Kendal Museum project reveals extinct, endangered and rare birds

Mike Addison


A METICULOUS project to identify and catalogue every single specimen of bird at a South Lakeland museum has been completed after almost 10 years.

All 1,681 specimens of the impressive bird collection at the World Wildlife Gallery in Kendal Museum have been catalogued for the first time with help from Museum and Gallery Skills students, staff and volunteers.

The work has highlighted the existence of some extremely rare, critically endangered and extinct birds from all over the world in a collection that boasts 717 different species.

Much of the collection dates from the 19th century and Kendal Museum is now working to refurbish the gallery to make it possible for every single specimen to be on public display.

“This is really quite a remarkable feat," said museum curator Carol Davies. "It’s been 10 years of work and now we’ve got this incredible scientific record at the museum, which is unique in the UK. 

 

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Hampshire zoo crosses fingers for offspring after pairing two rare birds

Bulu (L) and Cinta (R) at their Marwell enclosure



19 Mar 2017 / Aaron Shaw, Trainee Reporter






STAFF at a Hampshire zoo are crossing their fingers as they try and breed one of their rarest birds.

Bulu is a male wrinkled hornbill, with Marwell Zoo hoping to breed him with Cinta, a female they have paired with him.

The birds are usually found in the Thai Peninsula, and the European Endangered species breeding programme (EEP) has recommended that the zoo pair them up as they try and bring in more offspring.

Meg Fieldhouse, team leader for birds at Marwell Wildlife said: “They are spending a lot of time together out and about in the enclosure.

“Bulu has recently been attempting to give Cinta food items and this is positive pair-bonding behaviour.

“At the moment, she seems a little confused by what he is trying to do, but this is probably because she is still young.

“She will understand eventually.”

In the wild, the birds have faced problems with illegal logging in protected areas, land conversion and forest fires.

The birds rely on undisturbed primary rainforest to thrive, so they are greatly affected by damage to their habitat.

The two have been at the zoo for four months, but following the EEP recommendation to pair them, they are hoping to produce offspring.



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Curtis Island kill-off to save rare animal from wipe-out

Emily Pidgeon | 13th Mar 2017 2:24 AM Updated: 5:18 AM

THEY may have almost been extinct but Yellow Chats are making a come back.

Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service operations support manager Mark Read said the Yellow Chat's population growth had tripled in five years on Curtis Island.

"The bird has been listed as endangered on national level, so it's a bird under a lot of pressure," Mr Read said.
 

With nine birds left on Curtis Island in 2011, the number had grown to 35 as of last year.

"Once we removed grazing pressure and the damage of feral pigs, we've seen a bounce back of the marine plains and population recovery of Yellow Chats," Mr Read said.

"It's a great success story." As a wildlife biologist by trade, Mr Read said the habitat combination Yellow Chats live in, is quite unique and they only live in a few spots across the county.

"Curtis Island has got that unique combination of habitat these birds are specific to ... which is essentially marine plains," he said. 

 

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Rare ‘night parrot’ sighted in Western Australia

Calla Wahlquist
March 24, 2017 00:00 IST
Updated: March 24, 2017 04:21 IST

The discovery was made by a group of friends determined to spot the bird thought to be extinct

A night parrot has been photographed in Western Australia, adding another twist to the mysterious history of the species that was presumed extinct until it was rediscovered in Queensland four years ago .

It is the first verified sighting of the bird in WA for almost 100 years and follows a history of unverified sightings, disbelieved reports and futile ecological surveys that rivals the hunt for the (presumably still) extinct Thylacine in Tasmania.

The discovery was made by a group of four friends from Broome who have dedicated the better part of seven years to locating the bird, examining detailed maps, trekking into likely habitats, and spending evenings in the state’s arid interior listening for unusual bird calls.

“The calls to us were unfamiliar,” one of the group, Bruce Greatwich, said. “We are quite experienced in these habitats so to hear something new was quite exciting.”

