Farmer's spray paint prank raised bird watchers' hopes of a new species

• AAP
• January 20, 2012 11:59AM

BIRD watchers' hopes they had discovered a new species of hawk have been shot down after a New Zealand farmer was revealed to be spray painting the birds pinkish-red and releasing them for fun.

In a judge's decision released this week, Grant Michael Teahan was found guilty of two charges of ill-treating an animal after he defended the charges in the Dannevirke District Court in November, the Manawatu Standard reports.

In early 2009, locals were mystified by the appearance of the strangely coloured hawks and sent photos of them in to the local newspaper.

However, when one of the hawks was hit and killed by a car the spray painting was discovered.

The SPCA began investigating and Teahan was uncovered when he asked his nephew to send a YouTube clip to the media, showing a man catching and shooting a magpie in a home-made trap, which was covered in pinkish-red spray paint.

Computers seized at Teahan's Dannevirke property had files, photographs and films relating to red hawks deleted.

Another file showed a cow that had been spray-painted with "Merry Christmas".

Palmerston North SPCA manager Danny Auger told the Manawatu Standard it was the most bizarre case he had worked on.

"Various people got involved, like experts who thought maybe it was a new strain or a new type of bird or whatever, but then feathers were being found and it was obvious somebody was actually painting these hawks."

Teahan, who will be sentenced on January 30, is considering appealing his conviction.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/weird-true-freaky/new-hawk-species-a-spray-paint-prank/story-e6frflri-1226249257292#ixzz1mAg6sF6o

Birds Invade Town: La Grange, Ky. Swarmed By Black Birds

Residents in a Kentucky town are saying "Get the flock out of here" to thousands of black birds that fill the sky each night.

At dusk, the birds take flight in La Grange, Ky., and create what some locals describe as a "cloud of birds," according to TV station WAVE. The birds nest down in a wooded area for the night and depart each morning in a huge pack, reports said.

Fine-feathered friends, they're not. Residents complain that they're constantly cleaning up after the avian arrivistes, who started showing up last November in the community northeast of Louisville. Nearly everyone has heard their town compared to Alfred Hitchcock's classic film "The Birds."

To protect themselves from bird poop, some people have begun carrying umbrellas, even on sunny days, CNN reports.

The birds' unexplained presence has allegedly coincided with a surge in respiratory ailments, according to one woman who spoke with WAVE.

While nobody is sure why the birds migrated to La Grange, wildlife experts told CNN that the behavior of flying clockwise in large groups is called murmuration and is common among starlings.

In an effort to scare off the unwelcome newcomers, a married couple blasts a noisy air canon. But the birds keep coming back.

video here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/26/birds-invade-town_n_1233709.html?ref=weird-news

Bowerbird Bachelor Pads With Best Illusion Snag Mates

Everyone likes a good optical illusion, and that includes at least one animal. Male bowerbirds woo females by constructing a bachelor pad that creates an illusion of uniform décor (and the illusion that their owners are much more robust lads than they really are).

And a new study suggests the females tend to choose mates from those who produce the best illusion.

Male great bowerbirds —pigeon-size birds native to Australia — spend the majority of their time building and maintaining their courtship sites, called bowers. A bower consists of a tunnel-like avenue made of densely woven sticks that leads to a court of gray stones, shells and bones. Previous research suggested the birds arrange items in such a way that the court appears uniform and small to a female viewing it from within the avenue, which makes the male appear much larger and more impressive than he really is.

Bowerbirds are the only animals so far that have been shown to use illusions for mating.

Continued:  http://www.livescience.com/18015-bowerbird-mating-illusion.html

The tiger sharks that eat woodpeckers and meadowlarks

Fatal attraction of brightly lit gas platforms

January 2012: Tiger sharks' diet has surprised researchers at Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama. The scientists were studying the diets of the sharks in the Gulf of Mexico and found that as well as feeding on the expected fish and other marine creatures, the sharks were also eating land-based birds, such as woodpeckers, tanagers, meadowlarks, catbirds, kingbirds, and swallows.

‘We were not expecting to see this. It certainly prompts a series of questions, the most obvious being, how does a land bird end up in the water as food for sharks?' said lead researcher Dr Marcus Drymon.

‘Certainly, bird migrations across the Gulf are incredibly strenuous treks that result in large numbers of bird deaths over water from exhaustion, but there may be other factors at play here. We're going to be taking a look at this over the next year and see if there are other causative circumstances that are contributing to these bird deaths.'

Birds become trapped in a cone of lightThe study findings may lend support to an issue American Bird Conservancy (ABC) has been raising for several years, that large numbers of night-migrating birds become fatally attracted to lighted oil and gas platforms.

These avian fatal attractions occur more often on cloudy nights, and can involve hundreds or even thousands of birds that apparently confuse the platform lights with stars by which they navigate. The birds become trapped in a cone of light - either reluctant or unable to leave it and fly into a wall of darkness.

‘Some birds circle in confusion before crashing into the platform or falling from the sky, exhausted. Others land on the platform where there is no food or drinking water. Some of these birds continue on quickly, but many stay for hours or even days. When finally able to leave, they can be in a weakened state and unable to make landfall, and ultimately, are more vulnerable to predation,' said Dr Christine Sheppard, Bird Collisions Campaign Manager for ABC.

Studies have shown that hundreds of thousands of birds die from oil and gas platform lighting effects in the Gulf of Mexico every year, but research suggests that using green lighting at platforms - as opposed to red or white lights - would nearly eliminate the circling behaviour, the study suggested.

Netherlands already has bird-friendly lightingSome studies have also indicated bird attraction could be mitigated greatly by cycling lighting off and on but observed that optimum cycling rhythms have yet to be determined. Studies of cell towers show that strobing white and red lights are far less dangerous than steady burning ones.

