ornithology

by Francesco Ventura As part of NASA grant 80NSSC25K7836, Francesco Ventura from WHOI’s Ummenhofer Lab led a field campaign to the Falkland Islands to track Black-browed albatrosses (Thalassarche melanophris) nesting…

AJP spotted this bird in the New Territories at the end of winter there. In our time in 1960s Hong Kong it would have caused a sensation amongst the birdwatchers for the simple reason it remained unrecorded there for at least another two decades. The latest Field Guide to the Birds of Hong Kong and South China (9th edition, 2022) describes it as “mostly an irruptive and uncommon winter visitor in…

Where rare birds go, camera-toting enthusiasts tend to follow. But sometimes, all it takes to cause a commotion is a relatively common, though little-known, bird with some funky dance moves. On Friday, more than 650 people congregated for a special bird walk in New York City’s Bryant Park, where American woodcocks have been stopping to rest and refuel on their migrations north for breeding. “We h…

We’re in the full flush of spring. Here on the east coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, signs of renewal abound, including winged arrivals from Espírito Santo, Brazil: the ravenous and ravishing purple martins. I, too, am feeling revived. In addition to the usual milestone—a birthday, my 60th—spring brings something else: the second anniversary of having survived a major health crisis th…

Bass Rock, a guano-covered hunk of rock off Scotland’s east coast, boasts the largest northern gannet colony in the world. With steep sides and a rounded top, Bass Rock is prime nesting territory, and in the spring of 2022, tens of thousands of the birds did what they always do—pack the island to lay their eggs and raise their young. But by the end of summer, things had gone horribly wrong. Highl…

Ornithologists with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have stitched together the most complete avian evolutionary tree ever, unveiling surprising relationships and offering bird lovers the illustrated Birds of the World Phylogeny Explorer to trace lineages and evolutionary milestones. The post New Online Tool Charts Evolution of Every Known Bird Species appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science N…

This Shining Sunbeam hummingbird shows why its name is appropriate. The iridescence from those feathers on its back have to be seen to be believed. We were at Hacienda El Bosque, a popular birding lodge at an altitude 11,000 feet (3,350 metres) almost at the highest point of a pass over the Cordillera Central of the northern Andes. There are feeders to attract all sorts of birds and this hummingb…

After discovering a historic bird survey in the Pacific Northwest, Georgia Tech’s Ben Freeman located the original sites, repeating the surveys three decades later.

A new study published in the open-access journal Nature Conservation assesses the threat status of bird species from Vietnam, underscoring the country’s critical conservation needs. Vietnam is well known for its extraordinary level of biodiversity, particularly its very rich bird fauna. However, although the country is home to more than 900 species, co-author of the … Continue reading "Eyes to th…

A new study using participatory science data reveals regional variation in the ways wildfires impact bird populations in the U.S. in unprecedented detail.

Both local and migratory birds are spending less time in the region due to climate change and urbanization, according to a new study.

I had never heard about birdwatching until the last day when I stumbled upon the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's eBird project. It provides a dataset of bird observations worldwide, with 1.5 billion records updated monthly. I immediately loaded this dataset into my visualization tool. The adsb.exposed website already contains a dataset of air traffic with over 130 billion records and a dataset of Fo…

migratory songbirds’ fall feather molt May 27, 2025 Above: The wing of […]

Project FeederWatch is a winter-long survey of birds that visit feeders at backyards, schools, and other locales in the United States and Canada.

In this blog post, Taylor Craft discusses the use of GPS tracking and satellite imagery to uncover the lives of Black-tailed Godwits in the Senegal Delta. You can read their latest study, published alongside co-authors, here. A pressing challenge The landscapes of the endangered continental Black-tailed Godwit face increasing pressures at nearly every key site along their migratory route. With po…

In my last post, I extolled the virtues of our BirdCam, a delightful contraption that, this spring, provided a fun little window into the lives of our backyard buntings, orioles, and other winged neighbors. Alas, summer has since arrived, migrants have moved north and upslope, and now BirdCam feeds us a dull diet of House […] The post Visitation From A BirdCam Blue Jay appeared first on The Last …

The Search for Lost Birds, a collaboration between Re:wild, American Bird Conservancy and BirdLife International, has developed the most complete tally of bird species that are lost to science.

Help researchers at UCLA and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County protect West Coast birds by recording your daily bird observations

This blog post is provided by Catherine Sheard and tells the #StoryBehindThePaper for the paper “Anthropogenic nest material use in a global sample of birds”, which was recently published in the Journal of Animal Ecology. This study investigates patterns in the use of artificial materials in bird nests. I had been collecting data on bird nests for a number of years, including thinking about how …

AJP spotted Yellow-cheeked Tits ( Machlolophus spilonotus ) in the New Territories of Hong Kong last week. They are marked in the Hong Kong bird book as an uncommon resident, but also of captive origin. I am always suspicious of that latter label since the bird is known to occur across China not that far to the north. The habitat - mature woodland - would not have been available for many decades …