The calls were different to those recorded in the Queensland night parrot population, described by researchers in 2005 as “a ‘ding-ding’ call similar to that of a bell miner” followed by “a short frog-like ‘grieet’,” but were enough to indicate the bird might be present.

The next morning a night parrot darted out in front of one of the group, George Swann, while he was walking through spinifex looking for entirely different birds.

It was green and yellow with black barred feathers. The common description is of a big, dumpy budgerigar, about the same size as a rainbow lorikeet.

Cameras at the ready

“We were able to go down and re-find it and we had our cameras at the ready to get a photo,” Mr. Greatwich said.

Ordinarily, he added, they would never disturb a nocturnal bird in the daytime, “but in this instance we knew we had to get a photo”.



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Endangered ibises benefit from joining egret flocks

Date: March 22, 2017

Source: American Ornithological Society Publications Office

Birds benefit from flocking together -- even when they're not of a feather. According to a new study in The Auk: Ornithological Advances, China's endangered Crested Ibises benefit from joining forces with other, more visually-oriented bird species while searching for food.

Joining mixed-species flocks can reduce birds' risk of predation while boosting their foraging opportunities, but it can also expose them to competition and disease, and little research has been done on what this means for birds such as ibises that rely on their sense of touch to find food. Yuanxing Ye and Changqing Ding of the Beijing Forestry University and their colleagues studied the behavior of Crested Ibises foraging with and without Little Egrets in central China's Shaanxi Province, recording the birds' behavior with a digital video camera to determine whether they picked up on social cues from the other species. They found that ibises in mixed-species flocks became alert to threats sooner, suggesting they felt less at risk when mingling with the more visually-oriented egrets.



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For the birds: New prediction method sheds brighter light on flight

Date: March 27, 2017
Source: Office of Naval Research

Resembling a feathered flying ace with his miniature protective goggles and chinstrap, the parrotlet named Obie stood ready to take off. On signal, Obie propelled into the air, flapped through a laser field infused with microparticles and landed on another perch three feet away.

The journey only lasted three seconds, but it challenged the accuracy of three aerodynamics models long used to predict animal flight. It also might impact future designs of bio-inspired drones, robots and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a topic of interest to the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.

Sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), researchers at Stanford University found a new way to precisely measure the vortices -- circular patterns of rotating air -- created by birds' wings during flight. The results shed greater light on how these creatures produce enough lift to fly.



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Scientists make new discovery about bird evolution

March 24, 2017

In a new paper published in National Science Review, a team of scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature, and the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology (all in China) described the most exceptionally preserved fossil bird discovered to date.

The new specimen from the rich Early Cretaceous Jehol Biota (approximately 131 to 120 million years old) is referred to as Eoconfuciusornis, the oldest and most primitive member of the Confuciusornithiformes, a group of early birds characterized by the first occurrence of an avian beak. Its younger relative Confuciusornis is known from thousands of specimens but this is only the second specimen of Eoconfuciusornis found. This species comes only from the 130.7 Ma Huajiying Formation deposits in Hebei, which preserves the second oldest known fossil birds. Birds from this layer are very rare.

This new specimen of Eoconfuciusornis, housed in the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature, in Eastern China, is a female. The ovary reveals developing yolks that vary in size, similar to living birds. This suggests that confuciusornithiforms evolved a period of rapid yolk deposition prior to egg-laying (crocodilians, which are archosaurs like birds, deposit yolks slowly in all eggs for months with no period of rapid yolk formation), which is indicative of complex energetic profiles similar to those observed in birds.

This means Eoconfuciusornis and its kin, like living birds, was able to cope with extremely high metabolic demands during early growth and reproduction (whereas energetic demands in crocodiles are even, lacking complexity). In contrast, other Cretaceous birds including the more advanced group the Enantiornithes appear to have lower metabolic rates and have required less energy similar to crocodilians and non-avian dinosaurs (their developing yolks show little size disparity indicating no strong peak in energy associated with reproduction, and much simpler energetic profiles, limited by simpler physiologies).