A simple application of this strategy has been used for the 9/11 memorial in lights, turned on each year on the anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. They are monitored and briefly turned off when too many birds accumulate in the beams.

‘Some countries, such as the Netherlands , have already instituted bird friendly lighting on oil and gas platforms off their coast. The 2005 study for the Department of the Interior called for research on the issue, but no further action was taken until ABC, in an attempt to advance a solution, requested it. A federal study is now planned for 2013,' said Dr Sheppard.

There are approximately 6,000 oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico .

http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/shark-diet.html

Climate change affecting Europe's butterflies and birds

Fast-track warming in Europe is making butterflies and birds fall behind in moves to cooler habitats and prompting a worrying turnover in alpine plant species, studies published on Sunday said. 

The papers, both published by the journal Nature Climate Change, are the biggest endeavour yet to pinpoint impacts on European biodiversity from accelerating global temperatures.

A team led by Vincent Devictor of France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) found that from 1990 to 2008, average temperatures in Europe rose by one degree Celsius.

This is extremely high, about 25% greater than the global average for all of the last century.

In order to live at the same temperature, species would have to shift northward by 249 kilometres, they calculated.

But during this period, butterflies moved only 114 kilometres, and birds by just 37 kilometres.

Population decline risk
The data is derived from observations made by a network of thousands of amateur naturalists, amounting to 1.5-million hours of fieldwork.

The study was not designed to say whether these species are suffering as a result of warming, which is one of the big questions in the climate-change saga.

However, the risk of population decline is clear, the authors say.


Species that lag behind a move to a more suitable habitat accumulate a "climatic debt".

Eventually, the impact of warming hits parts of the local food chain on which they depend, such as caterpillars or vegetation, and this cuts into their chances of being able to adapt. Finding a similar habitat is made more difficult by agriculture.

The second study looked at 867 samples of vegetation from 60 mountaintop sites across Europe in an assessment of the hottest decade on record.

Continental level
Seen at local level, there was little apparent change during in the study period of 2001 to 2008.

But when the picture zoomed out to continental level, it was clear that a major turnover was under way.

Cold-loving plants traditionally found in alpine regions were being pushed out of their habitats by warming-loving ones, which invaded higher altitudes that were now within their grasp.

"We expected to find a greater number of warm-loving plants at higher altitudes, but we did not expect to find such a significant change in such a short period of time," said study leader Michael Gottfried, a University of Vienna biologist.

"Many cold-loving species are literally running out of mountain. In some of the lower mountains in Europe, we could see alpine meadows disappearing and dwarf shrubs taking over within the next few decades."

The research was the biggest plant-count of its kind in Europe, gathering 32 researchers from 13 countries. -- AFP

Oil rigs may provide bird buffet for sharks (video)

DAUPHIN ISLAND, Alabama -- Heaped on a table at the laboratory, the pile of beaks, feet, eyeballs, feathers and whole bird carcasses testified to what may be the oil industry’s most unexpected environmental impact.

For the second year in a row, researchers at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab have found the remnants of migratory birds in the bellies of tiger sharks caught off Alabama.

The body parts provide compelling evidence of the mortal toll that oil platforms take on birds migrating across the Gulf of Mexico each year. The carcasses also highlight an issue federal officials have essentially ignored since it was revealed seven years ago.

A federal study from 2005 described a phenomenon known as “nocturnal circulation.”Groups of birds migrating across the Gulf on cloudy nights can be disoriented by the brightly lit oil platforms and fly around them in circles for hours, often until they become exhausted and fall into the sea and die.

That study called for further investigation, but federal officials never followed up, according to a statement from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement emailed to the Press-Register.

read more here:  http://blog.al.com/live/2012/01/oil_rigs_may_provide_bird_buff_2.html

Study shows species can change

A study of South American songbirds completed by the Department of Biology at Queen’s University and the Argentine Museum of Natural History, has discovered these birds differ dramatically in colour and song yet show very little genetic differences which indicates they are on the road to becoming a new species.


“One of Darwin’s accomplishments was to show that species could change, that they were not the unaltered, immutable products of creation,” says Leonardo Campagna, a Ph.-D biology student at the Argentine Museum of Natural History in Buenos Aires, who studied at Queen’s as part of his thesis. “However it is only now, some 150 years after the publication of his most important work, On the Origin of Species, that we have the tools to begin to truly understand all of the stages that might lead to speciation which is the process by which an ancestral species divides into two or more new species.”

For decades scientists have struggled to understand all of the varied forces that give rise to distinct species. Mr. Campagna and his research team studied a group of nine species of South American seedeaters (finches) to understand when and how they evolved.

The study found differences in male reproductive plumage and in some key aspects of the songs that they use to court females. Now, the group is looking to find the genes that underlie these differences, as these so-called candidate genes may well prove to be responsible for the evolution of a new species. This will allow researchers to gain insights into evolution.

“Studies like ours teach us something about what species really are, what processes are involved and what might be lost if these and other species disappear.”

Campagna’s research co-supervisor is Stephen Lougheed, Acting Director of QUBS and an associate professor in the Department of Biology. QUBS has been a pivotal part of research and teaching at Queen’s for more than six decades and hosts researchers from both Canadian and international institutions. Research at QUBS has resulted in more than 800 publications in peer-reviewed journals and more than 200 graduate and undergraduate theses.

The findings were recently published in Proceedings of The Royal Society.

http://www.queensu.ca/news/articles/study-shows-species-can-change

Elaborate Bird Plumage Due to Testosterone?

