Changes in agriculture practices have destroyed quail habitat and sent more nitrogen and phosphorous into the Chester River and Chesapeake Bay. A new collaboration aims to cure both ills.
Researchers at the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory have found that a contaminated mixture called Aroclor 1268 has spread beyond a former chemical plant, now a Superfund site, near Brunswick.
Researchers at UC San Francisco have discovered a neurological mechanism that could explain how songbirds’ neural creativity-generator lets them refine and alter their songs as adults.
Virginia Tech student Katherina Gieder created a model to help land managers protect the threatened piping plover, a tiny shorebird, against habitat damage and predation.
NMSU PhD student Brian Millsap leads a six year study on Cooper’s Hawks in urban Albuquerque. The study will help the New Mexico Fish and Wildlife Service learn new information on the biology of all raptors.
The same gene that creates elaborate head crests in domestic rock pigeons also makes head and neck feathers grow up instead of down in domesticated doves to give them head crests, although theirs are much simpler and caused by a different mutation, University of Utah researchers found.
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In a breakthrough for computer vision and for bird watching, researchers and bird enthusiasts have enabled computers to achieve a task that stumps most humans—identifying hundreds of bird species pictured in photos.
New research published in the American Journal of Veterinary Research has found that a substance called dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) shows promise as a potential cryopreservant for freezing avian blood.
Wichita State University microbiology professor Mark Schneegurt and ornithology professor Chris Rogers have discovered that one of North America's most common migratory birds – the Dark-eyed Junco – carries on its feathers a remarkable diversity of plant bacteria, the greatest ever found on wild birds. And while many of these bacteria may be harmful to plants, the bacteria could also be of great benefit.
A group of international researchers published in Functional Ecology found that compared with early birds, late risers are more likely to be cuckolded. The study’s lead author, Dr. Timothy Greives of North Dakota State University, Fargo, said they found that early risers used that time to mate with birds not in their social pair. Melatonin-implanted birds did not sire as many birds and later cared for nestlings fathered by an early riser in their nest. Study results provide insight into the evolution of the body clock.
Researchers have developed vaccines for H5N1 and H7N9, two new strains of avian influenza that can be transmitted from poultry to humans. The strains have led to the culling of millions of commercial chickens and turkeys as well as the death of hundreds of people.
Research by Bournemouth University's John Stewart has found that birds living during the Ice Age were larger, with a mixture of birds unlike any seen today, and many species now exotic to Britain living in Northern England.
Citizen scientists tracking backyard bird feeders helped scientists pinpoint the climate forces that likely set the stage for boreal bird irruptions in which vast numbers of northern birds migrate far south of their usual winter range. The discovery could make it possible to predict the events more than a year in advance.
A Cooper’s hawk, found in Greater Vancouver, is the most polluted wild bird that has been found anywhere in the world. The levels of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) in the contaminated Cooper's hawk were 196 parts per million, significantly higher than those recorded in birds found either in cities in California or in an electronic waste site in China.
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New research from a Wake Forest University biologist who studies animal behavior suggests that evolution is hard at work when it comes to the acrobatic courtship dances of a tropical bird species.
The landscaping plants chosen by residents for their yards plays a much greater role in the diversity of native birds in suburban neighborhoods than do the surrounding parks, forest preserves, or streetside trees, say biologists at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
For the first time, the same Golden-winged Warbler has been caught at both a migration hotspot and in his wintering grounds.
A new study published in Urban Ecosystems tries to determine what economic value residents in two comparable cities place on having birds in their backyards and parks. Researchers compared two types of common birds – finches and corvids – in both cities, asking residents how much they would pay to conserve the species and what they spend, if anything, on bird food. In Seattle, that value of enjoying common birds is about $120 million annually and in Berlin, $70 million.
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Every year, many bird researchers catch warblers, finches, thrushes and other feathered travelers to better understand their routes and migration patterns. A number of conservation initiatives seek to secure land to help species make their trek thousands of miles southward. But without a collective vision, these efforts may not be enough to protect birds in the Great Lakes region.
What inspires people to support conservation? A new study by researchers at Cornell University provides one simple answer: bird watching and hunting.
A scientific team from WCS, Myanmar’s Nature and Wildlife Conservation Division – MOECAF, and National University of Singapore (NUS) has rediscovered a bird previously thought to be extinct.
The conservation value of growing coffee under trees instead of on open farms is well known, but hasn’t been studied much in Africa. So a University of Utah-led research team studied birds in the Ethiopian home of Arabica coffee and found that “shade coffee” farms are good for birds, but some species do best in forest.
Western Illinois University biological sciences Professor Brian Peer is receiving attention for his research and publication on a bilateral gynandromorph bird found in the wild.
Wildlife biologists at the University of Arkansas have captured and documented the first northern saw-whet owl in Arkansas.
A new study from the Wildlife Conservation Society shows that habitat alteration may be less important than other factors– such as human behavior– in driving the effects of “exurban” development on bird communities. These unexpected results are fueling more questions that may ultimately lead to informed landowners lessening their impacts on local wildlife.
