I confess to being a political junkie, but even I have had to watch less cable news, concentrate on the sports section and turn to more interesting, if less addictive, educational pursuits.
So here are some 2018 news stories about avian research.
Stupefying. Birds around the world eat 400-500 million tons of beetles, flies, ants, moths, aphids, grasshoppers, crickets and other plant-eating insects, helping to keep those populations under control.
Rare back. One of the rarest birds in the Western hemisphere is the Bahama nuthatch. The species was feared extinct from the damage caused by Hurricane Matthew in 2016. A research team found it on the island of Grand Bahama. Unfortunately, there may only be two left.
Learning by doing. Songbirds acquire new skills through observation and through trial and error. University of Zurich researchers have demonstrated that a skill learned through the latter method by zebra finches is more easily adapted in new situations. Scientists see parallels to how children learn.
It takes a village. It’s not uncommon for different species of birds to cooperate. Some birds will build nests near larger, more aggressive species to deter predators; flocks of mixed species forage for food and defend territories. Researchers published in Behavioral Ecology reported that Australian fairy-wrens can also recognize individual birds from other species and may form long-term relationships for foraging and defense.
On the bright side. Researchers from Lund University in Sweden have mapped the origins of hundreds of migratory birds in Europe and tropical Africa and studied the immune system in three groups (African sedentary birds, European sedentary birds, migratory birds). The results showed that that migratory species benefit from leaving tropical areas when it is time to raise their young, moving away from tropical diseases.
Don’t flush your drugs. Researchers have shown that during courtship, male starlings sing less to females who have been fed dilute concentrations of antidepressants. Worms, maggots and flies at sewage treatment plants contained many pharmaceuticals, including Prozac. The drugs appeared to make female starlings less attractive to the males.
Traffic noise hurts. According to Frontiers in Zoology, traffic noise may be associated with an increase rate of telomere loss in zebra finches. Telomeres are caps on the ends of chromosomes that protect genes from damage; shortened telomeres indicate accelerated aging. Zebra finches exposed to traffic noise after they had left the nest had shorter telomeres at 120 days of age than zebra finches that were exposed to noise until 18 days before they had left the nest and whose parents were exposed to traffic noise during courtship, egg-laying and nesting.
Vanishing. Researchers have found declines in the number and diversity of bird populations at nine sites surveyed in northern New Mexico, where eight species vanished over time while others had considerably dropped. From 2003 to 2013, there was a 73 percent decrease in abundance of bird (157 to 42) as well as the diversity of species (31 to 17). The decline may be related to significant loss of pinon pines due to prolonged drought and hotter temperatures.
Less rainfall, fewer birds. More than 100 years ago, biologists surveyed birds in the Mojave Desert. A three-year resurvey showed that the once bird species-rich environment had 43 percent fewer species, on average, at revisited sites. The 61 sites lost, on average, 43 percent of the species that were there a century ago. The main change that correlated with the decline was a decrease in rainfall, according to University of California-Berkeley researchers.
Predicting movement. September is the peak of bird migration, with billions of birds winging their way south. Researchers used a combination of artificial intelligence and weather forecasting to better predict waves of migration across the U.S. up to seven days in advance. The predictive ability can be a bird conservation tool.
Columnist Sharon Wootton can be reached at 360-468-3964 or www.songandword.com.
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