Police seize illegal bird trap in a park

 24th September

By Kloe Hackett

POLICE seized an illegal trap used to catch wild birds.

The officers were called to a park in Wickford to deal with the large metal illegal device.

They have not revealed where the park is in the town.

A spokesman for Basildon Community Policing Team posted on Facebook: “Today, we have seized a device used in the illegal trapping of wild finches.

“This was located in the Wickford area.

“Please make us aware if you see any similar devices.

“Possession or control of a wild bird is an offence.

“Anybody possessing wild birds is obliged to show, on a balance of probabilities, that their possession is lawful.

“Finches listed on Part I Schedule 3 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 can only be legally sold if they have been bred in captivity from lawfully held parent birds, and if they are fitted with Government approved close-rings.”

A wildlife charity conservationist has blasted the illegal bird catchers.

Macbraden Bones, 48, Essex Wildlife Trust landscape conservationist area officer for the south east, said: “I have never heard or come across this before.

“This is the first time I have heard of this and have not seen a problem like this in our area.

“I am stunned by this, there are a number of concerns with this.

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Man caught smuggling dozens of live finches into New York inside hair rollers

Francis Gurahoo planned to sell the birds for $3,000 each for use in singing competitions, officials say

Associated Press

Wed 19 Jun 2019 02.50 BST

A 39-year-old man has been caught allegedly trying to smuggle nearly three dozen live finches through John F Kennedy Airport in New York in order to sell them for singing competitions.

Francis Gurahoo was arrested on Sunday after arriving on a flight from Georgetown, Guyana. Prosecutors said customs officials found 34 live birds in his carry-on luggage hidden inside individual plastic hair curlers.

Gurahoo was arraigned on Monday on a charge of unlawful wildlife smuggling.

The finches are native to Guyana, officials said, and are highly prized. They are alledgedly used in singing contests in New York where bets are placed on the birds with the best voice.

Prosecutors alleged Gurahoo said he planned to sell them for about $3,000 each, which would have netted him more than $100,000.

Last December, customs officials at JFK airport found 70 live finches hidden inside hair rollers in a duffel bag from a passenger arriving from Guyana.

US customs officials said bird smuggling could threaten agriculture through the possible spread of diseases such as bird flu

Source

Customs find 70 birds smuggled in hair rollers at airport

By AAP

10:09am Dec 14, 2018

Customs officials at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport say they found 70 live finches hidden inside hair rollers.

Authorities say a passenger arriving from Guyana on Saturday had the songbirds in a duffel bag.

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Geneticist solves long-standing finch beak mystery

Bridgett vonHoldt found a single genetic key that unlocked beak size in a central African finch species

Date:  November 19, 2018

Source:  Princeton University

Bridgett vonHoldt is best known for her work with dogs and wolves, so she was surprised when a bird biologist pulled her aside and said, "I really think you can help me solve this problem." So she turned to a mystery he'd been wrestling with for more than 20 years.

"I love a good challenge and especially working on new questions!" said vonHoldt, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton. "I was presented with a new problem in an entirely new system, which was an incredible opportunity to explore how different ecologies could promote different evolutionary patterns."

The birder and biologist was Tom Smith, who has spent his career studying finches -- specifically, black-bellied seedcrackers (Pyrenestes ostrinus) -- in Cameroon and in his lab at the University of California-Los Angeles.

He and his colleagues have spent years investigating why some of these finches have small beaks while others have large beaks. Much of their original work identified differences in the hardness of the seeds they eat, a story quite similar to that of Darwin's finches. Smith, who is a professor at UCLA as well as the founding director of the Center for Tropical Research, established a breeding colony of these finches to understand the inheritance of beak size.

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Some Birds Use Songs to Find a Mate For Life

Posted by Stephanie Hertzenberg

Certain types of songbirds have evolved to use their songs to find mates that they will stay with for the rest of their lives. Researchers discovered that each sex uses what is called the sound control system to convert sound waves into social messages. Humans do something similar when they use vocal sounds and speech to communicate, but songbirds are far more advanced at it.

Finches, for example, must learn their songs during the first 90 days of their lives. If they are unable to do that, they will likely never find a mate. They may still be able to sing, but the song will be too poor to attract a mate.

The songs that finches sing are based on the songs of their fathers.

Read more at 

Galapagos study finds that new species can develop in as little as two generations

November 23, 2017

The arrival 36 years ago of a strange bird to a remote island in the Galapagos archipelago has provided direct genetic evidence of a novel way in which new species arise.

In this week's issue of the journal Science, researchers from Princeton University and Uppsala University in Sweden report that the newcomer belonging to one species mated with a member of another species resident on the island, giving rise to a new species that today consists of roughly 30 individuals.

The study comes from work conducted on Darwin's finches, which live on the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. The remote location has enabled researchers to study the evolution of biodiversity due to natural selection.

The direct observation of the origin of this new species occurred during field work carried out over the last four decades by B. Rosemary and Peter Grant, two scientists from Princeton, on the small island of Daphne Major.

"The novelty of this study is that we can follow the emergence of new species in the wild," said B. Rosemary Grant, a senior research biologist, emeritus, and a senior biologist in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. "Through our work on Daphne Major, we were able to observe the pairing up of two birds from different species and then follow what happened to see how speciation occurred."

In 1981, a graduate student working with the Grants on Daphne Major noticed the newcomer, a male that sang an unusual song and was much larger in body and beak size than the three resident species of birds on the island.

