ornithology
grrlscientist | June 17, 2007tags: Junkin's warbler, birds, ornithology, DNA technology
An ornithologist prepares to band a mysterious Junkin's warbler.
Image: Sandy Junkin.
With all the skilled birders and ornithologists in North America, it is truly remarkable to find a bird that cannot be identified, especially when that bird was captured in a mist net. After all, when you have a bird in your hand, you have the opportunity to examine its field marks closely.
Enter Dave Junkin. Junkin was the director of Buffalo Audubon's Beaver Meadow Wildlife Sanctuary in Java, and even after his retirement, he is an expert bird…
grrlscientist | June 15, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, global warming, climate change, ornithology, birds, avian biodiversity, habitat destruction
White-crested hornbill, Tropicranus albocristatus, also confined to African rainforests, may see more than half of its geographic range lost by 2100.
Image: Walter Jetz, UCSD. [larger]
Thanks to the combined effects of global warming and habitat destruction, bird populations will experience significant declines and extinctions over the next century, according to a study conducted by ecologists at the University of California, San Diego and Princeton University. This…
grrlscientist | June 13, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, dinosaur, bird, fossil, Gigantoraptor erlianensis, China
An artist's painting of the newly discovered Gigantoraptor dinosaur, depicted with other smaller dinosaurs. Fossilized bones uncovered in the Erlian Basin of northern China's Inner Mongolia region show the Gigantoraptor erlianensis was about 26 feet in length and weighed 3,000 pounds. The discovery of the giant, birdlike dinosaur indicates a more complicated evolutionary process for birds than originally thought.
Image: Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology & Paleoanthropology (Beijing, China) [larger…
tetrapodzoology | June 3, 2007
A Chinese goose: the domesticated form of the Swan goose Anser cygnoides (that's right, more than one species of goose has been domesticated: this was always assumed based on morphological features, but was confirmed genetically in a 2006 study [abstract here]). The Swan goose is also the ancestor of the domesticated African goose. Wild swan geese are native to eastern Russia, China and Korea (they used to occur on Japan, but haven't been recorded there since the 1970s, except as rare winter visitors) and have declined severely since the 1950s due to loss of floodplain habitat and human…
tetrapodzoology | May 17, 2007
Yet again, I am totally snowed (the day job, editorial work, technical consultancy, in-progress manuscripts, etc.) and haven't been able to complete any of the frighteningly long list of articles I am planning to blog: you know, the ones on more sheep, more anguids, Australia: land of placentals, It's all about me, proto-narwhals and beluwhals, vampire pterosaurs, Piltdown, plethodontids, the probing guild, Cenozoic sebecosuchians, more Triassic crurotarsans, dinoceratans, pyrotheres, astrapotheres, 'new' big cats, more phorusrhacids, J-Lo and other fossil pleurodires, meiolaniids, passerine…
grrlscientist | May 15, 2007tags: hummingbird, Gorgeted Puffleg, Eriocnemis Isabellaea, endangered species, ornithology, birds
A new species of hummingbird, the Gorgeted Puffleg, Eriocnemis Isabellaea, has been discovered in the Serrania del Pinche mountains of southwest Colombia.
[much larger image]
According to ornithologists, the Gorgeted Puffleg has been discovered living in the cloud forests of southwestern Colombia. Despite its recent discovery, this stunning rare hummingbird that has violet blue plumage and iridescent green on its throat, is already endangered by the environmentally damaging illegal drugs…
grrlscientist | May 4, 2007tags: evolution, birds, orioles, Icterus, research
"Oriole."
Image appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Pamela Wells.
[Larger image].
I often think about differences in morphological and behavioral traits in closely-related species and wonder whether the speed and character of changes in these traits reveal anything about the evolutionary relationships between taxa. For example, in birds, both visual and auditory cues, such as plumage and song patterns, are essential for identifying members of their own species. However, these phenomena have rarely been…
grrlscientist | April 26, 2007tags: online books, ornithology, birds, anatomyAvian Anatomy Handbook, Julian Baumel
For those of you who study birds or who like to look at them, Julian Baumel's celebrated Handbook of Avian Anatomy: Nomina Anatomica Avium, 2nd Edition, published in 1993 by the Nuttal Ornithological Club, is now available as a free PDF download. It's a big file (400 pages; 49MB), so it might take some time to download, but it is free (shall I add that even though Julian Baumel was retired at the time, he came out of retirement for a short time to guest lecture the anatomy lab portion of my Ornithology course…
grrlscientist | April 25, 2007tags: Solomon Islands Frogmouth, Rigidipenna inexpectatus, Podargus ocellatus inexpectatus, birds, birding, ornithology
Gone are the days when animals were classified to taxon based solely on bone structure (osteology), body structure (morphometrics) or behavior (ethology), or some combination of these characters. Currently, scientists have a suite of powerful tools for classifying creatures to taxon, and analyses using a combination of these methods is allowing us to come to a deeper understanding of all animal life. As a result of using these techniques, a new species of bird has been…
tetrapodzoology | April 22, 2007
A week ago I went on a tetrapod-finding trip - with my good friends Mark North and Jon McGowan - to the Isle of Portland. Portland isn't an island: it's a promontory, sticking out from the south coast of Dorset into the English Channel. The plan with this post was to show off some of the neat photos that resulted, and perhaps accompany some of those photos with a little bit of text. As with previous attempts to produce 'text-lite' posts of this sort, I failed miserably...
