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Many people know that penguins are social birds that live and raise their chicks together in big colonies. View the full article -
While many might consider a walk in the woods to be a quiet, peaceful escape from their noisy urban life, we often don't consider just how incredibly noisy some natural environments can be. Although we use soothing natural sounds in our daily lives—to relax or for meditation—the thunder of a mountain river or the crash of pounding surf have likely been changing how animals communicate and where they live for eons. A new experimental study published in the journal Nature Communications finds that birds and bats often avoid habitat swamped with loud whitewater river noise. View the full article
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It's the smell that hits you first. The scent of urine and decomposing bodies. Then you notice other signs: scuttles and squeaks, small dead bodies leaking blood, tails sticking out of hubcaps. View the full article
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Great tits living in cities are genetically different from great tits in the countryside. Researchers made the discovery after a unique study where they examined populations of great tits in nine large European cities, including Glasgow. View the full article
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Swifts aren't called "swifts" for nothing. They're known for being among the fastest migrating small birds around. When they aren't breeding, common swifts stay in the air most of the time—up to 10 months of the year. Scientists had thought they travel about 500 kilometers per day on average. Now, new evidence reported in the journal iScience on May 20 shows that's a conservative estimate. View the full article
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The Queen's Green Canopy, a campaign to celebrate Elizabeth II's platinum jubilee next year, involves asking people in the UK to plant trees: a "treebilee" as her son, Prince Charles puts it. This is one of a number of public and private campaigns underway, including initiatives by big corporations from Nestle to Audi which are also planting millions of trees in an attempt to mitigate a portion of their environmental impact. View the full article
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Habitats under different levels of protection host marked / contrasted different communities of plants, birds and fish, despite having similar numbers of species, according to a study publishing 19th May, 2021 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology. The research, led by Nicolas Loiseau at the CNRS and University of Montpellier, highlights the importance of diverse conservation strategies to maximize regional biodiversity and maintain ecosystem services. View the full article
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The White-tailed Swallow, Hirundo megaensis, and Ethiopian Bush-crow, Zavattariornis stresemanni, are living in 'climatic lifeboats' with their tiny ranges restricted on all sides by temperature and rainfall patterns. Even under moderate climate warming, models predict a severe loss of suitable climate for these birds within the next 50 years—dramatically heightening their risk of extinction. View the full article
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Tracking migratory birds that carry tiny satellite transmitters in featherlight 'backpacks," can teach us a lot about change in the environment. It may also point at possibilities to avoid loss of biodiversity. That is an important message in the Ph.D.-thesis that Ying Chi Chan, a Ph.D. candidate of the University of Groningen, based at the Royal NIOZ (Netherlands Institute for Sea Research), defends on May 28th 2021. "Bar-tailed godwits with transmitters on their backs, directed us to an important area along the coast of the Yellow Sea at Dafeng-Dongtai-Rudong, where many birds roost and feed. Showing the importance of this area for migratory birds led to a halt of intended land-claim in the tidal zone of the Yellow Sea," Chan says. View the full article
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The study presents a new line of research, since so far there have been very few studies that have focused on loud and intermittent noises of a recreational nature, as is the case of traditional festivals, and the effects they cause on urban fauna. View the full article
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Fifty years after presumably becoming extinct as a breeding species in Bulgaria, the Griffon vulture, one of the largest birds of prey in Europe, is back in the Eastern Balkan Mountains. Since 2009, three local conservation NGOs—Green Balkans—Stara Zagora, the Fund for Wild Flora and Fauna and the Birds of Prey Protection Society, have been working on a long-term restoration program to bring vultures back to their former breeding range in Bulgaria. The program is supported by the vulture Conservation Foundation, the Government of Extremadura, Spain, and EuroNatur. Its results have been described in the open-access, peer-reviewed Biodiversity Data Journal. View the full article
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A team of researchers at Universidade de São Paulo has found that bird species that have a central position in frugivory networks tend to belong to more stable lineages over macroevolutionary time scales. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their analysis of hundreds of bird species and their dispersal networks and what they found. Carolina Bello and Elisa Barreto with the Federal Research Institute WSL have published a Perspectives piece in the same journal issue outlining past studies of complex networks of fruit-eating birds and the seeds they disperse from an evolutionary perspective and the work done by the team in Brazil. View the full article
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Since the dawn of the electronic age, it has never been easier for researchers to engage with the general public—gaining access to precious resources otherwise unavailable. View the full article
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University of Massachusetts Amherst neuroscientists examining genetically identified neurons in a songbird's forebrain discovered a remarkable landscape of physiology, auditory coding and network roles that mirrored those in the brains of mammals. View the full article
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A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.K. and one in Estonia has created a type of buoy that has proven to be effective at repelling seabirds, thus preventing them from getting caught in gillnets. In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the group describes the buoy and how well it worked when tested. View the full article
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The report offers, for the first time, a complete assessment of the potential of nature-based solutions (NbS) to mitigate climate change and benefit biodiversity in the UK. Incorporating contributions from over 100 experts, the comprehensive evaluation of the available evidence details the strengths, limitations and trade-offs of NbS in different habitats across the UK. View the full article
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Captive pelicans that are free to choose their own friendships are more likely to breed successfully on repeated occasions, new research suggests. View the full article
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Some have claimed she's indulging a forbidden romance. More likely, loneliness compels her to seek company at Rio de Janeiro's zoo. View the full article
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A team of researchers from Lund University, the University of Copenhagen and the Nature Research Centre in Lithuania has found that some great reed warblers climb as high as 6,000 meters when they fly over the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes monitoring migrating great reed warblers by affixing tiny data loggers to their backs. View the full article
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Human laughter is common, but it's a somewhat mysterious part of our evolution. It's clear to evolutionary scholars that we laugh as a part of play, signaling our cooperation or friendliness. But how did laughter evolve? And are humans the only ones who do it? View the full article
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If you're anything like us, you may have wondered if an octopus and a seabird would ever end up in a fight. Well they do, and it's a YouTube wormhole that can prove quite addictive. View the full article
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Yawning doesn't need be a sign of boredom. Rather, it appears to be a measure of brain size. Vertebrates with larger brains yawn longer, according to a study of more than one hundred species of mammals and birds. The findings of the study, which was conducted by an international team of scientists centered around biologist Jorg Massen of Utrecht University (NL) and Andrew Gallup of the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute (U.S.), were published on May 6, 2021 in the scientific journal Communications Biology. View the full article
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In the Alps climate change affects biodiversity
PhysOrg posted a topic in Bird Research in the Media
The European Alps is certainly one of the most scrutinized mountain range in the world, as it forms a true open-air laboratory showing how climate change affects biodiversity. View the full article -
Longstanding protections for wild birds would be restored under a proposal unveiled Thursday to bring back prosecutions of avian deaths by industry that were ended under former President Donald Trump. View the full article
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A pair of researchers from the University of Konstanz and the University of Jena, respectively, have found the most "Instagrammable bird" on the internet. In their paper published in the journal i-Perception Katja Thömmes and Gregor Hayn-Leichsenring describe their analysis of "likes" by Instagram users for pictures of birds. View the full article
