Birds

Birds, Feathers, And Birds Of A Feather

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Recent research sequenced 48 bird species, including (from left) the budgerigar, the barn owl and the American flamingo. (Left and center)iStock; (Right) Chris Minerva/Ocean/Corbis

Recent research sequenced 48 bird species, including (from left) the budgerigar, the barn owl and the American flamingo. (Left and center)iStock; (Right) Chris Minerva/Ocean/Corbis

Thanks to National Public Radio (USA) for this podcast of a story we know our ornithologically-inclined readers will appreciate:

What do a pigeon and a flamingo have in common? Quite a bit, according to a reordering of the evolutionary tree of birds.

One of a series of studies published Thursday in Science is the latest step toward understanding the origins of the roughly 10,000 bird species that populate our planet. Continue reading →

Darter “Spear Fishing”

/ Brinda Suresh / 1 Comment

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Today’s birding was at Hebbal lake with the Bangalore “bngbirds” birding forum. It was a cold, misty morning with relatively little bird activity. We saw some cormorants, herons, moorhens and a darter as we moved on.

Then, all of a sudden, there was some action that made my day! A Darter hunting!

I hope you enjoy this “blow by blow” account as much as I did!

Birds, Shakespeare & Ecology

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Thanks to National Public Radio for this story of unusual collaboration:

The Mystery Of The Missing Martins

When half a million songbirds didn’t show up at their usual roosting spot this summer, I went looking for them. My search took me to the back roads of South Carolina, where I saw firsthand evidence of Shakespeare’s influence on American ecology, met a society of strangely enthusiastic landlords, and learned a bizarre fact about the missing birds: They don’t nest in nature anymore. They only breed in houses provided by humans.

Murals at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology

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Video by Video by Lindsay France/University Photography

Video by Lindsay France/University Photography

This past spring, naturalist, writer, and artist James Prosek completed the Wall of Silhouettes on the north wall of the Lab’s visitor center. As you can see from the video above, this mural is all in black and white, and shows the life-size, hand-painted silhouettes of 170 birds in different habitats, accompanied by numbers like those in a field guide to represent the relationship between us and nature and one of the ways in which people connect with birds.

A mural by artist Jane Kim planned for the wall facing Prosek’s paintings is scheduled to be completed next November, and will feature representatives from all 231 bird families, Continue reading →

A Book To Gift The Bird-Lovers In Your Life

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We first heard about it here. This book may be the perfect solution to your next gift-giving occasion for the bird lover(s) in your life. We are still on alert and concerned about Amazon, so if you do not have find this in your local bookstore, please place your order somewhere that supports independent booksellers, or perhaps National Public Radio (USA) for this book. The publisher has this to say about the book:

“A remarkable book. Reading about the birds of Pandemonium will make you laugh and cry; it will make you see more clearly the need to take care of our planet; and it will confirm that one person with a passion can make a difference.” —Jeff Corwin, nature conservationist Continue reading →

FeederWatch BirdSpotter 2014

/ Seth Inman / 3 Comments

White-breasted Nuthatch feeding at LEGO Feeder. Photo by Gary Mueller submitted to Project FeederWatch 2014 BirdSpotter contest.

Project FeederWatch was one of my other neighbors back at the Lab of Ornithology when I worked for Celebrate Urban Birds. This year, FeederWatch is working on a photo contest with the optics company Vanguard, and it looks like they have some amazing prizes, and therefore some stunning contest entries! The 2014-15 BirdSpotter contest will run from November 5th to February 23rd, and the main goal of the contest is to increase project membership to 25,000 participants for the year.

The FeederWatch mission is pretty straightforward: if you live in North America and have a feeder in your neighborhood (yard, park, etc.), watch it during the winter (November-April) and count the different birds that visit it. Like other citizen science projects that the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is involved with, the data you send in becomes valuable input for scientists in their research!

