A recent study from the Biological Conservation journal brings shocking news: every year across the globe, an estimated 400,000 seabirds are killed by gillnets. Gillnets, a common term for any net used to entangle and catch fish, are used all over the world, and at any depth. These nets, whether used in subsistence or commercial […]
Review: Bird Sense: What it’s Like to be a Bird, by Tim Birkhead
Who’d be a bird anyway? Chickens have bi-focal vision: one eye for the close-up work of pecking seed; one for the fox on the horizon or the hawk in the sky. Peregrine falcons don’t swoop directly on prey – as the crow flies, to coin a phrase – but in a wide arc, using the […]
Ferruginous Hawk on Rat Farm Road
Our first Christmas Bird Count will be coming up on December 14th in Fall River Mills so I thought I would take a drive up there to see what I could see as the day approaches. Rat Farm Road is a long gravel road leading from the small town of McArthur, through some sage/prairie habitat […]
Easterly winds bring cold weather, frosts and swans!
More than 50 wild Bewick’s swans flew into WWT Slimbridge Wetland Centre in Gloucestershire last night, marking the start of winter for many UK wildlife lovers. The swans famously return from arctic Russia each year to the wetland reserve established by naturalist Sir Peter Scott. The arrival of lots of swans – dubbed a ‘swanfall’ […]
Black Pennant, Selysiothemis nigra
Selysiothemis nigra Black Pennant Quite a scarce dragonfly in Europe, its locations are few in Spain, Italy, Greece and a few oasis in North Africa, otherwise it occurs commonly in Central Asia and the Middle East. We found this species in Catalonia, Spain where it is not recorded as being present. Its wing-cells are the […]
Protect the Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo from Extinction
Yellow-billed Cuckoos can only be found in a fraction of their former range in the American West, a decline linked to the loss of over 90 percent of their breeding habitat—the cottonwood and willow forests that once lined the banks of western rivers. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has proposed protecting the western […]
Pato real o Pato criollo, Muscovy Duck, Cairina moschata
Hoy les presento al Pato real, o también llamado Pato criollo; las fotos que ilustran esta entrada fueron obtenidas el día Sábado 19 de Octubre en una isla que se encuentra en el Arroyo Garupá en cercanías de la localidad de Candelaria; en los días previos me encontré con Silvio Wandelow, un amigo que también […]
Add Your Voice to Protect the Red Knot from Extinction
The Red Knot has one of the most impressive migrations in the world, traveling over 9,000 miles twice a year along the Atlantic Flyway from the Arctic to Argentina and back, but habitat and the food resources to fuel this demanding journey have declined, putting these birds at risk. Since the 1980s, populations have fallen […]