This week in birds - #9

Here is a roundup of stories about birds and the worlds of Nature and science that were making news this week.  Follow the highlighted link to read the entire story.

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Countdown to the Great Backyard Bird Count: One week! Counting begins on Friday, February 17. Get ready!

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For those gardeners among my readers - and I know there is a lot of overlap between gardening and birding - the blog Wild About Ants had an interesting post this week about gardening for pollinators. Specifically, it addressed how to garden for bees, an important topic these days when bees face so many challenges. 

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It seems that old male White-crowned Sparrows feel more threatened by other old males than by young males. The young and inexperienced just don't get as much respect.

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Peru has created a 970,000 acre ecological preserve in the Amazon rainforest. The preserve will protect not only the rainforest habitat but also the culture of the Maijuna people, a tribe of some 200 individuals that live in the area. Good for Peru! 

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A new study has shown that more than two-thirds of all deaths of the severely endangered California Condor are caused by lead poisoning. This comes from the birds ingesting lead shot while eating from carcasses that have been killed by hunters and left to rot in the wild. Why is lead shot still legal when alternatives that could save the lives of many non-game birds - eagles, hawks, vultures, as well as condors - are available?

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Scientists are attempting to reintroduce the Bay checkerspot butterfly, a threatened species, into grassland areas around San Francisco where it was formerly endemic.

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Extreme winter weather in the United Kingdom is driving more songbirds into backyard gardens seeking shelter and food.

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Contamination of the area around Fukushima, following last year's earthquake and tsunami, has damaged bird populations even more severely than the comparable leak of radiation at Chernobyl several years ago. Some bird species have been virtually wiped out in the area around the leaking reactors. 

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The constant noise of motors in commercial maritime lanes causes increased stress in whales, a new study has shown.

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A small seabird, the New Zealand Storm-petrel, was thought to be extinct until it was rediscovered in New Zealand's Hauraki Gulf Marine Park in 2003. Now scientists believe that the bird may actually be nesting in the park.

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A nasty bacteria that affects finches, particularly House Finches, in this country and leaves them with swollen red and crusted eyes that can imperil their survival has been shown to be evolving rapidly. It evolves so rapidly that it is able to overcome defenses that the birds develop against it. But scientists believe that the rapid evolution may have left the bacteria itself vulnerable to some viruses and they are hoping to use this weakness against it.

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A population boom among ravens and crows has been going on in the San Francisco area for the last twenty years or so. The reasons probably have to do with increased food supply from human garbage and fewer predators such as Great Horned Owls in the more urban area.

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Around the backyard: The high point of my week was the visit by a Great Horned Owl which I blogged about here earlier in the week. A close second was the large flocks of American Robins that kept turning up in my yard all week. Their numbers ranged from perhaps fifty to upwards of a hundred and all week long I've been serenaded by their melodious songs.

The week has also seen flocks of twenty to thirty Brown-headed Cowbirds, sometimes accompanied by a few Red-winged Blackbirds, showing up at my feeders. In past years, I've sometimes had huge flocks of Common Grackles marching across my lawn in February, but I haven't seen any this year so far. Nor did I have any last winter.

Elsewhere around the yard...

Male cardinals are singing their spring courting songs in an attempt to woo pretty females like this one.

Pine Warblers have been plentiful, as always, in the yard this winter, but the other two warblers that usually visit me in winter have been much scarcer. I sometimes go for days without seeing or hearing a Yellow-rumped Warbler or an Orange-crowned Warbler.

The White-winged Dove flocks are getting bigger as they always do when winter lengthens into mid-February and March.

The most abundant birds at the feeders are still the American Goldfinches, but no Pine Siskins this year. The siskins, too, were abundant here during the last two cold winters, but I guess the mild weather this winter was not enough to push them this far south. I miss the busy, noisy little birds. Maybe next winter...