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By Nate Swick, on December 9, 2019
A survey of museum specimens from Chicago’s Field Museum suggests that migratory birds are getting smaller, likely due to climate change. Read more at BirdWatching Daily.
“We had good reason to expect that increasing temperatures would lead to reductions in body size, based on previous studies,” says study lead author Brian Weeks, an assistant [read more…]
By Nate Swick, on December 2, 2019
At Avian Hybrids, Jente Ottenburghs writes that thrush hybrids are far more common and complex that we would have originally imagined.
“Hybridization is not always limited to two species; often multiple species are interbreeding.” This is the first sentence of my recent Avian Research review on multispecies hybridization in birds. In that paper, I [read more…]
By Nate Swick, on November 4, 2019
Martha Cartwright’s recent birding trip to the Bahamas dealt with the fallout from Hurricane Dorian. She tells the story at Birds Caribbean.
From September 1 to September 3, for those three days, the world had been watching in awe and anguish the videos coming out of Abaco and Grand Bahama Island. Friends and family [read more…]
By Nate Swick, on October 29, 2019
Birding is finding its way into the public consciousness, meaning that we are seeing more and more pieces like this one from Colin O’Conner from The Washingtonian.
A few years ago, I noticed an old classmate from high school, whom I’d known as a burly, bearded “drink and fight” type, posting pictures of birds [read more…]
By Nate Swick, on October 21, 2019 At the American Ornithological Society Blog, Stephanie DeMay explains how Red-cockaded Woodpeckers are responding to climate change.
How each species will respond to climate change is a research area full of unanswered questions, with important implications for the world our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will experience. These are not the questions I was hired to [read more…]
By Nate Swick, on October 14, 2019
Wind turbines in the Great Plains seems like a no-brainer, until you start to look into the impacts of the turbines on birds like prairie chickens. At The American Ornithology Society Blog, a summary of research that tries to determine whether it’s the noise or the land cover that causes these birds to avoid wind [read more…]
By Nate Swick, on October 7, 2019
The news that the US and Canada have lost nearly 3 Billion breeding birds in the last 40 years is certainly affecting. Don Torino of The Meadowlands Birding Blog argues that it should be our rallying cry.
The plummeting numbers of these birds has been slow and sinister like a disease that seems to come [read more…]
By Nate Swick, on September 30, 2019
As Bald Eagle populations continue to rebound, some pairs have to move into more developed areas to nest, causing complications for humans and eagles. Get the scoop at Phys.org.
Some eagle lovers have blocked traffic by setting up tripods in the middle of the road; others have tossed rocks at the eagles to get [read more…]
By Nate Swick, on September 23, 2019
29% of the North American birds that were present in 1970 have disappeared in the intervening 50 years, the result of the study published in Science by researchers associated with the American Birding Conservancy. The good news is that the declines are reversible. Ed Yong has more at The Atlantic.
A new study, [read more…]
By Nate Swick, on September 16, 2019
A Big Year, even a county Big Year, is a series of mini-adventures that play out over the course of 12 months. Jay Packer shares the story of an exceptional day in his Taylor County, Texas, Big Year.
We spent the next 5 and a half hours scouring the streets of Merkel. In fact, I [read more…]
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