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New Research from Oxford University has revealed that shifts in the timing of egg laying by great tits in response to climate change vary markedly between breeding sites within the same woodland and that this variation is linked to the health of nearby oak trees.View the full article -
A trio of researchers at the University of Oxford has found that studying the interrelationships between great tits, oak trees and caterpillars in Wytham Woods, in Oxfordshire, England, near Oxford, has revealed some of the complexities involved in studying changes wrought by global warming. In their paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change, Ella Cole, Charlotte Regan and Ben Sheldon describe their analysis of data obtained from 60 years of study focused on great tits in Britain.View the full article
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The United Nations is preparing to host pivotal conferences in the coming months on two global crises: climate change and biodiversity loss. As experts have pointed out, these issues are fundamentally, inescapably intertwined. In both cases, human activities are harming nature and the support it provides to people.View the full article
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The trillions of bacteria living in our guts play a crucial role in our ability to digest food and fight off disease. All other animals also have communities of bacteria living inside them, that scientists call microbiomes, and learning about them can help scientists put together a more complete picture of how those animals interact with the world. In a new study in the journal Molecular Ecology, researchers used tiny radio trackers to follow the movements of birds that migrated between The Bahamas and Michigan, and they found that the same individual birds' gut bacteria were different in the two locations. And to figure that out, the scientists had to get up close and personal with a lot of bird poop.View the full article
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As early as 18,000 years ago, humans in New Guinea may have collected cassowary eggs near maturity and then raised the birds to adulthood, according to an international team of scientists, who used eggshells to determine the developmental stage of the ancient embryos/chicks when the eggs cracked.View the full article
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European wild rabbits are a 'keystone species' that hold together entire ecosystems—according to researchers at the University of East Anglia.View the full article
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A team of researchers from several institutions in Canada and one in the U.S. has found that the numbers of some birds in urban areas increased during last year's pandemic lockdown. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes how they used data from eBird, a large biodiversity community science program run by Cornell's Lab of Ornithology, to compare bird numbers in different parts of Canada and the U.S. during the early stages of the pandemic and what they learned from their effort.View the full article
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A new study from the Kalahari Desert finds that teamwork allows birds to cope with brutally unpredictable environments.View the full article
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I think we should go this way. This way! THIS! WAY!! Making yourself heard in a city can be difficult. That is not only the case for humans, but birds seem to be hindered by urban noise as well. Researcher Hans Slabbekoorn of Leiden University already showed that great tits in Leiden communicate differently at noisy crossroads compared to quiet neighborhoods. Now, it has become clear that also tropical bananaquits adjust their songs to frequencies above the city's traffic noise.View the full article
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Charles Darwin was obsessed with domestic pigeons. He thought they held the secrets of selection in their beaks. Free from the bonds of natural selection, the 350-plus breeds of domestic pigeons have beaks of all shapes and sizes within a single species (Columba livia). The most striking are beaks so short that they sometimes prevent parents from feeding their own young. Centuries of interbreeding taught early pigeon fanciers that beak length was likely regulated by just a few heritable factors. Yet modern geneticists have failed to solve Darwin's mystery by pinpointing the molecular machinery controlling short beaks—until now.View the full article
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Preserved penguin poop may be the key to connecting past Antarctic Ocean conditions and penguin populations, shedding light on how the birds and the region's ecosystem might fare as the climate changes. View the full article
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A swarm of bees has killed 63 endangered African penguins on a beach outside Cape Town, the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds said on Sunday. View the full article
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What do koalas, barking owls, greater gliders, southern rainbow skinks, native bees, and regent honeyeaters all have in common? Like many native species, they can all be found in vegetation along fences and roadsides outside formal conservation areas. View the full article
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Releasing a higher number of kiwi into large predator-controlled areas could increase the success of efforts to help their survival in the wild, new research shows. View the full article
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Neanderthals, our closest relatives, became extinct between 40,000 to 35,000 years ago. Since the discovery of the first Neanderthal fossil 165 years ago, scientists have learned more about Neanderthals—including their culture, sociality, ecology, diet, control of fire, production and use of tools, physiology, and even their genomic code—than about any other non-human hominin. Here, Spanish researchers use a highly original approach—scientific "role play"—to reconstruct a novel element of Neanderthal behavior: cooperating with group members while using fire and tools to catch choughs, birds from the crow family, from their night roosts inside caves. Their findings are published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. View the full article
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Thousands of seabirds that wash up on Atlantic coasts every year could have been starved to death by cyclones that whip up "washing machine" waves, a new study says, with experts warning the phenomenon could worsen with climate change. View the full article
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In times of exacerbating biodiversity loss, reliable data on species occurrence are essential, in order for prompt and adequate conservation actions to be initiated. This is especially true for freshwater ecosystems, which are particularly vulnerable and threatened by anthropogenic impacts. Their ecological status has already been highlighted as a top priority by multiple national and international directives, such as the European Water Framework Directive. View the full article
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The diet of the yellow-legged gull in the Medes Islands (Girona, Spain) has changed extremely over the last decades, according to a study that analyzes the changes in the diet of this species over the last twenty years. Regarding these gulls, which eat strictly marine resources, landfills and meat industries ̶ which are abundant in the area ̶ are nowadays the source for food of about 50% of their diet. View the full article
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Scientists say they've found the first evidence of tool use by a kea for the purpose of self-care, in a new study from the University of Auckland. View the full article
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India's newly announced plan to move from being the world's biggest importer of palm oil to that of major producer of the crop may be at the cost of large-scale deforestation of ecologically sensitive areas. View the full article
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The dull roar of traffic, the barking of dogs in backyards and the screeching of cockatoos at dusk. The shattering of early morning quiet by the first plane overhead or the garbage truck on its rounds. The squealed delights and occasional fights of a children's playground. View the full article
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Scientists analyzed more than 31 million iNaturalist records in a new study to find out who most often uses the popular nature app and what types of observations they submit. iNaturalist allows anyone with a phone or camera and an Internet connection to upload and identify photos of plants and animals anywhere in the world. View the full article
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Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and University of Konstanz in Germany have identified how large land birds fly nonstop for hundreds of kilometers over the open ocean—without taking a break for food or rest. Using GPS tracking technology, the team monitored the global migration of five species of large land birds that complete long sea crossings. They found that all birds exploited wind and uplift to reduce energy costs during flight—even adjusting their migratory routes to benefit from the best atmospheric conditions. This is the most wide-ranging study of sea-crossing behavior yet and reveals the important role of the atmosphere in facilitating migration over the open sea for many terrestrial birds. View the full article
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Global warming is a big challenge for warm-blooded animals, which must maintain a constant internal body temperature. As anyone who's experienced heatstroke can tell you, our bodies become severely stressed when we overheat. View the full article
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Research recently published by adjunct assistant professor Cyler Conrad from the Department of Archaeology at The University of New Mexico examines the importance of turkeys to the Ancestral Pueblo people and how they have managed the birds for more than 1,600 years. Evidence of turkeys and various methods of enclosing them is evident in the ancient pueblos all over New Mexico and surrounding areas, making them part of the area's history. View the full article