Continue reading →

Starling Murmuration, 2014

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Autumn, near Gretna Green. Dark clouds begin to form in the sky above fields, woodlands and reed beds. But these are no ordinary clouds. They are one of the UK’s most incredible wildlife spectacles.

Thanks to the Guardian for keeping up the tradition of sharing these seasonal photos (click the image above to go to a collection of this year’s contributions from readers).

Migration Celebration

/ Shailee Shah / 2 Comments

When I graduated from Cornell not too long ago, I drew a bird on my graduation hat. It was a stylized yellow-bellied sapsucker, a symbol I encountered almost every day in my four years as an undergraduate as I studied, worked and conducted research at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The Lab shaped my undergraduate experience and inspired my love of science and multimedia. This past weekend I had the gratifying opportunity to give back a little and pass on the inspiration.

As the Autumn chill set in – which in Ithaca means grey skies and a constant drizzle of rain – the Lab opened its doors to the community for a day of Migration Celebration. It was a day to celebrate birds: their fascinating behaviors, plumages, songs, migrations, habitats and ability to bring together people from all walks of life. The event was mainly geared towards children, with innovative educational activities organized by all Lab departments:

“What’s your favorite bird? A sandpiper? Can you draw it? Cool! Now let’s put it on a map and look up where it spends the winter.” Continue reading →

On the Road to 100 Species at Xandari

/ Seth Inman / 1 Comment

Silhouette of the Blue-crowned Motmot, one of Xandari’s most colorful and exciting resident species due to its racquet-tipped tail and partly iridescent plumage.

Over the last four months or so that I’ve been birding around Xandari, in the beginning with the help and company of James, Xandari’s species list on its eBird hotspot has been growing, if not daily, then at least weekly. James and I had charged ourselves with documenting every resident species before the migrants came down starting in September and October. When James left to go back to school in early August, we had seen or heard 80 species on or from property.

A pair of Gray-headed Chachalacas enjoying the view of Alajuela. Seen from Xandari’s balcony restaurant.

Since then, I’ve seen Continue reading →

Birds Are Barometers, Among Other Things

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A recent study projects that the summer range of the Allen’s hummingbird will shrink by 90 percent by 2080. Photo by Loi Nguyen/Audubon Photography Awards

One more story related to the centenary mentioned here, this time with a podcast interview with  to accompany our previous post linking to his editorial in the New York Times:

It’s been 100 years since the last passenger pigeon died. Would we have been able to save the bird today? What is the state of bird conservation in North America? Gary Langham of the National Audubon Society and Ken Rosenberg from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology discuss which species are under threat and how climate change might affect birds in the future.

Early Audubon

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Box 8. L'avocette de Buffon. Near Nantes, France, [1805 or 1806]. 1 drawing : pastel, graphite, and ink on paper ; 47 x 31 cm. Depicts the Avocet (Recurvirostra avosetta) standing on the ground with no background details. Unsigned. Audubon no. 117.

Box 8. L’avocette de Buffon. Near Nantes, France, [1805 or 1806]. 1 drawing : pastel, graphite, and ink on paper ; 47 x 31 cm. Depicts the Avocet (Recurvirostra avosetta) standing on the ground with no background details. Unsigned. Audubon no. 117.

Thanks to correspondent Kate Kondayen for this item, possibly of interest to our Cornell Lab of Ornithology friends, in the Harvard Gazette this week:

Growing up in the late 18th century, John James Audubon regularly skipped school and headed to the fields, spending his early years developing the techniques that led to his career as a famed naturalist who made pioneering contributions to art and science. Continue reading →

Conservation, Passenger Pigeons, History Of Extinction

/ Crist Inman / 4 Comments
Gérard DuBois

Gérard DuBois

My favorite doomsday journalist (and I mean that as the highest compliment) posted over the weekend an unamusing memo to remind us that this is an important centenary anniversary. It ups the ante on our commitment to the community of birdwatchers, casual and serious alike, who support important conservation of wildlife habitat all over the world.