ScienceDaily (Oct. 21, 2011) — In many bird species males have a more elaborate plumage than females. This elaborate plumage is often used to signal body condition, to intimidate rivals or to attract potential mates. In many cases plumage colouration also depends on the hormone testosterone. Christina Muck and Wolfgang Goymann from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen have now investigated whether this also holds true for sex role-reversed bird species.

In barred buttonquails that live in Southeast Asia, females are polygamous and pair with several males that incubate the eggs and raise the young. However, not only the behaviour, but also secondary sexual ornaments that depend on the male hormone testosterone are reversed between sexes.

Colourful plumage and long feathers allow a male to express its quality and/or condition without further physical demonstration of its strength. With such features they may be able to avoid physical fights which are costly with respect to energy expenditure and the risk of injuries. The size and intensity of some parts of the plumage, for example the so-called black bib in house sparrows, depends on the male sex hormone testosterone; males with high testosterone levels also possess a larger and more intensely coloured bib.

There is hardly anything known regarding function and regulation of plumage colouration in female birds: females mostly have a dull plumage with almost no variation between individuals. However, in a few bird species sex roles are reversed: here, the females aggressively defend territories and court males. The latter incubate the eggs and care for the young without any help from the females. Only very few species are known to show such sex role reversal in behaviour and the evolutionary background is still unsolved.

Christina Muck and Wolfgang Goymann now found a relationship between plumage colouration, body weight and testosterone concentrations in female barred buttonquail, a bird species that lives in Southeast Asia. The researchers kept the birds in pairs for one year in large breeding boxes and regularly took blood samples to monitor the time course of testosterone levels. In addition they weighed the birds and took photographs of the black throat patch of females to determine its size and colour intensity on the computer. Males of this species are smaller than females and do not possess such a patch.

The researchers could first show that testosterone levels were similar in males and females and did not exhibit large seasonal changes. Moreover, testosterone levels were rather low which is common is species that do not show a pronounced seasonality. Nevertheless they found a strong relationship between the size and the intensity of the black throat patch and the testosterone levels in females. Moreover, in females there was a correlation between testosterone levels and female body condition. No such correlations existed in males.

"It is really remarkable," states Christina Muck, "that the sex role reversal in behaviours is accompanied by a reversed hormone dependency in the expression of secondary sexual characters." Thus, female button quails succeed when they not only adopt male behavioural strategies but also use the underlying physiological mechanisms.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111021074732.htm

Sasquatch, rare woodpecker among strange Stennis tales

Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2011

By MICHAEL NEWSOM - mmnewsom@sunherald.com

Isolated within a sprawling buffer zone protected by highly secure entrances, the John C. Stennis Space Center is an easy target for paranormal stories.

The large site’s mystique has spawned some wild theories about what goes on inside it and its buffer zone -- 212 square miles of mostly wilderness and swamp. Stennis workers get some strange inquiries about what goes on there from those interested in UFOs and other topics, said Marco Giardino, NASA historian at Stennis.

“You get some strange phone calls that all NASA centers get,” Giardino said. “You know, people who wear aluminum-foil helmets or are being looked at by aliens. There are people who think we caused climatic change by landing on the moon. There are people who don’t think we landed on the moon. You get a cross-section of crazies that all NASA centers get.”

But despite the calls, there’s nothing odd going on there, Giardino said.

“We have a very vibrant tourist program,” Giardino said. “People get to come here on tour buses all the time. The mainstream public is pretty well aware of what we do, and none of it is sneaky or nefarious.”

Cajun Sasquatch?

The rocket-testing center is bordered by two large marshlands -- Honey Island Swamp and Devils Swamp. Some interesting tales have come from Honey Island Swamp, Giardino said.

Some believe the “Cajun Sasquatch” roams the Honey Island Swamp, which is on the western side of the Stennis buffer zone near the Louisiana state line. The creature is also known in south Louisiana lore as the “Honey Island Swamp Monster” or in some cases la bête noire, which is French for “the black beast.” The creature has been described as hairy, with fur colors ranging from orangey, black, grey or brown, in various news stories and television interviews dating as far back as the early 1970s. Some descriptions say it’s about 7 feet tall and weighs 400 pounds.

“(La bête noire) is what the Cajuns call their Bigfoot,” Giardino said. “Old Cajuns swear that it jumps on their flatboats and also leaves huge footprints.”

Giardino said Stennis officials don’t get as many calls about the beast as they did years ago.

There are other legends about something called the “loup garou,” which is French for werewolf, living in the nearby swamps of Louisiana

“It is such a massive wilderness that it has been identified as one of the potential places that bigfoot, or ‘la bête noire’ or the other mythical swamp beasts live,” Giardino said. “On its own, it’s really a place full of mystery, and still has bears and alligators and God knows what-all in it.”

Ivory-billed woodpecker?

In addition to menacing, mythical swamp beasts, there have also been reports of the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker living in the woods around Stennis, Giardino said. The scientific community has been at odds over the last several years about whether the large woodpecker, long thought to be extinct, has actually died out. There have been some sightings of the bird near the facility, as well as other areas across the southeastern United States.

In spring 2005, after various alleged witness accounts from across the country surfaced, along with a reported video of one of the birds taken by a University of Arkansas at Little Rock professor, some scientific groups declared the ivory-billed woodpecker wasn’t extinct. Others in the scientific community disputed that claim.

Giardino said there have been reports of the relatively large woodpecker, which has a wingspan of up to 3 feet, living in the buffer zone. It’s often confused, though, with its common, smaller cousin, the pileated woodpecker.

Whether there’s a Sasquatch, or the rarest of birds, living there, the sprawling marsh of Honey Island Swamp can capture the imagination, Giardino said.

