Weekend Birdery: Impressions of the Lyrebird
A lyrebird is kind of like that guy from the Police Academy movies who could do all the sounds, except, a bird. Other birds, hammers, chainsaws, drills, car alarms, etc. Just watch:
Via Robert Krulwich.
Weekend Birdery: Hummingbird Tongues
Science Friday brings us the latest in tongue research in this video. Apparently what we previously thought we knew about how hummingbirds drink—and about how dogs drink, but this isn’t weekend doggery, so whatever—was wrong. It turns out a hummingbird’s tongue isn’t really like a straw or a siphon. It’s more like . . . well, I dunno . . . a zipper cone?
The State of the Birds 2011
The 2011 State of the Birds report (pdf) was released a few weeks ago to a flurry of media attention1. And so it is altogether meet that I announce to you, my fellow Americans, that the state of our birds is . . . dispersed among an impressive real estate portfolio held by the United States government and managed by a dizzying array of public agencies:
Today, more than 850 million acres of land and 3.5 million square miles of ocean are publicly owned, including more than 245 million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management, 6,000 State Park units, 1,600 Marine Protected Areas, 550 National Wildlife Refuges, 350 military installations, 150 National Forests, and nearly 400 National Park Service units.
[* * *]
These habitats are vital to more than 800 bird species in the U.S., 251 of which are federally threatened, endangered, or of conservation concern. More than 300 bird species have 50% or more of their U.S. distribution on public lands and waters.
Note that the phrase “federally threatened” should probably not be taken literally.
Last year I somewhat jokingly complained about the 2010 SOTB report’s “unforgivable paucity of informative charts,” so I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this year’s much improved, more informative charts. They’re much better. And this map of public lands is helpful, giving you a sense of where these places are (= in the west, it seems).
I like the idea of a State of the Birds report. And it’s a nice-looking report, to be sure. At times it reads like the executive summary of a more comprehensive report out there somewhere—and that’s the report I really want to see. But it doesn’t exist.
- Note that media attention was technically unrelated to the release of the SOTB. [↩]
Death in the Air, Death Everywhere
Liz Condo/The Advocate, via Associated Press
The U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center reports that the birds tested negative for pesticides, though tests for other toxins and diseases are still pending. From the USGS-NWHC website:
While large-scale bird die-offs are always a concern, they are not that unusual. USGS records list at least 16 events involving more than 1,000 black birds or starlings over the past 30 years. The majority of these cases were poison related, although weather-related trauma was also the cause of some events.
Hundreds more blackbirds were found dead in Louisiana (pictured above), just 300 miles south of where the thousands were found in Arkansas. It’s thought that the Louisiana birds were also spooked by fireworks and then, somehow, ran into powerlines on the side of the road. (Hmmmm, don’t know about that one. Live wires?)
Presumably similar explanations apply in Kentucky, Tennessee, and (no doubt) elsewhere where large numbers of birds have recently fallen off their perches.
NYT quotes Melanie Driscoll, a biologist with the Audubon Society, for some statistical perspective:
“Five billion birds die in the U.S. every year,” Ms. Driscoll said, “so statistically some have to die at the same time.” The population of red-winged blackbirds is more than 200 million, she said, and they fly in flocks of 100,000 to 2 million. “So 5,000 sounds like a lot of birds, but really it is a relative number.”
Meanwhile, in the Old World, hundreds of turtle doves have been found dead in an Italian town near Bologna. Apparently they met their fate at some irresistible sunflower seeds, eating so much that their livers and kidneys were poisoned.
Evil pigs have not been incriminated as yet in any of the recent events.
Weekend Birdery: History of the Bird
People have been flipping the bird for thousands of years. It may very well be the most widespread and longest-lived obscene finger gesture there is. It appeared in Aristophanes’ 5th-century B.C. play The Clouds and was known to the Romans as Digitus impudicus, the impudent finger. According to Ira Robbins (pdf), writing in the UC Davis Law Review, the Bird recovered from near extinction in the Middle Ages and eventually migrated to the New World, where it now flourishes.
The first recorded sighting in America was in the 1886 photograph below, depicting Boston Beaneaters’ pitcher Charlie “Old Hoss” Radbourn (top left) flipping off the camera, a profound cultural moment which would later be replicated countless times by rogues and rapscallions everywhere.
