The Bird Thead

[AnBr]

New Bird thread

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[LFC]

Greater Scaup looking very, very annoyed. "Get off my pond."

[LFC]

[LFC]

Storm-petrels are small birds that live their entire lives at sea except when they nest, usually on some isolated island or rocky area that is most immune from predators. Now 3 different species have been discovered nesting in Chile nearly 50 miles from the coast in the Atacama Desert.

At a glance, the Atacama seems like the last place anyone would find a seabird. It is the driest nonpolar desert in the world, with a typical elevation between 1.5 and two kilometers above sea level. It is so inhospitable to life that NASA considers it “one of the most Mars-like environments on Earth.” But storm petrels can cope with difficult landscapes. Across the planet, their kin are known for choosing particularly secretive and hard-to-reach nesting grounds to avoid predators.

Researchers have long suspected that several species of Chile’s enigmatic storm petrels might be holding out somewhere in the Atacama, since their mummified bodies have been found there for decades. Naturalists with ROC have spent the past eight years tracking down desert nest sites to confirm those suspicions.

[AnBr]

[Deleted]

Bad hair feather day.

[goldenvalley]

Atlantic has a photo essay "Parakeets of London"  They are wild, not pets.  I would have guessed it's too cold for them.  

[LFC]

Some species of parrots and parakeets actually do quite well as long as they can find food. There's a population of Monk Parakeets in Chicago that make it through the winters because people put out food for them. Monk Parakeet colonies can be found in a number of other places like NW New Jersey, Connecticut, and North Carolina.

[LFC]

Birding Is Having Its Moment During the Pandemic

Jump on in, people. The water's great!

[LFC]

MCU characters ... as birds.

[LFC]

Migration is in full swing. This is a male Rose-breasted Grosbeak and a male (still in molt) Indigo Bunting that showed up in the past day.

[AnBr]

It has been some time since I last saw an Indigo Bunting

[LFC]

May 9, 2021 2:35:14 GMT AnBr said:

It has been some time since I last saw an Indigo Bunting

They're a fairly common bird in the right habitat. If you know the song you hear them in a lot of open and semi-open areas.

[pg]

Bird population suffered a bit of devastation, in Central TX through the deep freeze. Ours has typically been a winter haven/habitat for migrating birds who seek to get out of the cold. Yikes. I'm still cleaning up from the deaths, in my yard, on upper deck and who knows what's on my roof. I have some very kind birders who help. Very weird for me, as I'm not a natural birder. And when I see my Beagle leave it, I get worried about disease. He can smell that.

Still? Most birdies are back. I've seen interesting things. Baby Northern Cardinals? What are they doing here- the babies, with no parents in sight? Grackles- a staple here- not back. Hawks- part of the ecosystem here- not obvious as it's been. Hummingbirds, ah... I have plants that feed them. All over the back yard. Love them, and oddly they are more colorful than I've seen them here in years.

Today since 7:30am all birds are gone, like a whisper. Yep. We're expecting a complete TX storm. They know when to fly and tuck away. Me, too. All errands finished, and I'll just tuck in, myself, and watch the thunder and lightning show. This is "severe weather" season, and the birds are always my first tip-off. Like The Weather Channel. Very reliable.

[goldenvalley]

[RichTBikkies]

Which is winning?

[AnBr]

[RichTBikkies]

The colour is that kinky bondage-and-discipline purple they had on the S & M leather-upholstered chair with the handcuffs.

LFC posted the pic a few months ago on another thread.

[LFC]

May 17, 2021 16:07:41 GMT RichTBikkies said:

The colour is that kinky bondage-and-discipline purple they had on the S & M leather-upholstered chair with the handcuffs.

LFC posted the pic a few months ago on another thread.

(My story and I'm sticking to it.)

[LFC]

Politics comes to bird names. There is now a committee of the American Ornithological Society that is reviewing honorific names and suggesting changes. The McCown's Longspur, named after a Confederate general who was a bird collector, was recently renamed Thick-billed Longspur due to McCown's history. I have mixed feelings about this, understanding some but not supporting the wholesale removal of honorific names as being proposed by some.

Across the United States, people are pushing for the removal of Confederate officers’ names from buildings, schools, and army bases, as protests against racial injustice continue in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in May.

Something much smaller has also elicited debate over its Confederate name: McCown’s longspur, a bird that lives in the Great Plains and looks a bit like a sparrow. It was named after John Porter McCown, who was involved in forcible relocations of Native Americans during the 1840s, and who left the United States Army to serve as a Confederate general during the Civil War.

By memorializing someone who fought to defend slavery, the longspur’s name, some birders and scientists say, adds further barriers to inclusion in the world of bird researchers and enthusiasts — an overwhelmingly White community where people of color have repeatedly reported feeling ignored, excluded, and even deeply unsafe.

There's an article at TAC that has the expected take on this. The fact that it leads off with an incredibly inaccurate take on the woman who called in a false police report on a black birder in Central Park who told her to leash her dog (as legally required) is pretty much par for the course at TAC.

This decision marks the end of a year-long campaign that began in May 2020 after a viral incident in Central Park involving a black birdwatcher. Gay black comic-book writer Christian Cooper was birding in the park, saw a dog off its leash, berated the dog’s white owner, implied he was going to feed the dog a poisoned treat if she didn’t leash it, and then posted video of the confrontation online including the woman’s call to 911. This led to a spasm of racial sensitivity in the birding world, which culminated in the renaming of McCown’s longspur, after Confederate officer and amateur naturalist John P. McCown, as the “thick-billed longspur.”

"Berated?" Not even close. He was completely calm. "Poisoned treat?" Pulled out of thin air hyperbole because he carried dog treats to attract and leash unleashed dogs. That gives you an idea how man ignorant dog owners there are in the area who believe leash laws don't apply to them. He did post the video of her attempting to have him arrested on false charges which apparently was a bad thing. No mention that she said, on video, "I’m calling the cops … I’m gonna tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life." But hey, there's no racism in this country.

[goldenvalley]

Re: bird names...Statues of Confederates...naming schools after Confederate generals...fair game. Those of publicly visible symbols. But going through bird and other species names to week out the Confederate general references is just a silly waste of time. There is no public facing salute to the Confederacy in bird names. Most humans won't even notice and the birds certainly don't care what humans call them.  There must be better things to do with the time and energy.

[LFC]

Well I just had a cool request. A PhD student from Argentina found an image of mine from 2011 that he wants to use in an ornithological paper he's going to submit for publishing soon and contacted me for my permission to use it. I'm pretty sure he's fine under "fair use" but of course I gave him an enthusiastic "yes." The bird is a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher that I took in Texas.

[andydp]

Jun 3, 2021 3:14:28 GMT LFC said:

Well I just had a cool request. A PhD student from Argentina found an image of mine from 2011 that he wants to use in an ornithological paper he's going to submit for publishing soon and contacted me for my permission to use it. I'm pretty sure he's fine under "fair use" but of course I gave him an enthusiastic "yes." The bird is a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher that I took in Texas.

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Publish or perish. AKA: Any port in a storm.

[goldenvalley]

[LFC]

The best $280 I ever spent: Birding binoculars
The hobby is basically Pokémon Go, but for nature.