What's been happening at Tet Zoo lately I hear you ask? Besides that long-awaited British dinosaurs paper, I've had a few…
grrlscientist | April 13, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, Tyrannosaurus rex, dinosaurs, birds, fossils
Repeated analysis of proteins from a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex reveal new evidence of a link between dinosaurs and birds: Of the seven reconstructed protein sequences, three were closely related to chickens.
Image: NYTimes
It was once thought impossible to obtain actual soft tissue, such as proteins, from fossils, but the impossible has happened and now, two research teams who published reports in this week's Science describe their findings: the closest relative to the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex is .. a chicken.…
grrlscientist | March 23, 2007Tall, handsome and charming, Richard Meinertzhagen is sometimes known as the English spy who didn't kill Hitler when he met him while carrying a loaded gun in his pocket. Three biographies have been written about Meinertzhagen, who was reputed to be a British war hero, spy, and famous ornithologist (hence my interest), and he is mentioned as a historical character in many more histories, movies and several TV shows. Meinertzhagen lived from the 1870s to the 1960s, was the model for the fictional spy, James Bond, worked for Winston Churchill and worked with T.E. Lawrence ("of Arabia"), and…
grrlscientist | March 22, 2007tags: Long-whiskered Owlet, Xenoglaux loweryi, birds, birding, ornithology
Long-whiskered Owlet, Xenoglaux loweryi.
The strange and extremely rare Long-whiskered Owlet, Xenoglaux loweryi, has been seen in the wild for the first time on a private conservation area in Northern Peru by researchers. The bird, a species that wasn't even discovered until 1976, and until now was only known from a few specimens captured in nets after dark, was seen in the Area de Conservación Privada de Abra Patricia -- Alto Nieva. This sighting is considered a holy grail of South American ornithology and has not…
tetrapodzoology | March 18, 2007
At 12:30am this morning, as I lay on the settee watching Walking With Monsters on the UK History channel, there came an almighty series of loud noises from the fireplace. Like most British homes these days, we retain an open chimney, but the fireplace it's connected to is sealed over with a metal plate. A gas fire is in front of the plate, its flue connected to the chimney via a rectangular opening in the metal plate. From time to time bits of mortar fall down the chimney. But this time, noise continued for many minutes after the first series of big, initial noises. And Tigger Mamum-Ra, our…
tetrapodzoology | March 13, 2007
Predators don't just kill 'prey' species; they also kill other predators whenever given the chance. Lions kill hyenas and cheetahs, tigers kill dholes, dholes kill tigers, wolves kill bears, otters kill mink... dinosaurs kill dinosaurs...
For various reasons my early plan to produce a new blog post every day has fallen by the wayside, as well it might given that this would cause me to spend what 'computer time' I have doing blog writing and nothing else. So in the interests of churning out new material, I have for a while been recycling old texts wherever possible. Several years ago, Dave…
grrlscientist | March 7, 2007tags: large-billed reed-warbler, birds
Large-billed Reed-warbler, Acrocephalus orinus: the world's most mysterious bird.
Image: Philip Round/The Wetland Trust.
More elusive than even the Ivory-billed woodpecker, a large-billed reed-warbler has been rediscovered at a wastewater treatment plant outside of Bangkok, Thailand, Birdlife International announced today. The bird has eluded birders and ornithologists for more than 130 years.
Because the bird had not been seen since its discovery in 1867 in the Sutlej Valley of India, little is known about the mysterious large-billed reed-warbler.…
tetrapodzoology | February 5, 2007
We didn't just go to the New Forest on Sunday to look at crossbills, fantastic and charismatic as they are. The main reason for the trip was the visit to Blackwater Arboretum: a locally renowned roosting site for.... Hawfinch Coccothraustes coccothraustes. The site is so renowned that, at this time of year, a large number of people turn up in the later afternoon to watch the birds come in to roost. A wooden carving that appears to depict a hawfinch (confusingly, the accompanying plaque tells you that the carving is named 'Fire crest' [sic]) can be found at the site, as you see from the…
tetrapodzoology | February 5, 2007
I said I'd get distracted. Yesterday I again found myself in the New Forest in search of - can you guess - deer and birds. We saw deer alright, but mainly it was a finch-themed day ('we' = Southampton Natural History Society). As you can see from the adjacent photo, a lot of people were out, all hoping to see one particularly bizarre finch (that's me at the front, not a bizarre finch). But I'll come back to that later....
Our first sighting was of both male and female Common (= Red) crossbill Loxia curvirostra. They clambered around, feeding and calling, at the top of a pine, their…
tetrapodzoology | February 1, 2007
Yet more musings on the evolution of blood-eating in passerine birds...
So Redbilled oxpeckers (at least) are (sometimes) wound-feeding, blood-eating parasites (and before reading the following you need to see the previous posts here and here).
If I were to indulge in one of those credibility-destroying rampant speculations about a possible future course of evolution, I might speculate that Redbilled oxpeckers are on their way to specialized and dedicated vampirism. At the moment they seem not to be in the habit of making their own wounds in order to feed, but it's not so far-fetched to…
tetrapodzoology | January 31, 2007
In the latest installment in that 'evolution of vampires' thread, we learn how a chronic decline in populations of the Yellowbilled oxpecker has highlighted the pretty obvious fact that not all oxpeckers are alike. Why didn't I mention this sooner: d'oh!
Before I got distracted by troodontids, owls, godwits, or sloths, I was talking about oxpeckers and the evolution of blood-feeding and vampirism. Here I'll start the beginning of the end of this thread: we'll go via blood-feeding passerines to bats, and then finish with pterosaurs. It's likely, of course, that I'll get distracted before I…