Read more at: 

Malta announces finch trapping season in face of EU legal action

David Lindsay Sunday, 9 October 2016, 09:30 Last update: about 16 days ago 

27,500 finches legally put up for grabs

The government announced on Friday the opening of the bird trapping season, despite the fact that Malta is facing legal action by the European Commission over allowing the trapping of seven species of finch.

The bird trapping season will open on 20 October and will close on 31 December, according to a Legal Notice published on Friday.

The government has allowed for the trapping of a total of 33,200 birds – 27,500 of which are finches. Each trapping licence holder will be allowed to trap 10 finches during the season, and six song thrushes or golden plovers – meaning that each trapper will be allowed a total of 16 birds over the nine-week season.

In September 2015 the European Commission referred Malta to the European Court of Justice for its decision to allow finch trapping as of 2014. Malta was allowed a transitional arrangement in the EU Accession Treaty to phase out finch trapping, taking into account the time required to establish a captive breeding programme. This transitional arrangement expired in 2008.

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Trichomoniasis killing Island finches

Finches spreading parasite through backyard feeders

By Mitch Cormier, CBC News Posted: Aug 12, 2016 1:00 PM AT Last Updated: Aug 12, 2016 2:50 PM AT

Some of the Island's finches are dying of starvation right beside backyard feeders filled with the food they crave. The birds' throats are being blocked by a parasite called trichomoniasis.  

'They're trying to swallow, they can't swallow.'- Maria Forzan, wildlife pathologist

"You get a lot of inflammation, a lot of swelling, you get these nodules, they're like white nodules," explained wildlife pathologist Maria Forzan of the Atlantic Veterinary College.

"They are so big they block the way of the food, they block the esophagus of the bird stops being able to swallow."

Forzan has completed 14 necropsies on finches from the Island this year, more than she usually does. The birds have been collected by wildlife officers in both eastern and western P.E.I.

Parasite spread through bird feeders

The dead birds are found mostly around backyard feeders, where they're trying to get to food.

However, those feeders are also the reason the parasite is spread to other finches.

"They're trying to swallow, they can't swallow, they bring it back up and with that goes the parasite — so the thrichomoniasis that causes the disease," said Forzan.

"The other birds end up taking that regurgitated food and getting infected."

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How birds unlock their super-sense, ultraviolet vision

Date:July 12, 2016

Source:eLife

The ability of finches, sparrows, and many other birds to see a visual world hidden to us is explained in a study published in the journal eLife.

Birds can be divided into those that can see ultraviolet (UV) light and those that cannot. Those that can live in a sensory world apart, able to transmit and receive signals between each other in a way that is invisible to many other species. How they unlock this extra dimension to their sight is revealed in new findings from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The study reveals two essential adaptions that enable birds to expand their vision into the UV range: chemical changes in light-filtering pigments called carotenoids and the tuning of light-sensitive proteins called opsins.

Birds acquire carotenoids through their diets and process them in a variety of ways to shift their light absorption toward longer or shorter wavelengths. The researchers characterized the carotenoid pigments from birds with violet vision and from those with UV vision and used computational models to see how the pigments affect the number of colors they can see.

"There are two types of light-sensitive cells, called photoreceptors, in the eye: rods and cones. Cone photoreceptors are responsible for color vision. While humans have blue, green, and red-sensitive cones only, birds have a fourth cone type which is either violet or UV-sensitive, depending on the species," says senior author Joseph Corbo, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Pathology and Immunology.

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Finches offer researchers a new tool with which to study Huntington's disease

Like humans, songbirds learn their vocalizations, suggesting they could be useful as models for certain disorders

Date:October 5, 2015

Source:Rockefeller University

Many neurological disorders can rob someone of the ability to speak clearly, causing them to stutter, mispronounce words, and struggle to put together coherent sentences. However, the molecular and neurological dysfunctions that cause these symptoms aren't well understood.

Recent work at The Rockefeller University may give researchers a new tool to better study these vocal and speech impairments, particularly in Huntington's disease.

"There hasn't been a good animal model for any kind of speech disorder," says study author Wan-chun Liu, a senior research associate in Fernando Nottebohn's Laboratory of Animal Behavior. "Rats and mice, the most common lab animals, can't tell us much about speech disorders, since their vocalizations are innate, not learned. That's what makes songbirds so special." The research is described in a paper published on October 5 in Nature Neuroscience.

Like humans, songbirds and a few other types of birds can learn vocalizations. Liu used one such songbird, zebra finches, which are small, red-beaked birds common in pet stores, for the foundation of his research on neurodegeneration.

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Parasite hitting bird populations in Sussex

A deadly disease is having a devastating impact on bird populations, an ornithological enthusiast was warned.

Greenfinch populations in Sussex are thought to have dropped by up to a third and chaffinch populations by a fifth, according to a study by the Garden Bird Health Initiative.

The garden birds are suffering from trichomonosis, a parasite which infects the digestive system of mostly finches, doves and pigeons.

It causes lesions in the throat which makes it hard for the bird to swallow food leading it to die of starvation.

Affected birds appear “puffed-up” with fluffed-up plumage and are generally lethargic.

Peter Calladine, member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and Royal Ornithological Society, said: “It’s very bad news. It is very widespread and causing huge losses to the bird population in Sussex. The numbers have fallen terribly. We are talking thousands.

“Greenfinches seem to be the most affected. The disease is very distinctive. They get all puffed up and it’s quite obvious they’re dying.”

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