“It’s huge,” Giardino said. “As you drive toward Louisiana, there is nothing but trees and waterways. It’s a really beautiful place, but I wouldn’t be there at night, bête noire or not.”

http://www.sunherald.com/2011/10/26/3534149/sasquatch-rare-woodpecker-among.html

Bigger Birds in Central California, Courtesy of Global Climate Change, Study Suggests

ScienceDaily (Oct. 31, 2011) — Birds are getting bigger in central California, and that was a big surprise for Rae Goodman and her colleagues. Goodman uncovered the trend while working as a graduate student for Associate Professor of Biology Gretchen LeBuhn, analyzing data from thousands of birds caught and released each year at two sites near San Francisco Bay and Point Reyes National Seashore.

The SF State scientists found that birds' wings have grown longer and birds are increasing in mass over the last 27 to 40 years.

What's making the birds bigger? The researchers think that the trend is due to climate change, but their findings put a twist in the usual thinking about climate change and body size. A well-known ecological rule, called Bergmann's Rule, states that animals tend to be larger at higher latitudes. One reason for this rule might be that larger animals conserve body heat better, allowing them to thrive in the generally colder climate of higher latitudes.

Under this reasoning, some scientists have predicted that animals would get smaller as Earth has warmed up over the past 100 years. But the study, published in the journal Global Change Biology, suggests that the connection may not be so simple.

Climate change may affect body size in a variety of ways, they note in their paper. For instance, birds might get bigger as they store more fat to ride out severe weather events, which are expected to be more common under global climate change. Climate change could also alter a region's plant growth, which may eventually lead to changes in a bird's diet that affect its size.

LeBuhn said she was "completely surprised" to find that the central California birds were growing larger over time. "It's one of those moments where you ask, 'what's happening here?'" The results were so unexpected, she said, that the findings made them take a step back and look more closely at how climate change could influence body size.

The bird data come from two long-term "banding stations" in central California, where a wide variety of birds are captured, banded about the leg with an identification tag, and weighed and measured before being released. Many of the same birds were captured each year, allowing the researchers at the sites to build up a unique database that could be used to track changes among the birds over several decades.

The researchers used data from 14,735 individual birds collected from 1971 to 2010 at the Palomarin Field Station, near the southern end of the Point Reyes National Seashore, by researchers from PRBO Conservation Science. Their study also included data on 18,052 birds collected between 1983 and 2009, from the Coyote Creek Field Station at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay by the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory.

"At the time I started my research, a few studies had looked at body size changes in a few species in Europe and the Middle East, but no one had examined bird body size changes in North America," said Goodman, who graduated from SF State in 2010 and now teaches biology and environmental science at San Francisco's Jewish Community High School of the Bay.

"We had the good fortune to find an unexpected result -- a gem in research science," she added. "But we were then left with the puzzle of figuring out what was going on."

After testing and discarding a number of other explanations, Goodman and her colleagues were confident that climate change was behind the longer wings and bigger bodies in most of the birds. The birds may be responding to climate-related changes in plant growth or increased climate variability in central California, the researchers suggest in the paper.

The findings offer a glimpse at the potent effects of climate change across a wide range of species, LeBuhn said. "Even over a pretty short period of time, we've documented changes in important traits like body size, where we don't expect to see much flexibility."

"But in some ways," she added, "it gave me a little more hope that these birds are able to respond -- hopefully in time -- to changes in climate."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111031154127.htm

Study: Optical clues help flying birds

BRISBANE, Australia, Oct. 28 (UPI) -- Australian scientists say they've discovered how birds avoid collisions with objects and each other as they perform their aeronautic maneuvers.

The graceful flight of birds, even in crowded environments, is a result of their perception of something called optic flow, Partha Bhagavatula of the University of Queensland said.

"Our findings show, for the first time, that birds regulate their speed and negotiate narrow gaps safely by balancing the speeds of image motion, or optic flow, that are experienced by the two eyes," Bhagavatula said in a university release.

In a study, researchers trained parakeets to fly through a 23-foot corridor lined with varying combinations of thick black horizontal and vertical stripes, and then filmed their flights.
They found birds flew down the center of the corridor when optic flow cues were balanced -- with identical, vertical stripes on either side of the corridor -- but flew more closely to one wall or another when the cues were unbalanced, for example, when one wall was lined with horizontal stripes and the other with vertical stripes.

Also, the birds flew faster when the tunnels were lined with horizontal, rather than vertical, strips, suggesting they were using optic flow cues to regulate their flight speed.

While similar flight behaviors have been demonstrated in flying insects, this is the first time the use of optic-flow signals has been demonstrated in birds, the researchers said.


Read more: http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2011/10/28/Study-Optical-clues-help-flying-birds/UPI-21391319845211/#ixzz1cMc1TuBS

West Nile Virus Transmission Linked to Land Use Patterns and 'Super-Spreaders'

ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2011) — After its initial appearance in New York in 1999, West Nile virus spread across the United States in just a few years and is now well established throughout North and South America. Both the mosquitoes that transmit it and the birds that are important hosts for the virus are abundant in areas that have been modified by human activities. As a result, transmission of West Nile virus is highest in urbanized and agricultural habitats.

"The virus has had an important impact on human health in the United States partly because it took advantage of species that do well around people," said Marm Kilpatrick, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who studies the ecology of infectious diseases.

West Nile virus can infect a wide range of animals, including more than 300 species of birds and 60 species of mosquitoes. It also infects mammals, reptiles, and even amphibians. But researchers have found that in most places only a few key species of bird "hosts" and mosquito "vectors" are important in transmission of the virus.

"We now know that in any given location, only one or two species of mosquitoes play a big role, and only a handful of birds appear to be important in overall transmission rates," said Kilpatrick, who reviewed a decade of research on the ecology and evolution of West Nile virus in a paper published in the October 21 issue of Science.

