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Award-winning free-lance science journalist Nicola Jones , most noted for her work on climate change and environmental issues, ventured into the book world with a picture book on the wildlife rehabilitation efforts for one of North America’s most endangered bird species, the Northern Spotted Owl.
I was happy to read that the wood stork ( Mycteria Americana ), a bird near and dear to me, was down-sited from the status of endangered to threatened species. Fish and Wildlife Service is down-listing the wood stork from endangered to threatened under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). As a biologist working for the U.S. Photo: U.S.
I work part time for the National Park Service (although, we’ll see what happens this weekend if there’s a federal government shutdown) and our visitor center is located in the Science Museum of Minnesota. An American Robin was perched on the side of one of the Science Museum vans.
For one thing, we become more aware of cultural biases in our science (new findings on warbling female birds, for example, reveal both gender and geographic biases). Many popular science books have neither. As Ackerman explains in her Introduction, studying extreme behavior brings new insight into what we think we know.
Starvation and predators make it hard to grow up, and birds have evolved a lot of strategies to give (at least some of) their chicks the best chance in life. One strategy that varies among birds (and other animals) is the number of offspring. Seabirds are one group of birds that go for the latter strategy.
My client has a healthy watersheds strategy and I was going to Sevilla and Jaen for the first steps of the program. The science-based approach that recognises the dilemmas and identifies the hard choices isn’t election material, I suppose. I was going on a quest for a single species – something I normally just don’t do.
Britain might have had new species to add to it’s list, then again maybe it didn’t. If you have time of course you might want to brush up on your field identification skills and knowledge of both bird topography, behaviour and migration strategies it all helps.
The birds were too far away to identify, and I know more than one species does this, but if I had to guess they were starlings. There is a bit of science news. If half the Warblers go extinct, that would be a lot of species but you’d still pretty much have Warbler DNA. But there were a gazillion of them. This makes sense.
Somewhat strangely, the HBW calls it a “small grey to yellow babbler” – while the species indeed has some grey parts, that is not the color that sticks to mind when seeing or remembering the bird. Plus the sibia apparently plays an important role in the pollination of one endangered rhododendron species ( source ).
In China, wherever there is one real tourist attraction (like the Great Wall), the local strategy seems to be to add some fake attractions – replicas of palaces or tombs, amusement parks, shopping centers – in order to maximize the income from tourists. But the starting point has to be a real attraction, not a fake one.
At the recent Swarovski Social Media Summit in Arizona, Nate proselytized passionately for the program that both manages your sightings and contributes them to science. Then the fun really started… The eBird interface came back saying that a whopping 251 species needed clarification. But Nate is an eBird fanatic.
All species are from the ABA area, and all groups must meet at least one of these criteria: (1) the group “represented a good opportunity to build core birding skills,” (2) the authors thought it was a group that needed “a refreshed treatment,” (3) the authors were intrigued by the group and wanted to present it using their unique format.
It’s Macaulay Library contains a wealth of photos and audio recordings for approximately 10,000 species. It allows users to submit photos and recordings and provides detailed information on bird species, including sightings, distribution, identification tips, photos, and recordings. It offers a bird academy and much much more.
Doug Futuyma believes in science and in the scientific basis of evolution. How Birds Evolve: What Science Reveals about Their Origin, Lives, and Diversity by Douglas J. Here are good, complex questions about why this diversity exists, how it came about, and what is its function when it comes to species and overall avian survival.
The vast majority of the 10,000+ living species of birds are passerines, and the vast majority of those have a similar system of breeding: Mom and dad bird make a nest and share parental responsibilities roughly equally, if not identically. It turns out that the two strategies may be related.
Chapter Two is a potpourri of stories about nemesis birds, birding by ear, birding for science, under the rubric of birding ‘for the love of it.’ Adventures of a Louisiana Birder: One Year, Two Wings, Three Hundred Species. ’ What was left to write about? ’ “Is this going to be a collection of essays?”
Taking inspiration from Matthiessen’s 1967 book (long out of print), which combined his natural history essays with species accounts by Ralph S. Their newest collaboration, The Shorebirds of North America: A Natural History and Photographic Celebration, is a glorious combination of expertise, graceful writing, and visual awesomeness.
She lives part-time in Uruguay and is co-director of the Fiction Meets Science program at the University of Bremen, Germany, which seeks to bridge the “two cultures” of science and literature. In the marshes of the estancia , he discovers what he comes to believe is a new species of rail – one of the “accidentals” of the title.
Finally in 1799, the first visitors on this volcanic land were a group of French seal hunters who were after the fur seals that can be found hauled out on the beaches for fur and oil, which almost wiped out the local population of the species. Marion has a fascinating history with invasive species. Just get rid of the mice.
Gisela Kaplan has written a book about the species, and how they seem unperturbed by humans: “It’s one of their most successful defense strategies. ” The Australasian Swamphen used to think of itself as a subspecies of the Purple Swamphen but then started a self-improvement program and ended up as a full species.
For example, a researcher and presumed ornithologist set out with two hypotheses related to the Ashy Drongo (and another drongo species) and wrote a paper about it. ” Nicely phrased, too – who would want to argue with an “evolutionary adaptive strategy”? Well, maybe some hardcore creationists, I guess.
The best female strategy seems to be to mate with as many of the males as possible, as this means more help in feeding the chicks by all the potential fathers (I guess the fathers do not have easy access to paternity tests). They found that the species is diurnal (well, using cameras, would they even have seen nightly activities?),
The HBW allows itself a rare moment of dry humor when discussing the sounds of the species: “Most vocalizations of this species are harsh and unmusical. ” The Latin species name caudatus does not really mean much – just that it has a tail. Thanks for pointing that out. Feel free to submit your vote.
.” Blue-bearded Bee-eaters seem to have a pretty clever hunting strategy. The species name athertoni is derived from Lt. Unfortunately, there is not much literature on the species except for the inevitable analysis of the mitochondrial genome. They provoke honeybee colonies, which then fly out and attack the bird.
With an obvious hint of disapproval, the HBW remarks that for this species, the “nest [is] a small or bulky but always untidy pad” I suspect the author of these lines lives with teenage children and uses the description of the magpie-robin to vent some frustration with them. But it is all for science, I hear them say.
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