Weekend Birdery: Flamingos’ Post-Modern Kitsch
There’s always been a fine line between authentic flamingo yard art and ironic flamingo yard art. But it turns out that real-life actual flamingos are themselves the ultimate self-reflexive exploiters of kitsch.
Flamingos gather in the shape of a flamingo in Yucatan, Mexico. Photograph: Robert Haas/National Geographic/Caters News Agency
Weekend Birdery: Townsend’s Warbler
I saw one of these little critters outside my window last month. It’s Dendroica townsendi, and it’s the 250th species to make my life list.
Weekend Birdery: The Mosquito
The mosquito, according to leading organismal biologists, is not a bird. It does fly, and it is featured in this Weekend Birdery post. Yet it is not a bird. People in southern states sometimes like to quip that their state bird should be the mosquito, 
but as far as I can tell the distinction between birds and insects remains one of the areas of universally accepted scientific knowledge not actively disputed by conservative state and local officials in the South.
Anyway, I have two unresolved lines of inquiry concerning the biology of mosquitoes.
First: what is the trick to the way mosquitoes seem to vanish into thin air? Is there some set of tactical mosquito-flight maneuvers such that, if you knew them, you would know where to look for an offending mosquito after it has evaded your swat? For example, do they drop straight down, and/or zigzag backwards? Something different every time? In any case, if you haven’t lost track of the offender, it seems the most effective way to kill it is by clapping it between your hands. This reduces the chance that the air-flow disturbance caused by the swatting motion will simply push the mosquito out of harm’s way, as commonly results from the one-hand swat. A bazooka may work, too.
And second: wouldn’t it be better for mosquitoes, from an evolutionary perspective, if their proboscises didn’t cause such irritating reactions? I suppose the answer here is the fact that, even though the irritation leads to us making sporadic efforts to kill them, we don’t kill nearly enough of them to give rise to any selection effects.
Photograph by Darlyne A. Murawski.
Weekend Birdery: Oil Cleanup Crews May Be Worse Than Oil
At coastal nesting sites in Florida, well-meaning oil cleanup crews have inadvertently trampled shorebird nesting sites, apparently becoming as much of a threat as the oil itself in some cases. A resource management specialist at the Gulf Islands National Seashore at Pensacola Beach (shown below) was quoted by National Geographic as saying, “the cleanup can do more damage than the oil could ever do.”
From April to August each year, rare shorebirds such as the snowy plover and least tern lay nests of two to three eggs directly on the softly undulating, open dunes about 40 feet (13 meters) from the water’s edge.
Snowy plovers and least terns are considered threatened in Florida. When nesting, both species’ survival depends on limited contact with people.
But with oil encroaching on Florida’s coasts, an army of cleanup crews has descended on the seashore. About 44,300 people are now de-oiling roughly 450 miles (720 kilometers) of Gulf coastline, according to the website for the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command, the joint federal-industry task force responding to the Gulf oil spill.
With so many people working so close to breeding grounds, frightened adult birds are abandoning their nests, and adults and chicks are being inadvertently trampled.
Weekend Birdery: Reviled Geese
Branta canadensis is not widely beloved. These geese can be troublesome honkers and, weighing about 9 pounds, pose serious risks to human aviation when their numbers are unchecked.
Still it was a bit of a surprise to learn that 400 of them were trapped and exterminated from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park a few weeks ago. Now it turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg. NYT reports:
Officials plan to reduce the number of Canada geese in New York State by two-thirds, eventually trimming the population to 85,000 from 250,000, according to a report prepared by several city, state and federal agencies.
The reduction is part of a larger plan that also calls for the near halving of the Canada geese population in 17 Atlantic states, to 650,000 from 1.1 million.
That’s 165,000 condemned geese in New York and 550,000 overall. I resisted the title variant “Weekend Murdery,” tempting though it was, because I didn’t want to suggest that the wildlife-control professionals are bad people, or even that the goose-control program is necessarily bad policy, even if it seems a bit extreme. Also, unlike some bird populations on the Gulf coast (with whose catastrophic situation I contrasted the goose-control program in a previous post), Canada Goose populations are not seriously threatened by these exterminations, even at this scale. “Some 2.6 million Canada Geese are harvested by hunters in North America, but this does not seem to affect its numbers,” according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Still, I’d imagine that the assured survival of the species would be cold comfort for the hundreds of thousands of individual geese slated for extermination, if they knew what we had in store for them.
