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Oct 15, 2024 | 
birdnote.org | Rebecca Heisman
BirdNote®Komodo Dragons and CockatoosWritten by Rebecca HeismanThis is BirdNote. [Yellow-crested Cockatoo calls, ML 518060, 0:10-0:13] Yellow-crested Cockatoos are victims of their own charisma. Talkative and sociable, they stand over a foot tall, with snowy white plumage and a showy yellow crest. Due to widespread trapping for the pet trade, this bird has disappeared from many of the Southeast Asian islands where it once lived. Today it’s considered critically endangered.
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
allaboutbirds.org | Rebecca Heisman
From the Autumn 2024 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now. In spring 2020, Covid-19 restrictions forced then-PhD student Murry Burgess to conduct her field research entirely alone. Driving to the rural North Carolina barn where she was studying the effects of light on Barn Swallow chicks, Burgess, who is Black, passed Confederate flags and endured suspicious glares when she stopped at a local gas station.
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Sep 17, 2024 | 
scientificamerican.com | Rebecca Heisman
Chickadees, those adorable bandit-masked visitors to bird feeders, are among the most familiar and beloved backyard birds in North America. They’re so good at spotting and scolding predators that other birds keep an ear out for their alarm calls, and they’re so fearless that they can be coaxed to snatch seeds from people’s hands.
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Sep 13, 2024 | 
hakaimagazine.com | Rebecca Heisman
When commercial fishers haul up their nets, they often find dolphins, sharks, sea turtles, and other creatures entangled amid their catches. These accidentally caught, nontarget species are known as by-catch, and millions of animals worldwide are killed this way each year. A significant proportion of these trapped animals are seabirds—ocean-adapted species including gulls, albatrosses, and cormorants.
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Aug 23, 2024 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Rebecca Heisman
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May 24, 2024 | 
hakaimagazine.com | Rebecca Heisman
On May 22, 2024, a Michigan farmworker was stricken with conjunctivitis, or eye redness, a common symptom caused by bacterial or viral infections. But this case was unique: an avian influenza virus caused the condition. That was the third-known human infection of bird flu in the United States and the second time cows were responsible for its spread.
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May 23, 2024 | 
hakaimagazine.com | Rebecca Heisman
One hundred and eighty years ago on a small Icelandic island, fishermen killed the last of the great auks. Related to puffins and murres, these flightless seabirds were huge, standing at half the height of an adult man. With the great auks went many of the most basic facts about them—from how many fish they ate each day to how far they ventured from their breeding colonies. Modern scientists, however, have developed a technique that can reconstruct lost details of the birds’ lives.
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May 9, 2024 | 
whowhatwhy.org | Rebecca Heisman
Two studies of California bird populations show how shifting environments can rewrite animals’ genomes — for better or worse. As the environment shifts — due to climate change, habitat destruction, or other threats — we can often observe some of the ways that wildlife responds. Populations may decline. Individual animals may move. Some species may alter their behavior.
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Apr 29, 2024 | 
therevelator.org | Rebecca Heisman
As the environment shifts — due to climate change, habitat destruction, or other threats — we can often observe some of the ways that wildlife responds. Populations may decline. Individual animals may move. Some species may alter their behavior. But at the same time, scientists warn, wild plants or animals may experience harder-to-detect changes — for example, alterations to their genomes, the very DNA that defines them.
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Apr 1, 2024 | 
allaboutbirds.org | Rebecca Heisman
From the Spring 2024 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now. For a small migratory songbird like an American Redstart, driven by an evolutionary imperative to pass on its genes to the next generation, every day—and every spring—counts. A delay during spring migration can cause a bird to arrive late to its breeding grounds and miss its best chance at claiming a territory and finding a mate.