According to Kilpatrick, the familiar American robin plays a key role in the transmission of West Nile virus across much of North America. It is such an important host species that Kilpatrick calls robins "super-spreaders" of West Nile virus. The reason is not so much the abundance of robins, but rather the feeding patterns of the mosquitoes that transmit the virus. The mosquito species important in transmission seem to prefer robins over other, more abundant species of birds such as house sparrows.

"Robins are more important in transmission than their abundance alone would suggest," Kilpatrick said. "The peculiar feeding habits of the vectors play a really important role in transmission, and this idea applies to many different diseases. It's one of the really interesting things we've learned from the past decade of research on West Nile virus."

Insights gained from research on West Nile virus could help public health officials deal with other introduced diseases in the future. "The spread of disease-causing organisms is likely to only increase in the coming years," said Sam Scheiner, director of the Evolution and Ecology of Infectious Diseases program at the National Science Foundation (NSF). "West Nile virus has provided a test of our ability to respond to such spread. This research shows that predicting disease incidence in humans and other animals is more complex than first imagined, but that greater understanding of such complexities is possible--knowledge that can be applied to the next threat."

The globalization of trade and travel has spread many invasive species, including infectious pathogens like West Nile virus. Although its exact route of entry to New York is unknown, West Nile virus may have arrived in an infected mosquito carried across the Atlantic by an airplane, Kilpatrick said. The virus then adapted quickly to its new environment, evolving a new strain that was transmitted more efficiently by local mosquitoes than the introduced strain. By 2005, the new strain had completely displaced the introduced one throughout North America.

Three species of mosquitoes are key vectors for transmitting West Nile virus in much of North America. Interestingly, these mosquitoes are not among the species that feed frequently on people. They are bird specialists that happen to bite people often enough to cause human infections. "The mosquitoes that bite humans most are actually not as important in transmission of West Nile virus to humans because they rarely bite birds and thus rarely get infected in the first place," Kilpatrick said. "Instead, it's the species that feed mostly on birds and frequently get infected, but occasionally feed on people, that are most important."

Millions of birds have died from West Nile virus infection, with dramatic effects on the populations of some species. Crows, for example, are much less abundant than they were before the virus arrived. The robin population, which had been growing rapidly, has leveled off.

"Robins were on a steady upward trajectory thought to be linked to human land use--they love lawns and agricultural fields," Kilpatrick said. "Crow populations were growing even faster. Now crow populations have crashed downward and robins have leveled off, and we suspect that's due to West Nile virus."

Read more ...

The birds which cannot cope with the demise of Communism

A study has identified several species of songbirds which have suffered following the demise of the Soviet Bloc after being unable to cope with the consequences of the changes it unleashed in eastern Europe.

While some birds have thrived after adapting to socio-economic changes affecting their habitats – such as the regeneration of eastern bloc cities and the emergence of new suburbs – those with smaller brains, such as common whitethroat, goldfinch, garden warbler and pipit, have not been able to do so and have consequently lost out since the end of the Communist era, the research by Czech and German scientists found.

The study, which is published in the journal Biological Conservation, looked at population trends of 57 species over the last 20 years, in three different regions. One was in the former West Germany, the other two were the other side of the Iron Curtain: one in the former East Germany and the other in former Czechoslovakia.

The scientists observed that songbirds – or passerines – with relatively large brains, such as common magpies, Eurasian jays and blue and great tits, did better in the former Soviet Bloc countries than in West Germany.

The researchers believe the birds’ better cognitive abilities have allowed them to adapt better to the socio-economic changes affecting habitats after the end of communism.

In particular, they believe the birds benefited from an increase in green areas and growing volume of parks in the inner cities in eastern Europe, as the areas saw investment after decades of communism. At the same, a newly emerging middle class moved out of the cities, resulting in a housing boom on the outskirts of cities.

The bigger brained birds could rapidly spread into the new habitats, both in the city centres and suburbs and increased in population size.

But the smaller-brained songbirds, with less cognitive abilities, were less able to adapt and the housing boom decreased habitat available for them.

Dr Katrin Boehning-Gaese, from the Goethe-University, in Frankfurt am Main, explains: “Relative brain size reflects species’ cognitive abilities. The increase of such passerines suggests that species with good cognitive abilities might have been better able to adapt to rapid socioeconomic change and make use of the novel opportunities that arose after the end of communism.”

The scientists also found that the fall of the wall does not appear to have an impact on numbers of robin red breasts.

Jasper Copping
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/8843853/The-birds-which-cannot-cope-with-the-demise-of-Communism.html

Possible new species of bird discovered in Angola

Olivebacks in Angola?
October 2011. Rockjumper Birding Tours take serious birders to most corners of the world, and often to places that few other birders go - So occasionally they make some very interesting observations. Rockjumper clients recently made what may be a very important discovery of a new population of Heteromirafra larks in Ethiopia. And now in Angola they have found what may be a new species altogether.

During Rockjumper's recent tour to Angola, their group was birding the Northern Scarp Forests near Uige when tour leader Markus Lilje observed a group of three Olivebacks (Small, colourful finches in the waxbill family, genus Nesocharis) on the forest edge. No records of olivebacks exits for Angola, so this of course led to much ...excitement!

They initially perched on dry leafless twigs affording excellent views and then flew to a more concealed site, but here allowed prolonged views. Markus was able to take a few photos (admittedly not great, but certainly better than none!).

These birds most closely resemble White-collared Oliveback N.ansorgei but differ in having a more slender body shape, longer tail and a white collar running on the back of the neck unlike the white collar on the throat of White-collared Oliveback. Furthermore, White-collared Oliveback is a highly localized bird endemic to the Albertine Rift, a great distance from Angola.

