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| Red Knot / Photo by Gregory Breese/USFWS |
Birds and birding news
- This year's World Shorebirds Day counting project runs from September 5 through September 11. If you are birding this weekend in a place with shorebirds, submit shorebird totals to eBird and share the checklists with the World Shorebirds Day account.
- Loggerhead Shrikes break the necks of their prey by whipping their heads back and forth.
- Eight bird species from South America were recently confirmed extinct.
- Settling on Spanish bird names is complicated by regional variations.
- The Golden Eagle is among the species selected for the 25 Genomes project.
- A research group commissioned a comic to explain its penguin foraging study.
- Northern birds have to complete their molts faster than birds in the tropics.
- Willow Warblers arrive earlier in more fragmented habitats.
- A study of House Finches showed how bacteria became more virulent in response to the birds becoming more resistant to infection.
- Climate change and deforestation are reducing habitats for cloud forest birds in Honduras.
Science and nature blogging
- Corvid Research: Can crows and ravens hybridize?
- Avithera: Satin Bowerbirds 2018
- Stokes Birding Blog: When to Take down Hummingbird Feeders!
- Birding New Jersey: Smith’s Painted Buntling
- ornithologi: An Illustration of the Accipiters of North America – The Sharp-shinned Hawk, Cooper’s Hawk, and Northern Goshawk.
- Snapshots of Nature: And Fall.
- The Birdist: Birds At Large: Battle Beasts
- Cicada Mania: Looking for adult cicadas at night
Conservation and biodiversity
- Brazil’s National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, which included both natural history collections and cultural artifacts, was gutted by a fire early this week. Museum officials are still sorting through the damage, but at the moment it seems that the entomological, paleontological, and archaeological collections were mostly destroyed, while other invertebrate and vertebrate collections and the herbarium survived. The fire was so devastating in part because of the government would not pay to fireproof the museum.
- The fire underlines the importance of digitizing museum collections and offsite storage of the data.
- Human activity causes normally diurnal animals to become more active at night.
- Many plants along the Texas border are threatened by climate change and wall construction.
- NPCA is running a pilot project to reduce waste at some of the most-visited national parks. The link includes suggestions for how visitors can reduce the waste they generate.
- A rare Queen butterfly was found this week at DeKorte Park in New Jersey. Read more at the Meadowlands Nature Blog.