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Council bill for ridding the streets of pigeons and gulls doubles to £1million in just three years

Biggest bird control spender was Southwark, spending £393,000 since 2013

Amount spent by councils rose from £452,000 in 2014 to £830,000 last year

Bird control methods include pigeon-proofing buildings to using marksmen

Spending also covered clearing up pigeon guano and removing dead ones 

By Jim Norton for the Daily Mail

Published: 00:05, 18 February 2017 | Updated: 00:29, 18 February 2017

Council spending on ridding the streets of pigeons and gulls has doubled to almost £1million over the past three years.

The biggest spender on bird control was the London Borough of Southwark, which has shelled out £393,000 since 2013.

The amount spent by English councils on bird control surged from £452,000 in 2014 to £830,000 last year, statistics obtained through Freedom of Information requests show.

The bird control methods used ranged from pigeon-proofing buildings to employing marksmen or hawks to kill the pests. The spending also covered clearing up pigeon guano and removing dead ones.

The British Pest Control Association suggested the increase could be due to the growing awareness of public health risks associated with the birds.

But they added that some methods, such as pigeon-proofing, simply moved problems on to another building or area.

The figures come two years after then Prime Minister David Cameron called for a 'big conversation' about seagulls following attacks on a dog and a tortoise in Cornwall.

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British military base on Cyprus - a safe haven for wildlife criminals

Over 800,000 songbirds, such as blackcaps and robins, are estimated to have been illegally killed on a British military base in Cyprus last autumn, where illegal trapping activity remains around its highest ever levels, according to a new report.

New research by the RSPB and BirdLife Cyprus shows that the number of nets used to trap birds remains around record levels on British Territory, with an increase of 183% since the illegal-killing monitoring programme began in 2002. 

The songbirds are illegally trapped and killed to provide restaurants with the main ingredient for the local and expensive delicacy of ambelopoulia- a plate of cooked songbirds. Organised crime gangs are driving this illegal activity on a huge scale and it is estimated they earn millions of Euros every year from the songbirds they kill on British territory. 

Between August and October 2016 the small British Sovereign Base Area (SBA) police force, supported by specialist surveillance help from RSPB Investigations staff, opened more cases and confiscated more mist nets - long lines of near invisible netting - than ever previously recorded. However, the SBA Administration were largely forced to abandon their most successful tool against this criminal activity- removal of the invasive Australian acacia trees which trappers have planted on MoD land in order to lure the birds in- due to the trappers organising large protests and a dramatic blockade. Whereas the Base authorities had successfully removed 54 acres of acacia in the preceding two years, this autumn they were only able to remove a further 7 acres, leaving around 90 acres of this illegal-killing infrastructure still standing on the British firing range. 

Trappers also blatantly and extensively deploy electronic calling devices on the firing range at night in order to lure in birds to their deaths and there are concerns that parts of the British firing range are effectively becoming a no-go area for the committed but significantly outnumbered local police force. 

Martin Harper, RSPB Conservation Director, said: “This report sadly highlights that the British base is the number one bird killing hotspot on the whole island of Cyprus. “Many much loved garden bird species are being trapped and killed for huge profit by criminal gangs. The trappers’ brazen prevention of the removal of their criminal infrastructure from MoD land could never be tolerated here in the UK. The UK Government must therefore provide enforcement support to help the Base authorities respond to the trappers and safely remove the remaining 90 acres of acacia so that they cannot be used to kill hundreds of thousands more birds.” 

The report estimates that over 1.7 million birds could have been killed within the survey area, which covers both the British base and Cyprus Republic areas, and nearly 2.3 million across the whole of Cyprus due to this extensive bird trapping activity. This industrial scale activity has also been confirmed in a scientific paper, published last year, where Cyprus was identified as one of the worst places for illegal bird killing in the Mediterranean. 

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