Birds are crashing into NYC buildings. Record numbers are being rescued
October 8, 2020
In boxes and in hoodies, by bicycle and subway, New Yorkers are
bringing injured birds to the city’s only wildlife rehab center.
When Genevieve Yue brought an injured pigeon to Manhattan’s Wild
Bird Fund wildlife rehabilitation center last Saturday, she was
surprised to find a line outside.
“A couple ahead of me had a bird in their sweatshirt. Other people
had birds in Amazon boxes. Mine was in a take-out bag that I’d
grabbed from a restaurant,” she says. One passerby asked if people
were waiting in line for an ice cream shop.
Yue had found the injured pigeon lying on the sidewalk in her Lower
East Side neighborhood and knew the bird needed help. “I have a
particular fondness for pigeons. It breaks my heart when I see
people treating them like vermin,” she says. She lined a paper bag
with a spare diaper she had packed for her two-year-old, hopped in a
Lyft, and headed north to the Wild Bird Fund on the Upper West Side.
It’s a tiny nonprofit operation tasked with serving all of New York
City. “It’s kind of like a bird emergency room,” Yue says. “Our
little ambulances are basically paper shopping bags and shoeboxes.”
Everyone in line bonded over their tiny charges. “We started
immediately sharing. ‘Where did your bird come from? Where did you
find your bird? Do you want to see my bird?’”
She didn’t know at the time that New York was in the midst of a wave
of bird collisions. Between Friday, October 2, and Saturday, October
3, the Wild Bird Fund took in a record 220 injured birds,
three-quarters of which were migratory songbirds including northern
parulas, common yellow-throats, and many warbler species.
The annual winter migration south for North American birds started a
few weeks ago, and with migration comes collisions. New York City
Audubon scientists estimate that up to 240,000 birds die annually
from collisions in the city. Nationwide, the number is estimated to
be a staggering one billion.
" Source : National Geographic"
This gorgeous songbird is half male, half female
October 9, 2020
Reaserchers whith a team monitoring bird populations at
Powdermill Nature Reserve, in Rector, Pennsylvania, netted a
surprise on September 24: a rose-breasted grosbeak with
bizarre coloring. It had the bright scarlet feathers of a male
grosbeak on one side of its body and the canary yellow plumage
of a female on the other.
When they saw the robin-size songbird’s split coloring, it was
immediately clear that the grosbeak was what scientists call a
bilateral gynandromorph—an animal that appears half male and
half female.
“There was no question about it,” says Annie Lindsay, bird
banding program manager at Powdermill.
Measurements also revealed that the bird’s right wing was
slightly longer than the left, typical of the difference
between male and female grosbeaks.
While gynandromorphy simply means that an animal has both
female and male characteristics, bilateral gynandromorphs
often appear more dramatically different because those
characteristics are separated down the middle of their body;
the separation may be internal as well as external. And
bilateral gynandromorphy is different from hermaphrodism, in
which an organism has both male and female reproductive organs
but may appear on the outside to be either male or female.
Although hermaphrodism is natural among many creatures, such
earthworms and snails, gynandromorphy is rare and, in birds,
seems to occur when cells fail to divide properly early on in
development. (Learn more about how butterflies with the
condition develop.)
Source : "National Geographic"
Volunteers coming to rescue jaguars, other animals injured during Brazil's wildfires
October 2, 2020
SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL The jaguar’s paws were raw and pink when
volunteers found him at the river’s edge, his final destination in a
desperate search for water.
Since January, sweeping wildfires—likely set by farmers clearing
land—have scorched nearly 20 percent of the young male's habitat in
the Brazilian Pantanal, part of the world’s largest tropical
wetland. Stretching across Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay, the
70,000-square-mile Pantanal has the highest density of mammal
species on Earth. While the Amazon rainforest, which is 30 times the
size of the Pantanal, usually makes headlines with frequent
wildfires, such blazes are not as common in the Pantanal. The
biggest fires in the Pantanal this year are four times larger than
the Amazon's biggest blazes, NASA satellites show. To save its
unique biodiversity, teams of volunteers have fanned out throughout
the region, rescuing hundreds of animals and leaving others food and
water.
In September, volunteers traveling by boat spotted the injured
jaguar lying on his side on a riverbank in Encontro das Águas State
Park, home to one of the species' highest populations.
Source : "National Geographic"