Hat tip 10,000 Birds.
Weekend Birdery: Murder, But Not of Crows
Weekend Birdery has become awfully morbid lately, hasn’t it? Anyway, Jonathan Franzen has a piece in the July 26 issue of the New Yorker (abstract here) reporting on yet another theater of avian-hominid conflict in which the hominids—okay, just homo sapiens—reveal a whole new level of outrageous conduct. It seems that the human inhabitants of Europe—particularly the island-dwelling peoples of Cyprus and Malta—have an unshakeable penchant for killing (and eating) staggering numbers of songbirds. Franzen writes:
Every spring, some five billion birds come flooding up from Africa to breed in Eurasia, and every year as many as a billion are killed deliberately by humans, most notably on the migratory flyways of the Mediterranean.
Franzen describes how the birds are captured in Cyprus using “lime sticks: straight switches, about thirty inches long, that are coated with the gluey gum of the Syrian plum and deployed artfully, to provide inviting perches, in the branches of low trees.”
Female blackcaps caught on a lime stick
Others are ensnared in nets, and some are shot. Some are destined to be caged and sold as pets on the black market; many will wind up as someone’s dinner. Blackcaps, a common European warbler (pictured here), are a traditional delicacy in Cyprus.
Hunting and capturing songbirds is mostly outlawed all over Europe, but enforcement can be somewhat lax, particularly in countries where the locals feel that conservation laws have been imposed by foreign outsiders from the EU without sensitivity to their local traditions.
Jars of pickled songbirds
Photos from 10,000 Birds.
Weekend Birdery: Not Good for the Goose
It has been upsetting for bird lovers to see images of gulf birds coated in oil and to watch the casualty counts climb. As of its July 16 report (pdf), the Fish and Wildlife Service had collected 2,095 dead birds in the Gulf spill region—823 of which were visibly oiled. Another 1,174 visibly oiled birds have been collected alive.
The loss of birds and other wildlife as a consequence of the spill has been tragic, as everyone agrees, but at least they weren’t killed intentionally. One can’t say the same for the massive numbers of Canada Goose that have been corralled and gassed in New York City recently. Nearly 400 in Prospect Park alone were herded to their death last week (they were molting and couldn’t fly away), and another 1,235 were likewise exterminated last summer in different locations around the city.
The geese are believed to present a danger to air travel in the area. And in the wake of the Flight 1549 incident, the city has been determined to cull geese populations within 7 miles of the airports. There is some dispute, however (according to this NYT story), about whether local New Yorker geese pose the same danger as migrating, tourist geese.
Anyway there are better ways to control populations of geese. Relocation and release would be more comforting, but it’s not an option; the Canada Goose, Branta canadensis, has proven so adaptable to human environs that it has made itself into a pest all across the continental United States. Nobody wants more of them. But more humane alternatives like egg addling are available—alternatives which are probably much cheaper and more environmentally friendly than sending hundreds of adult geese to suffocation chambers, double-bagging their carcasses, and dumping them in a landfill.
Oily Bird Doesn’t Get the Worm
GrrlScientist writes:
When oiled, seabirds are vulnerable to drowning because their feathers’ waterproofing qualities are destroyed and their downy feathers’ insulative properties are lost, leading to either hypothermia or sometimes, as is the case for many Gulf birds, hyperthermia. Oiled birds lose body weight rapidly as their metabolism increases to compensate for their falling body temperature. Sticky, oiled feathers are heavy and cannot trap air between them to keep the birds buoyant, so they cannot fly and often sink into a watery grave below the waves. Thus, birds are very particular about their plumage, and use their bills and tongues to remove debris, including oil, despite its terrible taste and smell. They sometimes ingest the oil, which causes health problems, such as ulcers and damage to internal organs that detoxify the blood.
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) has collected a total of 1,589 “visibly oiled” birds in the Gulf since the BP Deepwater spew began, according to FWS’ July 9 report (pdf). The good news is that the number of cleaned and released birds has been climbing, now up to 450 (28.3%). Oily birds found dead number 569 (35.7%). That leaves 571 (35.9%) oily birds captured and in some stage of rehabilitation. GrrlScientist notes that the International Bird Rescue Research Center (IBRRC) has reported average release rates of 50%-80% over its nearly 40 years of operation, but survival rates after release vary greatly with the circumstances of the spill, the species affected, and the rescue response.