New research shows that mating pairs of the bird species known as great tits become more similar in their hormones over time. The results of this study will be presented at the annual conference of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in West Palm Beach, Florida on January 7, 2015.
A newly published study involving the University of Iowa finds crows have the brain power to solve higher‐order, relational‐matching tasks, and they can do so spontaneously. That means crows join humans, apes and monkeys in exhibiting advanced relational thinking, according to the research.
Since 1998, hundreds and sometimes thousands of dead eider ducks have been washing up every year on Cape Cod’s beaches in late summer or early fall, but the reasons behind these cyclic die-offs have remained a mystery. A team of scientists from Cornell, Tufts University, University of Georgia, the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have pinned down one of the agents responsible: a pathogen they’re calling Wellfleet Bay virus (WFBV). Their findings shed light on why eider ducks (also called common eiders) die on Cape Cod every year and offer hints about how the virus spreads.
More than 200 researchers, including a Las Cruces professor, are part of an international collaboration in sequencing DNA for all major groups of birds.
A group of international scientists and researchers investigated how various birds are related genetically.
GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Nature abhors a vacuum, which may explain the findings of a new study showing that bird evolution exploded 65 million years ago when nearly everything else on earth -- dinosaurs included -- died out.
Birds fly into windows all the time, often killing themselves. The student chapter of The Wildlife Society at Michigan Tech is researching these collisions at buildings on campus, hoping to develop some protective solutions.
Although hummingbirds are much larger and stir up the air more violently as they move, the way that they fly is more closely related to flying insects than it is to other birds.
A new diagnostic technique — resulting from monitoring thousands of courtship calls from songbirds — can be used to safely map the human brain during complex neurosurgery, according to research from Neuroscientists at NYU Langone Medical Center and elsewhere.
Biologists long assumed that one-way air flow was a special adaptation in birds driven by the intense energy demands of flight. But now University of Utah scientists have shown that bird-like breathing also developed in green iguanas – reptiles not known for high-capacity aerobic fitness. The finding bolsters the case that unidirectional bird-like flow evolved long before the first birds.
Unable to fly, nestling birds depend on their parents for both food and protection: vocal communication between parents and offspring helps young birds to determine when they should beg for food and when they should crouch in the nest to avoid a predator seeking an easy meal. A group of researchers has found that ambient, anthropomorphic noise – from traffic, construction and other human activities – can break this vital communications link, leaving nestlings vulnerable or hungry.
Researchers uncovering the secrets of spooky sounds, charismatic voices, nestling birds, traffic noise and more will describe their latest findings during a two-hour live Webcast press event on Wednesday, October 29, 2014. It will be streamed live from the 168th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), which takes place this week in Indianapolis, Indiana.
University of Delaware oceanographers have reported a connection between local weather conditions and the weight of Adélie penguin chicks in the Oct. 22 issue of Marine Ecology Progress Series.
Planned wind turbine farms in California --- intended to create new, renewable energy resources --- are endangering the lives of rare birds of prey populations. A geography professor at West Virginia University is monitoring the birds' flight patterns to protect them and preserve the efforts to harvest wind energy.
Over the past two decades, the resident communities of birds that attend eastern North America’s backyard bird feeders in winter have quietly been remade, most likely as a result of a warming climate.
In a new study, scientists examined whether corn and grassland fields could provide both biomass for bioenergy production and bountiful bird habitat. The research team found that grasslands supported more bird species than cornfields did, and new findings indicate grassland fields may represent an acceptable tradeoff between creating biomass for bioenergy and providing habitat for grassland birds.
Birds’ individual personalities may be among the factors that could improve its chances of successfully coping with environmental stressors. Research presented at the APS intersociety meeting “Comparative Approaches to Grand Challenges in Physiology.”
The study shows that the familiar anatomical features of birds – such as feathers, wings and wishbones – all first evolved piecemeal in their dinosaur ancestors over tens of millions of years. However, once a fully functioning bird body shape was complete, an evolutionary explosion began, causing a rapid increase in the rate at which birds evolved. This led eventually to the thousands of avian species that we know today.
Research with barn owls reveals how the brain decides what it should pay attention to among competing external events.
Cien años después de la extinción de la paloma migratoria, los grupos científicos y de conservación de aves más importantes del país se reunieron para publicar el informe Estado de las aves 2014, el análisis más completo de los datos de tendencias a largo plazo correspondientes a las aves de los Estados Unidos alguna vez realizado.
Biodiversity Research Institute’s (BRI’s) Adirondack Center for Loon Conservation and the Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS’s) Adirondack Program announced today that three new articles summarizing research on Adirondack loons have been published in a special issue of the journal Waterbirds that is dedicated to loon research and conservation in North America.
One hundred years after the extinction of the passenger pigeon, the nation’s top bird science and conservation groups have come together to publish The State of the Birds 2014—the most comprehensive review of long-term trend data for U.S. birds ever conducted.
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