ornithology

Hundreds of birdwatchers have flocked to Wales after a "mega rare" bird appeared in the UK for the first time. Ornithologist Simon Hugheston-Roberts made the historic identification of the western reef heron, a species normally found along coastal areas from West Africa through to India, at Y Foryd in Caernarfon, North Wales. He made the discovery at approximately 10am on Saturday morning while d…

‘Twitchers’ rush to coastal Western Australia to see black-headed gull, which usually flies between Europe and Asia Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast A lone seabird has caused a stir in the nation’s birdwatching community after landing on the Western Australian coast, thousands of kilometres off its usual migratory flight path. The black-headed gull, which usually flies…

Some staging regions support multiple groups of the same migratory species, each of which may use the region differently. Characterizing the ways, in which separate groups use such regions can therefore help to identify vulnerabilities during this sensitive period of the annual cycle. The Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) is a massive wetland complex in the northern Great Plains of North America used …

Winter months are dreary in New York City, but perhaps none so much as January 2021. Cold air and gray clouds blew between the skyscrapers as the world below remained stuck in the pandemic’s icy grip. But that month, a small corner of the city briefly came alive when a majestic Snowy Owl appeared in Central Park. Bird fanatics and dozens of other intrigued New Yorkers ventured out of their homes,…

Oil spills are well-known for causing acute mortality of birds, but sublethal and delayed impacts are less understood. Focusing on the mallard ( Anas platyrhynchos ), we used simulation modeling to explore how sublethal oiling may affect avian survival and breeding ground body condition. We used empirically informed migration and energetics simulations to model hypothetical spills occurring in no…

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…