It is not amusing to be reminded about various tragic commons, especially ones for which collective action would seem to have been achievable. We link to these stories in the hope that doomsday outcomes will become less likely if we remind ourselves often enough.

Yesterday the ever-better New York Times, newspaper of record that pays more and better attention to environmental issues than most other publications, saw fit to print this piece by the Executive Director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, for which we give our thanks and share with you in whole due to its value as a public service:

ITHACA, N.Y. — THE passenger pigeon is among the most famous of American birds, but not because of its beauty, or its 60-mile-an-hour flight speed. Nor is it a cherished symbol of our great country. No, we remember the passenger pigeon because of the largest-scale human-caused extinction in history.

Continue reading →

eBird Expansion

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Including historical data since 1810 and extending into checklists from December of last year, eBird’s Observational Dataset just hit a milestone of 500 million records, making eBird the largest repository of biodiversity information that is freely accessible.

Ospreys At Cornell

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Volunteer birders capture fledging of young ospreys on campus

Volunteer birders capture fledging of young ospreys on campus

Click the image above to watch three minutes of video from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology:

Cornell employees and volunteer “birders-on-the-ground” Cindy and Karel Sedlacek and Suzanne and William Horning capture the fledging of two young ospreys from their nest on a light pole above the soccer field on Game Farm Road, August 8, 2014.

Ospreys build nests on high outcropings and forks in trees. Utility Poles and platforms are a frequent substitute, often built especially for this purpose.

Winged Wildlife at Carara National Park (Part 2)

/ Seth Inman / 1 Comment

White Ibis on the banks of a river.

As I hinted in Part 1, Carara National Park is great for experiencing much of Costa Rica’s famous biodiversity. Monkeys, iguanas, poison dart frogs, and insects, together in a rich rainforest replete with all sorts of weird fungi that can look tasty and cute. Upon entering the park, James and I were greeted with the laughing calls of Black-hooded Antshrikes, birds that enjoy the columns of marching insects that commonly go by the name of “army ants.” Plenty of other birds with the word “ant” in their names made themselves known with their songs or movements in the undergrowth: male and female Dot-winged Antwrens, a Dusky Antbird, several Chestnut-backed Antbirds and Black-faced Antthrushes, and even a Streak-chested Antpitta heard from afar.

Apart from birds, we also saw several species of butterfly, including this one with the classic owl-eye pattern on its wings to startle potential predators. We also saw cicadas, but several times they had fallen prey to skillful salliers from silent perches. This female White-whiskered Puffbird, as well as this woodcreeper (Long-tailed, perhaps?), both emerged from their hidden leafy blinds to land somewhere with a juicy, shiny cicada in their beaks. There were several other woodcreepers doing their job–creeping along tree trunks–like a Streaked Woodcreeper with its powerful bill, and in general James and I struggled to Continue reading →

Wildlife at Carara National Park: Part 1

/ Seth Inman / 4 Comments

Red-capped Manakin (male). He has spiffy yellow thighs, unfortunately not visible in this picture.

A few weekends ago, James and I spent six hours at Parque Nacional Carara, on the Pacific side of Costa Rica and just about an hour and a half from Xandari. Braving the muggy, humid coastal rainforest with the intention of spotting and/or hearing at least fifty new (for us) species, we set off on the first couple miles of trail with our field guide in hand. James uses a pair of Nikon Monarch binoculars for quick spotting and following birds as they flit around, and I sport a Canon SX50 digital camera to hopefully capture still images or video for identification purposes. Sometimes I get lucky enough to take a photo that’s worth sharing!

