Birdchick Blog
Scott's Wild Bird Food aka Miracle Grow fined $12.5 million in criminal and civil penalties that regulators say are the heftiest ever issued under federal pesticide law. Weirdest survey about birders and birding...ever. Warning, it takes awhile.
Are you a member of the American Birding Association? Be sure to cast your vote on whether or not to expand the listing area!
Should the American Birding Association add Hawaii to its listing area? (um, yes) 12 year old Canadian boy (or should I say Canada Boy) enters the 100 millionth observation to eBird.
OK, so we kind of got in an argument with the last podcast (certainly not the first time and certainly not the last) so we took it down. We didn't realize it would still show up in the feeds. So we redid it.
Yes, we are still married.
Things we talked about:
Crazy Pants in Duluth, MN wants to shoot hawks...cause they're what's wrong with the ecosystem.
Like Omar on The Wire, changes to the American Ornithologists Union taxonomy a' comin'.
You should listen to Joseph Scrimshaw's Obsessed Podcast. You can also buy his book here.
Bird stowaway on a plane goes all the way across the Pacific. Can't wait til US Fish and Wildlife and ABC's Cat's Indoors! Campaign sees this: woman raising baby robin with her cats...I suspect she's not a licensed wildlife rehabber. (This is a terrible idea, if this bird ever gets released, it will not associate cats as predators...not all cats are so relaxed with birds, this story will not end well).
Guy taking pictures of eagles manages to get all the numbers on an eagle band and id where the bird came from--cool follow up story.
As if bird names weren't confusing enough, birders and ornithologists like to argue about whether or not to capitalize bird names.
Oh and for those trying to follow Non Birding Bill's squirrel/bubonic plague story...um...it was actually either a cat or a mouse that infected the man as he was trying to save a mouse from a stray cat...yeah, I know, it's weird. Read the full story here.
A European government agency wants to trap hawks to allow more non native pheasants to breed so people can shoot them (and no, this story isn't from Florida). An interesting discussion about reporting rare ducks and how some hunters use bird listservs, bird blogs and rare bird hotlines to look for rare ducks to shoot.
OMG the most pretentious article/field guide review I've ever read...well, except maybe for that one time a bird book author totally dissed a competitors book and then in the same article touted how awesome his own book was.
It's tough to be a banded bird in the Middle East. A dead bee-eater found in Turkey has been accused of being an Israeli spy. Apparently this is not the first time. Griffin vultures with satellite packs were detained for similar reasons in Saudi Arabia in the past. Mute swan eggs are being stolen from nests in an Orlando, FL park. One man was arrested for one particular theft (he ate a couple of the eggs) but the others remain a mystery. What baffles me is that mute swans are non native so you can't prosecute people for stealing the eggs...unless these are "pet swans" owned by the city.
Here's a short video from Birds and Beans about why you should look for shade-grown coffee.
http://youtu.be/wirnRx-zlNk
And this made me laugh (and you will too if you are familiar with this meme):
A quick recap of the 2012 Biggest Week In American Birding. Bird festivals make it into Dear Abby or How to nail closed your coffin on the bird festival speaking circuit.
Holy cow, the eagle cam drama over at the Minnesota Bound Bald Eagle Cam. One eaglet fell out of the nest, the other got tangled in nesting material but no worries, after intervention from The Raptor Center, the chick was rescued, rehabbed and back with its parents.
I have 2 Birds and Beers next week, one in Ohio at the Biggest Week in North American Birding and one in Point Pelee, Canada.
Feral parrots in Australia are swearing...and teaching it to wild birds.
These 2 stories seem like something we could reasonably fix and save millions of birds:
The Washington Office of the Bureau of Land Management is urging all states to use partnerships and available funds to discover, then cap, fill, or pull pipes that are used for mining claims or other activities to prevent birds from going inside to use them as roosting or nesting holes. The sides are so smooth the bird get stuck and die inside the pipes. Western bird clubs, can you unite to help cap these things?
TV towers kill millions of birds every years, the steady burning lights draw them in and they collide with the guy wires. If we change steady-burning lights on the 4,500 towers greater than 490 feet tall - about six percent of the total - could reduce mortality by about 45 percent and save 2.5 million birds.
2 pilots are on trial for harassing birds by flying to low. Their lawyer argues, "Can birds be harassed?"
Another whooping crane has been shot but this time not in Indiana, this time in South Dakota. There's a $10,000 Reward. There's a hilarious story out of east Texas about a guy in a trailer park who found an ivory-billed woodpecker. Two stations covered it with footage they recorded. One got footage of a red-headed woodpecker, the other started with a red-headed woodpecker and then got footage of a pileated.
One station tried to hide their footage, the other did a follow up that maybe the bird wasn't an ivory-bill after all.
Meanwhile, a pair of teenagers found an actual rare bird, an elaenia. Will we ever find out what species tho?