This exciting discovery may well prove to be a new species to science but this can only be verified by further research and observation.

http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/oliveback-angola.html

Smells May Help Birds Find Their Homes, Avoid Inbreeding; Research May Bring Help to Endangered Species

ScienceDaily (Sep. 22, 2011) — Birds may have a more highly developed sense of smell than researchers previously thought, contend scholars who have found that penguins may use smell to determine if they are related to a potential mate.The research by the University of Chicago and the Chicago Zoological Society, which manages Brookfield Zoo, shows how related birds are able to recognize each other. The study, published Sept. 21 in the journal PLoS ONE, could help conservationists design programs to help preserve endangered species.

"Smell is likely the primary mechanism for kin recognition to avoid inbreeding within the colony," said Heather Coffin, lead author of the paper.

Coffin conducted the research while a graduate student at UChicago and was joined in writing the paper by Jill Mateo, associate professor in Comparative Human Development at UChicago, and Jason Watters, director of animal behavior research for the Chicago Zoological Society.

"This is the first study to provide evidence for odor-based kin discrimination in birds," said Mateo, who is a specialist on kin recognition.

Experts said the work offers important insights into how birds use smell to guide behavior.

"The work by the research group is truly groundbreaking in that it shows for the first time ever in birds how the olfactory sense of captive penguins is both informative and functional in a behaviorally critical context: namely the recognition of friends from foes in general, and relatives from non-relatives in particular," said Mark E. Hauber, professor of psychology at Hunter College, a specialist on bird social recognition.

Penguins are ideal subjects because they typically live in colonies made up of thousands of birds. They live in monogamous pairs -- an arrangement that facilitates rearing of their young, since parents frequently take turns leaving the nest to gather food. Despite the size of the community, mates are able to find each other after traveling for days foraging for food in the ocean.

Research on other sea birds has shown that smell helps guide birds to their home territory and helps them forage for food. Other research has shown that birds could use sound and sight to recognize each other, but no other studies have shown that smell might be used in connection with kin recognition, Mateo said.

In the study conducted at Brookfield Zoo, researchers first sought to determine if the penguins were able to recognize familiar individuals by smell. They constructed an experiment using a dozen penguins, from a group that included breeding pairs, their offspring and nonbreeding individuals. The birds -- all Humboldt penguins -- endangered natives of Peru -- were from groups either on exhibit or off exhibit.

The zoo is an ideal setting for the research, as it has extensive records on which penguins are related and have been housed together, Watters said.

Researchers took odor samples from glands near the penguins' tails, where an oil that the birds use for preening is secreted. They put the oil on cotton swabs and rubbed the odor inside dog kennels, similar to the enclosures penguins at a zoo use for their nests. They also put the odor on paper coffee filters and placed them under mats inside the kennels.

When the penguins were released to the area containing the kennels, the researchers found that penguins spent more time in the kennels with familiar odors. The penguins were able to distinguish between the odors of birds they spent time with and the odors of unfamiliar penguins.

"What I found particularly notable about the study was that the authors identified the oil secreted from the penguins' preen gland, which is rubbed on the feathers to make them water repellent, as the odor source used in recognition," said Bryan D. Neff, professor and associate chair of biology, University of Western Ontario and an expert on kin recognition. "Oils are used in kin recognition by species of other animals, most notably a variety of insect species, including bees and wasps, which when considered with the penguin data provide a wonderful example of convergent evolution."

"It's important for birds that live in large groups in the wild, like penguins, to know who their neighbors are so that they can find their nesting areas and also, through experience, know how to get along with the birds nearby," Watters said.

Because offspring usually return to the same colony for nesting, siblings have the potential of becoming mates, something that can be avoided by their smell mechanism, the new research shows.
Researchers also found that when the birds were exposed to the odors of unfamiliar kin and unfamiliar non-kin, they spent more time in the kennels with odors of unfamiliar non-kin, indicating they were probably able to determine by smell which animals they were related to and were more curious about the novel odors. Being able to make the distinction may help the penguins avoid mating with kin, researchers said. The discovery also could assist zoos in managing their breeding programs.

"It could also be true that birds may be able to help zoo 'matchmakers' in determining potential mates," Watters said.

The ability of birds to be able to recognize familiar scents and thus be guided to their home territory also has potential value to naturalists, he said.

"You could imagine that if you were trying to reintroduce birds to an area, you could first treat the area with an odor the birds were familiar with. That would make them more likely to stay."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110921172834.htm

Who, What, Why: Is it legal to eat wild birds?

A pub has stopped selling wild bird on its menu - in the form of rook salad - on police advice. So what is the legality of such dishes?
The Taverners pub on the Isle of Wight managed to sell 30 servings of its unusual addition to the specials menu before the authorities asked the landlord to desist.

All wild birds in the UK are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.

Technically, it is legal for people to eat some species if they killed the birds under licence but, with the exception of wood pigeon, they can never be sold for human consumption.

It would, however, be legal to eat a wild bird if it had been killed by someone else, or discovered dead as roadkill - although anyone wishing to do so would have to prove they were not responsible for its demise.

The hitherto obscure area of law was brought to public attention by the Taverners. However, the pub's owners and the customers who chose the dish were not technically guilty of breaking the law.

Instead, the man who supplied the bird meat was arrested on suspicion of contravening the 1981 act. A police investigation found that the man had shot a number of fledgling rooks.

The legislation makes it illegal to kill, injure or take any wild bird, although a general licence system allows exemptions in some circumstances. It sets out a list of birds - such as golden eagles, red kites and woodlarks - which are protected at all times and for whom no licence to kill will be granted.