But not all the wildlife we spotted at Carara was avian. On the way to the park entrance, we crossed the famous Río Tarcoles, a river that is home to dozens of crocodiles that bask in the mud, particularly under the bridge that tourists walk over to gaze at the enormous predators hanging around. James and I saw plenty of smaller reptilian relatives skitter across the paths at the park, including iguanas and a basilisk lizard. We passed several troops of leaf-cutter ants marching  Continue reading →

A Sophie’s Choice Moment For Two Species, One Environment, And No Solomon In Sight

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Damian Mulinix — Chinook Observer. A small portion of the cormorant colony as seen from a bird blind.

Damian Mulinix — Chinook Observer. A small portion of the cormorant colony as seen from a bird blind.

You can read about this in a major media outlet, but try another approach for this story. Local journalism is alive and well, and covering complex, important topics through the local lens:

A plan to kill 16,000 double-crested cormorants on East Sand Island has some residents on the North Coast scratching their heads. Although still in the proposal phase, the plan drew many to an open house in Astoria last week to ask questions of the federal agencies involved. “I can’t believe in this day and age we can’t come up with an alternative solution to killing things,” said Tommy Huntington of Cannon Beach. Continue reading →

24/7 Birdwatch

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Ezra, a red-tailed hawk, perches outside Schoellkopf Stadium. Photo credit, Christine Bogdanowicz.

Ezra, a red-tailed hawk, perches outside Schoellkopf Stadium. Photo credit, Christine Bogdanowicz.

In the interest of what we consider essential news about environmental or conservation issues we occasionally share an article in its entirety here, with the encouragement to give the source its due. The nature of blogging is to be quick but not sloppy, brief but clear, and missionary but unorthodox.

The link to this article is deeply missionary, in that our blog has more bird-related content than any other type of content; birds are both a metric for and icon of our conservation mission; quoting the article in entirety is our unorthodox way of getting the writer’s attention (and if he or the publication prefers we will be happy to reduce our republishing of this article to the normal “fair use” excerpt standard) because his article is about the topic Seth has been working on for the last several years at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and its far reaches.  We think he might find the work Seth and James are doing at Xandari an interesting extension of this article’s focus:

Thanks to Cornell Lab of Ornithology webcams and local bird enthusiasts, anyone in the world can see into the lives of a family of red-tailed hawks that resides on a light-pole about 80 feet above an athletic field on campus.

More than five million viewers across 200 countries have been following the exploits of Ezra (father) and Big Red (mother) and their offspring since in 2012. This year three nestlings hatched.

Continue reading →

Bird Fun (…and Aristotle?) around Tacacorí

/ James Zainaldin / 2 Comments

Papier-mâché penguins and other birds from the fourth grade class

In his recent post on our work at the local school in Tacacorí, Seth outlined our papier-mâché and painting ambitions with the third and fourth grades there. The second half of the week, Seth and I were split up because of the kids’ conflicting class schedules. I took fourth grade on the last few days, and he worked with third grade.

In his Poetics, Aristotle elaborates an aesthetic theory partly on the basis of μίμησις (mimēsis), or “imitation.” According to Aristotle, humans are “mimetic” beings, that is, disposed to imitate nature and other human beings. Art’s basis is precisely in Continue reading →

Celebrating Birds with Tacacori Students

/ Seth Inman / 3 Comments

About fifteen minutes downhill from Xandari by foot, the primary school at Tacacori serves first through sixth graders from the local community. Xandari has collaborated with the school on multiple occasions in the past, and also regularly cares for their grounds (mowing the lawn, etc.). This semester, third and fourth graders don’t have an art class in their normal schedule, so it seemed a perfect opportunity for James and me to go over and do a week-long art project with the kids.

Of course, I stuck with what I know best for art projects with young children, and decided upon papier-mâché and painting on little cardboard canvases, just like I had done in the Galápagos a couple years ago. James and I went to the third and fourth grade classes during their Spanish classes and for about an hour and twenty minutes each a day we showed them how to use newspaper, glue, and a balloon to create the body of a bird. Then, with recycled cardboard from Xandari, we gave them canvases to paint on as well as the materials to make beaks, wings, tails, and feet for the birds.  Continue reading →