Sydney airport worker gouged in eye by falcon living in Qantas hangar

Exclusive: union says cleaners should not have to work in area where falcons have nested for at least 20 years

An aircraft worker has been gouged in the eye by a falcon that lives in a Qantas Sydney airport hangar, creating what the union has called an “unsafe work environment”.

Multiple peregrine falcons – including at least one small family – live, nest and hunt in the hangar.

Falcons have been there for at least 20 years and have turned it into a “known roosting site”.

But on Tuesday last week, one of the falcons attacked a worker, causing significant damage to his eyes, neck and face. The worker “may lose sight in one eye”, the Transport Workers Union said.

The birds cannot be easily removed because they are a protected species, and Qantas has allowed them to stay because they keep mice, rats and pigeons away.

Guardian Australia has obtained an internal safety warning issued by Qantas that confirmed the attack and told staff to wear safety goggles until the end of breeding season in November.

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Suffolk golf club sees 25% increase in bird species

Tania Longmire

October 29, 2019 20:14

Ufford Park Woodbridge Hotel, Golf and Spa in Suffolk has seen a nearly 25 per cent rise in bird species that live at the venue in just eight years, according to a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) survey.

The club is now home to 39 species and new residents include four mistle thrushes and a number of hawfinches.

Mistle thrushes have been scarcer in south east England because of drier summers in recent years, and sightings of hawfinches – the UK’s largest finch – are increasingly rare because their breeding areas are in decline.

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Rare eagle sneaks into Iran and drains Siberian ornithologists’ funds by spamming costly text messages

25 Oct, 2019 08:13 / Updated 12 days ago

A Russian bird conservation group has discovered a sudden hole in their budget after one of the eagles they were tracking started bombarding them with hundreds of expensive text messages from Iran.

Roaming is one big headache when you travel a lot, and raptors can get burned by it just as easily as the bipeds that created mobile phones. Just ask the Russian Raptor Research and Conservation Network (RRRCN), an environmental group whose eagle tracking budget was surprisingly drained by one particularly sneaky bird of prey.

The network studies the migration routes of various birds, including the endangered steppe eagle. They do so by putting solar-powered GPS trackers on their subjects. The device records the coordinates of the birds and dumps the data via text messages through a regular mobile network when it’s available. The conservationists then check the routes against potential threats like high-voltage power lines or poison baits deployed for pest control and try to find ways to avoid them.

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A cyclist suffered an anaphylactic reaction after being attacked by a magpie.

'It smashed me really hard': Cyclist suffers an anaphylactic reaction after magpie swooped and scratched her face while she was cycling

Mellissa Gregory was bike riding with partner when she was attacked by magpie 

She claims the bird swooped and drew blood from her face causing it to swell

She was rushed to hospital leaving doctors confused over anaphylactic reaction 

By SAHAR MOURAD FOR DAILY MAIL AUSTRALIA

PUBLISHED: 14:37, 2 November 2019 | UPDATED: 14:37, 2 November 2019

Mellissa Gregory was bike riding with her partner at Chelsea's Bicentennial Park in Melbourne's south when a magpie swooped and attacked her face three times.

She claims the bird drew blood from her face causing it to swell from an allergic reaction. 

'Out of nowhere I just get hit in the side of the face,' she told 7NEWS.

'Next thing I know there's just blood everywhere... It honestly smashed into me really hard.'

Ms Gregory was rushed to hospital and doctors were left confused over the anaphylactic reaction. 

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Why Do Pigeons Bob Their Heads?

By Emma Bryce - Live Science Contributor

Are they really wagging their heads up and down? Look a little closer …

In 1978, a group of researchers in a laboratory at Queen's University in Canada clustered around a plexiglass box enclosing a treadmill … with a pigeon walking on it. The purpose behind this comical scene was to try and answer an age-old question: Why do pigeons bob their heads?