Other species can be killed under licence to prevent damage, disease or to conserve flora and fauna, and there would be nothing to stop those who did so from eating the birds they had culled.

However, except in the case of wood pigeon, it has never been legal to sell wild birds killed under licence for human consumption. Game birds are covered by a different law.

"The reasoning for this is that permitting sales of the wide variety of other wild birds killed under general licence, could increase the risk of killing purely to meet commercial demand," says Melissa Gill of Natural England, which oversees the permits in England.

"The licensee is at fault if he sells on the meat of a bird he has killed under licence - it is a condition of the licence which he is granted that he does not do that."

On the other hand, tucking into a dead bird which had been found in one's garden or as roadkill would not contravene the act.

"It would not be illegal to eat it, so long as the individual could prove that they had not killed it and had discovered it dead," Ms Gill adds. However, the legal onus would be on the individual eating the bird to prove how and where they found it.

And the organisation responsible for food safety advises against making a meal of a newly discovered avian carcass.

"The Food Standards Agency would not advocate cooking and eating roadkill," a spokesman says.

"There are various reasons for this, including the possibility that the animals you find may not have been healthy when killed and may have been suffering from disease or environmental contamination which could have an adverse effect on your health."

The Answer

All wild birds in the UK are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 - it is illegal to kill them without a licence

• The licence holders can eat the birds they kill themselves so long as they do not sell the meat on


• It would be lawful to eat a wild bird that someone else had killed or whose carcass had been discovered - although anyone who did so would have to prove they were not responsible

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14631856

10 August 2011 Last updated at 11:04

Giant fossil shows huge birds lived among dinosaurs

The fossilised jawbone is nearly twice the length of that of an ostrich, the largest bird found on Earth today

An enormous jawbone found in Kazakhstan is further evidence that giant birds roamed - or flew above - the Earth at the same time as the dinosaurs.

Writing in Biology Letters, researchers say the new species, Samrukia nessovi, had a skull some 30cm long.

If flightless, the bird would have been 2-3m tall; if it flew, it may have had a wingspan of 4m.

The find is only the second bird of such a size in the Cretaceous geologic period, and the first in Asia.

The only other evidence of a bird of such a size during the period was a fossilised spinal bone found in France and reported in a 1995 paper in Nature.

Sharing space

An overwhelming majority of the birds known from the period would have been about crow-sized, but Dr Darren Naish of the University of Portsmouth said that a second find of an evidently different species suggests that large birds were common at the time.

"This fossil is only known from its lower jaw, so unfortunately we can't say anything at all with certainty about the shape and form of the whole animal.

"If it was flightless and sort of ostrich-shaped, it would have been maybe 2-3m tall and somewhere over 50kg," he explained to BBC News. "If it was a flying animal, then maybe it was shaped like a big albatross or a condor."

Dr Naish also wondered about the dinosaurs with which the enormous birds shared their space.

"I think the really interesting thing is that they're living alongside the big dinosaurs we know were around at the time: big tyrannosaurs, long-necked sauropods, duck-billed dinosaurs," he said. "That opens up loads of questions about ecological interactions that we can only speculate about.

"People have said there weren't big birds when there were big pterosaurs, but now we know there were."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14466814

Ancestor of all birds knocked from its perch

The winged Archaeopteryx, long venerated as the forebear of birds, has been knocked off its hallowed perch on the tree of evolution, according to a new study.


A new dinosaur species unearthed in northern China reveals that the iconic 150 million year old "original bird" is probably just another dino with feathers, of which there are many, the researchers said.

It is hard to imagine a harder fall from evolutionary grace.

Since its discovery 150 years ago in Bavaria, most scientists placed Archaeopteryx squarely at the root of the broad group of proto-birds, known as Avialae, from which our modern feathered friends have emerged.

The emblematic creature was also held up as a case study -- THE case study during the late 19th century -- of evolutionary transition, to wit, from dinosaur to bird.


Over the years, a few scientists have gingerly expressed doubts, pointing to supposedly defining bird-like characteristics -- feathers, the wishbone, three-fingered hands -- that were also showing up in non-avian dinosaurs.

But without hard proof that Archaeopteryx was not really where it belonged on the so-called phylogenetic tree, the presumed progenitor continued to reign over its feathered kingdom.

Enter Xing Xu, a professor at Linyi University in China's Shandong Province and discoverer extraordinaire of dinosaur fossils.

In the new study, published in Nature, Xu and colleagues describe the attributes of a previously unknown dinosaur the fossil of which was found in Liaoning Province, in China's northeast.

About the size of a chicken and probably weighing less than a kilo (about two pounds), Xiaotingia shared a host of key characteristics with Archaeopteryx but seemed, at the same time, to fall into another group of non-avian dinos called Deinonychosauria.

A standard computer analysis confirmed as much, but at the same time produced a stunning result: Archaeopteryx had been reclassified into the same group.

"In other words, Archaeopteryx was no longer a bird," Lawrence Witmer, a professor at Ohio university's Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine, said in a commentary, also in Nature.

Xiaotingia, it turns out, was the smoking gun that sceptical scientists had been looking for.

Surprised by their findings, Xu and his team ran the analysis again, but this time without the newly discovered species. Archaeopteryx was restored -- in error, they now knew -- to its previous perch.

Xu has called for further confirmation, but suggests that his discovery will overturn long-held assumptions about the "avian ancestral condition."

"Perhaps the time has come to finally accept that Archaeopteryx was just another small, feathered, bird-like theropod fluttering around in the Jurassic," Witmer said.

One reason it has been so hard for biologists to embrace this idea may have more to do with history than science.

The first Archaeopteryx specimen was discovered, with uncanny timing, less than two years after the publication of Charles Darwin's game-changing Origin of the Species.