Another 1,056 birds collected from the Gulf have been found dead with no visible signs of oil. It’s my understanding that FWS will be making cause-of-death determinations on these, but so far we don’t know how many of these can be chalked up to the spill. Daily updates of all FWS collections (non-birds, too) are available here.
Picture via Buzzfeed, How to Clean a Pelican.
Kindness in an Unkindness of Ravens
Common Raven, Corvus corax, showing off at Bryce Canyon National Park, USA. Image: United States National Park Service (Public Domain)
You’d think that ravens—looking all black and bedraggled as they do, and croaking their gruff baritone croaks as they do—would be sort of, well, evil. Or at least brutally indifferent to others’ suffering. And they are! But, in a beyond-good-and-evil kind of way, they are also surprisingly sympathetic to other ravens with whom they have formed social bonds.
A new study of the Common Raven, Corvus corax, examines what are called “affiliative behaviors”—various forms of touching and preening—among ravens in the minutes after one of them has been in a fight. Researchers placed 11 ravens (raised in captivity) from four nests in a large outdoor aviary outfitted to be as natural for the birds as possible. GrrlScientist recounts:
Drs. Fraser and Bugnyar began their study by documenting the frequency of affiliative behaviors in these birds, using a standard protocol developed for primate research. They watched the aftermath of 152 fights between these juvenile ravens during the following 23-month period of time, and recorded the identities of the aggressor, the victim and the bystanders (nearby flock members), along with the intensity of the conflict (a chase flight or hitting were rated as “high intensity”, whilst a forced retreat was “low intensity”). All affiliative (“consoling”) behaviors — defined as contact sitting, preening or beak-to-beak or beak-to-body touching between the victim of the conflict and an individual flock member — were recorded during the ten minutes following each conflict. These post-conflict time periods (PC) were then matched to a control period (MC) for the same victim raven on the next possible day and the frequency and nature of the affiliative interactions that occurred in those time periods were compared….
The ravens were two to three times more likely to exhibit affiliative behaviors immediately following a conflict (the PC period) than at other, controlled times not immediately following a conflict (the MC period). And they favored those ravens they were closer to. GrrlScientist:
Basically, affiliative behaviors occurred most often when the flock member had a closer social bond with the victim raven than with the aggressor. Furthermore, the team observed an increasing probability of unsolicited bystander affiliations after more intense conflicts (when the victim was more likely to be distressed)….
“The findings of this study represent an important step towards understanding how ravens manage their social relationships and balance the costs of group-living,” Drs. Fraser and Bugnyar write. “Furthermore, they suggest that ravens may be responsive to the emotional needs of others.”
The function of the post-conflict affiliative behavior is, one must admit, not perfectly clear. But a leading hypothesis (developed in studies of chimps) contends that its function is to console: to alleviate the victim’s distress, and to do so out of empathy.
If that hypothesis is correct, it will give the lie to the (not-exactly-common) English word for an aggregation of Corvus corax, “an unkindness of ravens.” It seems these corvids just don’t want to live according to our labels.
Via GrrlScientist.
Source:
Fraser, O., & Bugnyar, T. (2010). Do Ravens Show Consolation? Responses to Distressed Others. PLoS ONE, 5 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010605
Weekend Birdery: The Hummer
Is there any wildlife blog funnier than Animal Review? I suppose it’s possible. Here’s a taste, from the Hummingbird review:
Yet despite being only hours away from starvation at any given moment, the hummingbird cannot calm down and focus. While its teachers describe it as ‘boisterous,’ the truth is that it suffers from a pretty severe case of ADD, and being the only bird in the entire world that can fly backwards, sideways, directly up, directly down, and hover doesn’t help things, either. Its homework is a disaster. Thus, although it’s endemic to the Americas – North, South and Cental [sic] – the hummingbird is unable to point out any of these places on a map.
Meanwhile, while the anorexia and ADD go undiagnosed, the hummingbird stands most precariously on the edge of a heart attack. Some hummingbirds, during flight, can get their heart rates up to 1260 beats per minute. Furthermore, some species take about 250 breaths a minute and flap their wings up to 80 times per second. You’d think someone would notice. But no, we find its acute tachycardia cute.
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