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Life was never easy for the Pacific Coast's western snowy plover.
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Seabirds from Gough Island in the south Atlantic, Marion Island near Antarctica and the coasts of both Hawaii and Western Australia have a dangerous habit: eating plastic. Across 32 species of seabirds sampled from around the globe, an international team from 18 institutions in seven countries found that up to 52% of the birds not only ate plastic, but also accumulated the plastic's chemical components in their bodies.
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Thirteen years after Vermont lost the ignominious distinction of being the only state in the continental United States without any breeding pairs of bald eagles, the state is moving to remove the iconic national symbol from its list of threatened and endangered species.
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Yellow warblers are hosts to brood parasitic brown-headed cowbirds, which rely on other species to raise their offspring. Warblers use referential "seet" calls to warn female warblers specifically of the brood parasitic brown-headed cowbirds that may try to lay eggs in their nests. When exposed to experimental playbacks of seet calls one day, female warblers were more vigilant the next morning, researchers report in the current issue of the journal Biology Letters.
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Human-altered landscapes often bring hardships for wildlife—unless you're a vulture, according to a new study by University of Georgia researchers.
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In the Green Swamp of Polk County, Florida, Paul Sykes heard a sound that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. The sharp honk may have sounded, to a layperson, like a stepped-on squeaky toy. But to Sykes, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist then based in Delray Beach, it sounded like the recordings he'd heard of the spectral ivory-billed woodpecker.
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A scientific explanation for those battles over the air conditioning remote control: Researchers at Tel Aviv University's School of Zoology offer a new, evolutionary explanation for the familiar scenario in which women bring a sweater into work, while their male counterparts feel comfortable wearing short sleeves in an air-conditioned office. The researchers concluded that this phenomenon is not unique to humans, with many male species of endotherms (birds and mammals) preferring a cooler temperature than the females.
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The sight of ducklings paddling in a line behind their mother is a common sight in rivers and ponds across the country.
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Whether birds get caged in the eye of a hurricane may depend on the intensity and totality of the chaos beyond the calm, says a novel study from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln's Matthew Van Den Broeke.
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A Texas company's plans to drill for oil in the Everglades may have a tougher time winning approval, now that an administration that's skeptical of fossil fuels has taken over in Washington.
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New Jersey's tidal marshes aren't keeping up with sea level rise and may disappear completely by the next century, according to a study led by Rutgers researchers.
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The smarter the bird, the more unique welfare needs it has in captivity, according to a U of G first-ever study.
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As dead birds wash ashore on Southern California beaches, the victims of a major oil spill, environmentalists are calling on Gov. Gavin Newsom to reduce the state's ties to the oil industry.
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Sitting by the edge of a river on a lazy summer's day, the sky is a beautiful blue overhead. Lush greenery crowds the bank. The river is alive: minnows, coots and water voles fuss at the water's edge.
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Reintroducing species in new natural habitats is a strategy to help prevent the extinction of the most threatened organisms. However, this process is influenced by several factors—which are not much explored in the scientific bibliography—and its global success ratio is still low.
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The stench of petroleum permeated the air of Huntington Beach's Talbert Marsh on Sunday as crews in small boats and sealed inside protective uniforms heaved absorbent pads laden with oil as thick as brownie mix into plastic bags.
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ʻUaʻu kani, or wedge-tailed shearwater, is a seabird species common in Hawaiʻi. Though historically found nesting along coastlines, human development in these areas has likely reduced the availability of nesting habitats, pushing the seabird colonies to nest in undeveloped islets.
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The Jehol Biota, an ancient ecosystem in Liaoning province in northeastern China, includes a dense and diverse array of Cretaceous flora and fauna and is a hot spot of feathered dinosaur fossils. A new study reconstructs a cool climate and high elevation at the site, providing critical environmental context for the wide array of dinosaurs preserved there.
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When I experienced a great loss in in my early forties—almost a year to the day after another—I went to see my mother in the family home. She wasn't a hugger or giver of advice, so instead we fed the birds. As she had when I was a child, she stood behind me in the kitchen with her shoulder propped against the back door, passing slices of apple and small balls of minced meat into my hand.
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As the climate crisis threatens millions of species worldwide, biodiversity conservation is now an all-hands-on-deck operation. Natural history collections play a critical role in this effort as repositories holding records of historical biodiversity shifts, like libraries made of biological specimens.
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A trio of researchers at the University of Auckland has found that the New Zealand parrot is smart enough to use a touchscreen but not smart enough to understand the difference between virtual and real imagery. In their paper published in the journal Biology Letters, Amalia Bastos, Patrick Wood and Alex Taylor, describe different experiments they conducted with the endangered birds.
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Death's come knocking a last time for the splendid ivory-billed woodpecker and 22 more birds, fish and other species: The U.S. government on Wednesday declared them extinct.
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Eye size likely plays a role in the contest between avian brood parasites—birds that lay their eggs in the nests of other species—and their hosts, who sometimes detect the foreign eggs and eject or abandon them, scientists report in the journal Biology Letters.
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Research by Wageningen Bioveterinary Research (WBVR) has shown that the risk of airborne transmission of high pathogenic avian influenza virus from infected wild birds is negligible. The research looked specifically at the airborne movement of particles from wild waterfowl droppings in the vicinity of poultry farms during the risk season for avian influenza (October to March). It also considered transmission via aerosolization, with the exhalations or coughs of wild waterfowl infected with avian influenza virus finding their way into the ventilation systems of poultry farms. As a precaution, it's important that the carcasses of wild waterfowl or other wild birds that have died of high pathogenic avian influenza are removed from their habitat as soon as possible. If not, scavengers eating the carcasses could cause feathers to become distributed. Feathers of wild birds that died of, and if the wild bird died of high pathogenic avian influenza contain the virus, which can then the virus can survive for a long time in those feathers.
Dense bison herds may threaten nesting bird species
in Bird Research in the Media
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