Birdbrains: Birds can struggle to weather the weather

The hot topic among Vermont birders is, of course, the weather. It's been a wet spring, and people are noticing its impact not just on their spirits, but on nesting birds.

Rain can flood nests, cause nests to fall apart, destroy eggs, and kill young. Rain also influences the abundance of food. When food is scarce, chicks don't develop as quickly and can even starve. When a whole nest fails, many birds will make another nest. If this re-nesting attempt is late in the season, the young have less time to grow before fall migration, which makes it harder to survive.

Many people are reporting nest failures this year, but is it really affecting bird populations? Scott Sillett of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center is one of the researchers studying the impacts of global weather patterns on songbird populations. His long-term study of black-throated blue warblers investigates differences between El Nino and La Nina years. Many of us are familiar with the El Nino event of 1997 when California was drenched in rain. In Jamaica, where black-throated blue warblers winter, El Nino years bring less rain, and the warblers have a harder time surviving the winter because food is scarce. Similarly, on their breeding grounds in New Hampshire, Scott found that during El Nino years there is less food available and, consequently, fledglings weigh less.

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Tired, hungry birds turn up on beaches around Santa Cruz

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. An unusual number of a species of baby pelican that's under federal protection are showing up weak and hungry on beaches in the Santa Cruz area.

Animal rescue workers say at least 29 sick birds have been found this month. The S-P-C-A had to euthanize four birds this week that were very sick and that another died on its own.

Necropsies found that some birds had empty stomachs.

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Cape Cod weekly wildlife sightings

...This has been another interesting week for bird sightings. The birds reported consist of mostly sea/shore birds. Many of the birds reported are uncommon birds in Massachusetts, which continues the trend of low numbers of common birds and good numbers of rare and uncommon birds...

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this one is wierd, amazing and scary sight I would venture to say

Vultures lay siege to Amazon jungle city
LIMA, Peru (Reuters) - Hundreds of vultures have swarmed the airport of the biggest city in Peru's Amazon jungle, putting planes at risk and threatening to cut off the city of more than 400,000 people from the rest of the country.

The birds already have forced the airport in Iquitos -- a popular tourist destination that can only be reached from the capital Lima by air -- to shut down eight hours a day, said Aurelio Crovetto, head of Peru's state-run airport authority.

Bird deaths puzzle Unalaska

More than 1,600 sea bird carcasses have washed onto Unalaska shores over the last two days in a mysterious die-off that scientists are scrambling to understand.

Some say they may have died of hunger. Others say they're smashing into boats.

Maybe it's both, some scientists said.

Several hundred black, gull-like shearwaters died after flying into a crabbing boat that steamed through the early morning darkness in Unalaska Bay on Wednesday morning, said Forrest Bowers, a fisheries biologist for the state Department of Fish and Game in Unalaska.

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Balmy winter puts chill on bird migration

Some European birds have failed to fly south for the winter, apparently lured to stay by weeks of mild weather that experts widely link to global warming.

Birds including robins, thrushes and ducks that would normally fly south from Scandinavia, for instance, have been seen in December -- long after snow usually drives them south. And Siberian swans have been late reaching western Europe.

"With increasing warmth in winter we suspect that some types of birds won't bother to migrate at all," said Grahame Madge, spokesman of the British Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).

Many individual birds were leaving later, and flying less far.

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