Extra testosterone makes the dark-eyed junco songbird sing more sweetly, fly farther, and mate more often. They make more chicks and don’t even have to take care of them. Sounds like the good life, but then they die young.
read more | digg story
Critically endangered and famously testy flightless birds, cassowaries, are running amok through the back yards and suburban streets of north Queensland in search of food. Decimation of fruit trees in the area from storm Larry has forced the birds to seek food outside of the tropical forest where they live.
read more | digg story
The cold and wet spring in the Netherlands this year has proven fatal for this year’s stork hatchlings.
In the Rhee area in the province of Drenthe, four dead stork youth have been found. In a preserve near Meppel, eight dead storks have been found.
Storks live in open nests, which means that adverse weather will affect the nests directly. Parent birds try to protect their young but in not leaving the nest they are unable to feed the hatchlings. Either the exposure to the extreme cold and wet, or lack of food can prove fatal to young, growing birds.
The problem has struck stork nests all over the country. Experts expect more dead stork youth will be discovered in the coming days and weeks.
Why shouldn’t wedding guests throw rice at newly married couples? “Don’t do it for the birds, do it for the inlaws.” Read about this urban myth in the Snopes.com article Against the Grain.
A pair of Peregrine Falcons nesting in London have put a halt to a scheduled fireworks show to kick off a Mozart festival. The protected birds could be disturbed by the pyrotechnics so the festival will offer attendees a free glass of champagne on opening night in lieu of the fireworks. There are currently five breeding pairs of Peregrine Falcons active in London. Read the full story Rare birds put stop to fireworks on the BBC.
A pair of Black-winged Stilts are incubating four eggs at Martin Mere in Burscough, Lancashire. Bird watchers from across the region are flocking to the see the birds, who normally live in the Mediterranean. Read the full story Flocking to see rare bird.
Mink are blamed for decimating a colony of seabirds on the Western Isles of Scotland. A colony of 200 pairs of adult terns are struggling to raise just 5 or 6 chicks this season, where normally the group would have at least 100 surviving hatchlings. The mink prey on other native species, including voles. The mink are believed to have been brought to the island from the US to stock fur farms, but were set free as the demand for fur dropped. Read the full story Mink ‘run amok’ in bird colonies on the BBC.
In March as part of our visit to Rajasthan in India we had the chance to visit a bird hospital in Delhi. The hospital is run by Jains at the 16th-century Digambara Jain Temple.
Followers of the Jain religion revere all life and are vegetarians. Some strict observers wear cloths in front of their mouths in order to avoid accidental inhalation of insects, and brush the ground before them as they walk, so as not to step on any living thing.
Unfortunately we arrived at the hospital after the normal opening times and could only have a quick look at the facility. Here are some photos we took at the hospital.
Top left to bottom right: The exterior of the temple complex; the hospital facility; some patient roosts; the “small birds ward”.
An international research team will try to reconstruct the habitat of the extinct dodo bird during an upcoming expedition to Mauritius. The team wants to determine the cause of the dodo’s habitat destruction and ultimate extinction.
The team also hopes to find complete skeletons of adult and young dodo birds. In October 2005 researchers in the southeast of Mauritius found a large burial site with bones of dodos and other domestic animals.
The team will depart the Netherlands on Friday, 2 June and returns on Monday, 3 July. The team is maintaining a weblog of their adventures, which is available at www.dodo-expeditie.nl (in Dutch).
In the last few days on the Tjeukemeer body of water in Friesland a Great White Pelican (Pelecanus onocrotalus) has been spotted. The bird was first seen in the Netherlands at the beginning of May on the south part of the lake. Meanwhile the pelican has also been spotted on the Wadden Islands Ameland and Terschelling, as well as other parts of Friesland.
The pelican is wild, rather than an escapee. The bird has no ring or marking on the wing which would indicate it came from a zoo. The pelican does not have its full head crown yet, so it is a young bird. It probably became lost or disoriented during the spring migration from Africa, possibly due to inexperience. Pelicans winter in East Africa and spend the summers in the Balkans. The birds normally fly via Israel, when they float over thermal streams to conserve energy. While soaring the bird may have been knocked off course and not noticed something was wrong.
The bird, which eats freshwater species, should be able to survive the summer in the Netherlands, as appropriate food should be available in inland Dutch waters. This case is not the first time a wild pelican has found itself in the Netherlands. Since the first part of the last century, five or six pelicans have been spotted but then moved on.