Head-bobbing is as much a feature of pigeons' identity as is their tendency to swarm us at the slightest suggestion that we might be harboring a snack. Bopping their heads as they stalk about pecking the ground for crumbs, these birds seem to be grooving to some secret beat, as if they're all attending a silent disco in the town square. 

But what's the real purpose behind this seemingly ridiculous motion?

The 1978 treadmill experiment gave us the first crucial insights into that question. And the study overturned one major assumption in the process: Pigeons aren't actually bobbing their heads. Instead, they're pushing them forward. 

When the researchers in that study reviewed slow-motion footage, they found that there were actually two main parts to a pigeon's head movement, which the scientists called a "thrust" and a "hold" phase. 

"In the 'thrust' phase, the head is pushed forward, relative to the body by about 5 centimeters [2 inches]," explained Michael Land, a biologist at Sussex University in the United Kingdom who has studied eye movements in animals and humans. "This is followed by a 'hold' phase, during which the head is kept still in space, which means that it moves backwards relative to the forward-moving body."

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New Zealand's bird of the year: the most important election – aside from the real one

What started as innocuous good fun has evolved into a national obsession, complete with voter fraud, skulduggery and high passions

Elle Hunt

Tue 5 Nov 2019 11.12 GMTLast modified on Wed 6 Nov 2019 00.51 GMT

The data team picked up on them first – 310 “dubious” votes from an IP address in Australia, sending one trend line suddenly, suspiciously skyward above the others. Something funny was going on with the shag.

Of course, by then – the 13th year of the competition – organisers knew to expect dodgy dealings in New Zealand’s bird of the year poll.

If a nationwide vote to name a favourite native bird sounds like innocuous good fun – a creative means of celebrating unique, threatened fauna – you may be underestimating bird of the year. Coordinated by the Royal Forest & Bird Society, an environmental nongovernmental organisation, it is often described as the country’s most important election – second only to, you know, the actual elections. Since 2017, too, it has had the same validation as two other Kiwi creations, pavlova and Russell Crowe: Australia has tried to pass it off as its own.

From a total of 900 votes received (some by post) in the first vote in 2005, bird of the year has grown to about 28,000 in 2015 and more than 48,000 in 2018 – nearly double the number that just elected the mayor of Wellington.

For this year’s competition, voting has been changed to proportional representation, allowing five choices, owing to persistent feedback that it was “too hard for people to choose just one bird”, according to a Forest & Bird spokeswoman, Megan Hubscher. “We’re seeing some interesting campaign strategies starting to take shape around that as well – for example, the penguin species are grouping together to campaign for ‘five ticks to penguins’.”

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Complex society discovered in the vulturine guineafowl

NOVEMBER 4, 2019

by Max Planck Society

Multilevel societies have, until now, only been known to exist among large-brained mammals including humans, other primates, elephants, giraffes and dolphins. Now, scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz report the existence of a multilevel society in a small-brained bird, the vulturine guineafowl (Acryllium vulturinum). The study, published in Current Biology, suggests that the birds can keep track of social associations with hundreds of other individuals—challenging the notion that large brains are a requirement for complex societies, and providing a clue as to how these societies evolved.

Multilevel societies occur when social units, such as pairs, of animals form groups that have stable membership, and these groups then associate preferentially with specific other groups. Because this requires the animals to keep track of individuals in both their own and other groups, the assumption has long been that multilevel societies should only exist in species with the intelligence to cope with this complexity. While many bird species live in groups, these are either open, lacking long-term stability, or highly territorial, lacking associations with other groups.

Vulturine guineafowl, however, present a striking exception: The researchers observed these birds, which are from an ancient lineage resembling dinosaurs, behaving highly cohesively without exhibiting the signature intergroup aggression that is common in other group-living birds. And they manage this despite having relatively small brains, even relative to other birds. "They seemed to have the right elements to form complex social structures, and yet nothing was known about them," says Danai Papageorgiou, lead author on the paper and a Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.

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