Bird 'Arrested’' By Dutch Police On Shoplifting Charge And Twitter Can’t Keep Calm!

By Medha Sharma

10/02/19 AT 9:19 AM

Bird behind bars? Yes, you read it right. In an unusual incident, the Dutch police recently arrested a tiny parakeet bird and placed it in custody after its owner was arrested for shoplifting.

As the feathered creature was a partner-in-crime, sitting on the offender’s shoulder when he violated the law, the police had no option but to "arrest" the adorable birdie. The local police did not have a birdcage so the felon was put behind a regular cell with bread and water.

No wonder, the Dutch are known for treating everyone equally!

Sharing the photo of the green and yellow bird seated in a cell, the Police Utrecht Centrum jokingly wrote, “This bird sat on the shoulder of the thief we arrested for shoplifting. As we don’t have a bird cage, this bird had no other place to stay than in a cell.”

As it was a petty theft, the police released the felon soon, along with with his feathery friend who promptly hopped back on his shoulder as the duo walked out of the station.

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Least Bittern – a new species for Ireland

09/10/2019

An unusual bird was discovered by my good friend John O'Donoghue on the back lawn of his house in Farranfore, Co Kerry, at 5 pm on Monday 7 October. It was a quiet, mild evening with sunshine and a clear sky at the time of finding. The specimen was in very poor condition and could not fly, so John decided it was best to pick it up and bring it inside to save him from his dog. However, unfortunately, some 30 minutes later, it had passed on.

On Tuesday morning, John called over to me at work, across the road from his house, to show me what he had found. A Google search produced nothing even close to the bird, so I decided to make contact with Birdwatch Ireland. After some discussion with them it transpired the bird was a Least Bittern and had originated from North America – little did we know at the time the interest this small, misfortunate bird would attract.

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Researchers Implant Memories in Zebra Finch Brains

Juvenile birds learn the length of the sounds in a song from a false memory introduced via optogenetics, instead of from real interactions with a tutor bird.

Oct 3, 2019
ABBY OLENA

Animals learn by imitating behaviors, such as when a baby mimics her mother’s speaking voice or a young male zebra finch copies the mating song of an older male tutor, often his father. In a study published today in Science, researchers identified the neural circuit that a finch uses to learn the duration of the syllables of a song and then manipulated this pathway with optogenetics to create a false memory that juvenile birds used to develop their courtship song.

“In order to learn from observation, you have to create a memory of someone doing something right and then use this sensory information to guide your motor system to learn to perform the behavior. We really don’t know where and how these memories are formed,” says Dina Lipkind, a biologist at York College who did not participate in the study. The authors “addressed the first step of the process, which is how you form the memory that will later guide [you] towards performing this behavior.”

“Our original goals were actually much more modest,” says Todd Roberts, a neuroscientist at UT Southwestern Medical Center. Initially, Wenchan Zhao, a graduate student in his lab, set out to test whether or not disrupting neural activity while a young finch interacted with a tutor could block the bird’s ability to form a memory of the interchange. She used light to manipulate cells genetically engineered to be sensitive to illumination in a brain circuit previously implicated in song learning in juvenile birds.

Zhao turned the cells on by shining a light into the birds’ brains while they spent time with their tutors and, as a control experiment, when the birds were alone. Then she noticed that the songs that the so-called control birds developed were unusual—different from the songs of birds that had never met a tutor but also unlike the songs of those that interacted with an older bird.




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Montrose welcomes more than 55,000 geese as ‘Scotland’s biggest nature spectacle’ returns

by Craig Smith

October 7 2019, 2.36pm

More than 55,000 pink-footed geese have descended on an Angus reserve as part of “Scotland’s biggest nature spectacle”.

Droves of the birds have taken up their winter residences at the Scottish Wildlife Trust’s Montrose Basin Wildlife Reserve.

They have flown about 750 miles (1,200km) from their summer breeding grounds in Greenland and Iceland.

The latest count revealed there are now at least 55,326 of the birds – up by more than 5,000 since September – with numbers still increasing.

Anna Cowie, the Trust’s Montrose Basin ranger, said: “Montrose Basin Wildlife Reserve is an internationally-important habitat for pink-footed geese.

“These birds are one of the heralds of autumn, and we’ve been pleased to see so many people flocking to the basin at dawn and dusk to take in the spectacle.

“This has been a very unusual season with birds arriving from Iceland much earlier than in recent years. It’s impossible to say when numbers will peak.”

The “pinkfeet” are thought to have arrived in numbers earlier this year due to snow in Iceland pushing them south quicker than usual.

The best time to see and hear large numbers is at dawn and dusk.

During the day, most of the geese head out to find food.

Read on

Yellow-billed Cuckoo found dead in East Sussex

02/10/2019

A Yellow-billed Cuckoo was discovered in residential Seaford, East Sussex, on the morning of 2 October.

The bird, which was very freshly dead and had presumably only just perished, was discovered lying between two large brick pillars on the path which runs out to Splash Point at the end of Gerald Road at around 09:30 by Mary-Anne Carter, who lives on Gerald Road and was out walking her dog.

She passed the unusual corpse to her neighbour, Robert Lawson, who commented: "I thought the bird looked like a cuckoo, or possibly a shrike.

"I took it home and looked in the Collins Bird Guide, and was able to identify it as a Yellow-billed Cuckoo."

This represents the second record for East Sussex and unfortunately bears a striking resemblance to the previous occurrence, which flew into a wall in Eastbourne and was picked up dead on 4 November 1952. There is also a single record from West Sussex, which again involved a freshly dead bird at Middleton-on-sea on 14 December 1960.

Incidentally, another Yellow-billed Cuckoo was found on St Mary's, Scilly, on the morning of 2 October, but happily was still alive. However, it quickly disappeared into gardens after its discovery and hasn't yet been seen again.

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The impact of human-caused noise pollution on birds

OCTOBER 11, 2019

by Cornell University

Anthropogenic noise pollution (ANP) is a globally invasive phenomenon impacting natural systems, but most research has occurred at local scales with few species. Researchers in this study investigated continental-scale breeding season associations with ANP for 322 bird species to test whether local-scale predictions related to breeding habitat, migratory behavior, body mass, and vocal traits are consistent at broad spatial extents for an extensive group of North American bird species in the continental United States.

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Better protection sought for Thailand's helmeted hornbill

OCTOBER 11, 2019

by Busaba Sivasomboon

Time is running out for Thailand's dwindling population of helmeted hornbills thanks to poaching of the exotic birds for the ivory-like casques atop their big red and yellow beaks.

The species, known by the scientific name Rhinoplax vigil, is listed as "critically endangered" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

"Currently, there are fewer than 100 of the birds in Thailand's forests," says Dr. Kaset Sutacha, chairman of the Bird Conservation Society of Thailand and head of the Exotic Pet and Wildlife Clinic at Kasetsart University's Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Bangkok.

"Critically endangered" is just a step away from "extinct in the wild" and two steps from becoming considered "extinct."

Demand from China is helping drive demand for their distinctive casques, "helmets" in French, which males deploy in battle. The material is used to make rings, pendants and other decorative items.

Worries over the species' survival intensified after the wildlife trade monitoring group TRAFFIC recently posted photos online of dozens of skulls of the endangered avian for sale.

A campaign on the change.org online petition site is pressuring the government to add the bird to Thailand's Wildlife Preservation List as soon as possible. It now lists 19 other species.

Read on