Piping Plover Chick / USFWS Photo
Birds and birding news
- Bald Eagles that have recolonized California's Channel Islands have had difficulty finding enough of their traditional food sources and have turned to scavenging seal carcasses and eating the islands' rare seabird and fox species instead. Both options present problems; seal blubber is laced with DDT, and the islands' rare species may be put at risk from additional predation.
- Forest fragmentation makes it easier for rat snakes to prey on nesting birds, leading to declines in forest breeding birds.
- A pelagic expedition near Jamaica failed to find any Jamaica Petrels, its target bird, but did find 46 Black-capped Petrels and several other unusual seabirds.
- A BBC film crew finally filmed a bittern booming during the day.
- EBird has a Gulf Coast Oil Spill Bird Tracker that they released as a Google gadget. You can contribute by surveying Gulf Coast marshes and entering your sightings into eBird.
- Logging in Tongass National Forest threatens the Alexander Archipelago wolf and the Queen Charlotte goshawk.
- WorldWaders: Launching a multi-contributed blog on shorebirds
- Round Robin: Bad Place, Bad Timing for an Oil Spill
- Great Auk or Greatest Auk: Why This Birder is Supporting the Arizona Boycott
- Wild Birds Unlimited: Dryer Lint is a NO NO for Nesting Material
- Birder's World Field of View: How Marie Read got the photos of Black Terns you can see in our June issue
- The Marvelous in Nature: Butterbutts
- Behind the Bins: Termite Hatchout
- Yesterday oil spilling from the former Deepwater Horizon rig drifted onto the Chandeleur Islands. Those islands and Breton Island are included in Breton National Wildlife Refuge, a refuge founded by Theodore Roosevelt. Meanwhile, the coffer dam arrived at the rig site and will be lowered over one of the leaks.
- Oil has been slow in reaching the shore partly because of weather conditions and partly because BP has sprayed a massive amount of dispersant into the oil slick. Dispersants break up a slick and cause the droplets of oil to sink deeper into the water column. Unfortunately this mix of oil and dispersant could be toxic for organisms that live underwater, including fish, oysters, and corals.
- We may be underestimating the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill because most of its effects will be underwater. Also see part 2.
- The spill came at a particularly bad time (not that there is a good time for an oil spill!). Here is a photo gallery of ten species at risk from the spill.
- Last year, the Interior Department allowed the BP's offshore drilling operation to go forward without an environmental impact analysis, raising questions about Ken Salazar's leadership at Interior. Meanwhile, congressmen had complained about BP's safety record at their facilities in Alaska.
- American carbon dioxide emissions dropped in 2009 due to a poor economy.
- Yellow Fever mosquitos have evolved resistance to DEET.
- Childhood mortality and infertility in the Darwin-Wedgewood family may have been caused by inbreeding. Darwin himself suspected as much due to his studies of fertilization in plants.
- Ecological methods of mosquito control can equal or better pesticides in the quest to reduce deaths from malaria. When Oaxaca cleared brush around streams and homes, deaths from malaria dropped from more than 17,500 to 254 in four years. Mexico recorded no deaths from malaria in 2008.
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