After two hours of scouring the mountains of Brescia, Stefania Travaglia finally finds what she is looking for. Among the remote farmhouses of an alpine hamlet, a spring-net trap is partially hidden behind a grassy embankment and a few trees. Tangled in the wire mesh, an exhausted fieldfare thrush sits silent and unmoving. Travaglia sets […]
“Fire!” A baritone retort accompanies a spray of tawny sand as a large cannon net stretches wide. Small shorebirds with white bellies and mottled orange and black feathers try to flee, but the net is faster: It settles and traps a flock of Ruddy Turnstones underneath. A ragtag crew leaps up and dashes to the indignant […]
In a single day, more than 1,000 migrating birds collided with buildings within a small area in downtown Philadelphia, killing a particularly large number of Parula, Magnolia, Black-and-white, and Black-throated Blue Warblers, Common Yellowthroats, and Ovenbirds as well as smaller numbers of many other species. Birds collide with many types of buildings on a regular […]
Millions of birds like the Sardinian warbler (above) and the Blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla) have been migrating through the region for a long time. And, each year for many years, poachers on Cyprus have been trapping and killing them illegally. The slaughter is now said to have reached “industrial levels.” A study just published by The […]
Thousands of migrating birds have inexplicably died in south-western US in what ornithologists have described as a national tragedy that is likely to be related to the climate crisis. Flycatchers, swallows and warblers are among the species “falling out of the sky” as part of a mass die-off across New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Arizona and […]
IT IS LOW TIDE at the end of the wet season in Broome, Western Australia. Shorebirds feeding voraciously on worms and clams suddenly get restless. Chattering loudly they take flight, circling up over Roebuck Bay then heading off for their northern breeding grounds more than 10,000 km away. I marvel at the epic journey ahead, […]
Barnacle geese are shifting their migratory patterns northward in response to global heating, new research has found, in a stark indication of how wildlife is being affected by the changes in climate. In their spring journey from the UK to their breeding grounds on Svalbard, one population of the geese has been forsaking a traditional […]
Wetlands may not look as picturesque as flowery meadows or verdant rainforest, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important. As well as acting as carbon sinks and shock absorbers for extreme weather events, they are also essential rest and refuelling stops for thousands of waterbirds as they migrate along coasts and continents. That’s why the […]