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| Western Tanager / Photo by Kari Cieszkiewicz/USFWS |
Birds and birding news
- The Trump administration is pushing a regulatory change that would stop enforcement of "incidental" bird killings under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Birders should comment in opposition to this rule by July 20th.
- The songs of White-throated Sparrows are changing from ending with repeated sets of triplets to repeated sets of doubled notes. The new song debuted in British Columbia and has been moving eastward over the past two decades.
- The AOS released its new checklist supplement for North America this week. The most notable changes in the ABA Area include splitting the Mexican Duck as its own species and merging the Northwestern Crow with American Crows due to widespread interbreeding.
- Black Lives Matter protests have revived calls to change problematic honorific names like the McCown's Longspur. Here are the AOS guidelines for English names and instructions for submitting proposals to change them.
- The discussion of race and birding has continued since Black Birders Week, including an interview with the author of White Fragility, interviews with some of Black Birders Week's organizers, and an essay on race and birding in Wyoming.
- Cactus Ferruginous Pygmy-Owls have a tiny range in the southwestern US and northern Mexico and are threatened by habitat fragmentation and climate change.
- Air, plastic,and water pollution threaten Madagascar's endemic birds.
- Saving the Saltmarsh Sparrow will mean providing space for salt marshes to retreat as the sea level rises.
- Restoration efforts around Cape May Point include the removal of invasive plants and their replacement with native ones.
- Here is some good bird news from this year.
- This spring a male Golden-winged Warbler has maintained a territory on Sparta Mountain in the area that was cleared to create scrub-shrub habitat.
- Finally, this is baby bird season, so here are some guidelines on what to do if you find a baby bird. (Or see baby bird guidelines in comic form.)
Science and nature blogging
- Vermont Center for Ecostudies: Field Guide to July 2020
- Feathered Photography: Male MacGillivray’s Warbler Turning On His Perch
- The Meadowlands Nature Blog: Don Torino's Life in the Meadowlands: Gardening Like Life Depends On It
- Backyard and Beyond: Wasps and Caterpillars
- Edin Whitehead: Little zooming legs
- On The Wing Photography: Yellow Warbler Female With Food For Her Chicks
- The Prairie Ecologist: Celebrating Color, Movement and Noise in an Evolving Prairie
- Avian Hybrids: Taxonomy in flux: The story of three flatbills and a flammulated flycatcher
Biodiversity and conservation
- Scientists are tracking Spotted Lanternflies through their life cycles to find ways to control their spread.
- A growing Elk population may bring tourists to eastern Kentucky, but see this thread on problems with the article.
- A right whale found off Monmouth County probably died from propeller wounds.
- This year's National Moth Week will not feature public events due to the pandemic, but observers are still encouraged to submit their own sightings to sites like iNaturalist.
- Dracula ants can snap their jaws at 90 m/s, which is faster than any other animal's movement.
Climate change and environmental politics
- The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the use of single-use plastics (and even led to reusable bag bans in some places), but reusables are still safe to use since the virus spreads by airborne particles rather than surface contact.
- This week the House Democrats announced a new climate action plan. The plan is unlikely to be enacted in this term but could be in the future if Democrats win control of the Senate and White House. The new plan borrows ideas from the Green New Deal and is more ambitious than the Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House but not the Senate in 2009.
- The next administration will face a major challenge undoing the environmental damage caused by the Trump administration. Many of this administration's changes disproportionately harm Black communities and worsen the effects of COVID-19.
- Despite the pandemic, the Trump administration is trying to speed up construction of the border wall. The project seems to be drying up at least one oasis because wall construction is draining the aquifer that feeds the wetland.
- Washington, DC, is suing four major oil and gas companies for misleading the public about climate change.
- A spending bill that passed the New Jersey legislature this week included language that could allow for a golf course to be expanded into Liberty State Park. This proposal has been a subject of controversy for some time, and it is time to protect Liberty State Park's bird habitat from development.
- New Jersey's DEP released a report on how climate change will affect the state, from higher temperatures and sunny day flooding to the potential disappearance of the state bird.
