in Utah.