With an evenly matched blend of avian and reptilian features, it became -- in textbooks and public debate -- "Exhibit A" in explaining the transformative power of natural selection and evolution.

"The familiar fossils have guided almost all scientific thought about the beginnings of birds," Witman said, including himself among those led astray.

It's reclassification, he added, is likely to "rock the palaeontological community for years to come."

Who are the new candidates for king of the roost?

No single species is likely to ever gain the stature that Archaeopteryx once had, said Xu.

But among the new pretenders, three newly discovered creatures stand out: Epidexipteryx, Jeholornis, and Sapeornis.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/ancestor-birds-knocked-perch-161509323.html

Bird fossils reveal life's colourful chemistry

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature

The study revealed the chemistry preserved in the 120 million-year-old fossilised bird

The pigments preserved in fossils, including a 120 million-year-old bird, have been revealed using X-rays.

A team, led by scientists from the University of Manchester, UK, scanned the beautifully preserved fossils.

Their study, published in the journal Science, revealed the chemical fingerprint of pigments that once tinted the ancient bird's feathers.

Manchester palaeontologist Phil Manning described the discovery as an insight into "the chemistry of life itself".

As well as the colour patterns of ancient creatures, pigments reveal fundamental clues about the chemical reactions that took place in their bodies, and the food the creatures ate that fuelled those reactions.

Dr Manning, his Manchester colleague Roy Wogelius and Uwe Bergmann from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, led the international team. They used a powerful X-ray source called a synchrotron, which uncovered metals within the ancient fossilised feathers.

"These trace metals, specifically copper, is a [marker] for a dark pigment called eumelanin," explained Dr Wogelius. This X-ray technique was so sensitive that it was able to show that each molecule of copper it detected was being tugged and squashed into a particular shape because it was bound within a eumelanin molecule.

See the dark

The X-rays acted as probes, detecting the individual chemical building blocks that make up the fossil. When the rays hit the fossil, the signal that bounces back depends on the shape and size of each molecule, and how it is being subtly influenced by the chemicals surrounding it.

The team used this powerful probe to scan fossilised remains of two ancient birds: 110 million-year-old Gansus yumenensis, the oldest example of a modern bird in the fossil record, and 120 million-year-old Confuciusornis sanctus, the earliest beaked bird.

This revealed, not only that the dark pigment molecules were an intrinsic part of the chemical matrix of the birds' feathers, but that they were perfectly preserved for up to 120 million years. This allowed the researchers to paint a monochrome picture of both ancient creatures.

Dr Wogelius said: "[Eumelanin] controls the dark and light patterns of an animal, so for Confuciusornis sanctus, for example, we can see that its body and the neck were black and its wings were patchy.

"For years people had been looking at these fossils thinking that the feathers were just impressions. We showed that they have chemistry."

Previous attempts to diagnose the colour of long extinct animals focused on pigment "containers" in feathers known as melanosomes. But these biological paint pots, Dr Manning explained, do not survive well in ancient fossils.

"But the pigments they once contained do, courtesy of their copper heart - even after the melanosome containing them has been destroyed," he told BBC Nature.

The new technique will allow scientists to study the chemistry of more fossils, without having to damage them by removing samples. For many fossils, this is an important consideration; an Archaeopteryx specimen the group studied last year has been valued at an estimated $6 million (£3.75 million).

Dr Phil Manning said that the findings showed the "potential for unlocking the prehistoric colour palette", but that they also contained more fundamental clues about ancient life.

"This offers insight to the [biochemistry] that governed life tens or even hundreds of millions years ago," he told BBC Nature.

Since metals, including zinc and copper, form part of many animals' diets, so mapping them in fossils could shed light on what the animals fed on 100 million years ago.

And since one of the key roles of pigmentation is camouflage, pigmentation could tell us more about the world around the animal and what it was trying to blend into.

Dr Manning said: "The potential for this technique to gently un-pick the chemistry of long extinct species is quite breathtaking."

"We can even start treating the fossil record as a long-term experiment for burying organic compounds in different environments and then studying what happens to them through deep geological time," he said.

The technique allows complete fossils to be studied

"So it could help us understand what happens when you bury something like biowaste in the ground.

"We could really understand what happens to something when its buried for 120 million years; this goes way beyond palaeontology."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/13965976

Washington cops under attack... by aggressive crows

Story Published: Jun 10, 2011 at 12:15 PM PDT

EVERETT, Wash. (AP) - Officers at a Seattle-area police department have found themselves in a flap with some unusual suspects: an angry flock of birds.

Crows have been attacking police in the parking lot of an Everett Police Department precinct station. They've been swooping down and dive-bombing the officers as they walk to and from their cars.

Lt. Bob Johns said he recently was flanked by the aggressive birds and "got zinged."

"They're like velociraptors," Johns said.

One officer used his siren to try to scare away the crows, but it didn't work. The birds responded by decorating his car with droppings, The Daily Herald reported.

State Fish and Wildlife Department biologist Ruth Milner said the birds are simply protecting baby crows that have been kicked out of the nest and are learning to fly. Adult crows are quite protective of their young - a common trait among larger birds and birds of prey.

"All they're doing is defending their nest," Milner said.

She noted crows also can recognize people's individual features. And they hold grudges.

"If your cops have done something that (the crows) perceive as a threat, they could be keying in on them because they're all wearing the same kind of uniform," Milner said.

In addition to the officers, at least a dozen city employees have encountered the angry crows, and some have complained about being attacked, city spokeswoman Kate Reardon said. But she said police and city workers have agreed to let the crows be, and wait out the aggression.

She said the employees will be cautious but can use umbrellas to defend themselves if need be.

http://www.kval.com/news/offbeat/123648944.html