In 2011, animal control authorities confiscated 18 pigeons, a crow, and a gull from a homeless man in Los Angeles who kept them in cages. The pigeons, diseased and dirty, were euthanized and the gull and crow sent to bird rehabilitators. In 2018 the homeless guy sued the city, claiming some of the birds were …
Windows and cats are major sources of mortality for our birds but certainly aren’t the only major causes. Somewhere between 87 and 350 million birds are killed by vehicles each year in the U.S., although the estimates vary. See this study. Barn owls seem particularly marked for doom. Now threatened or endangered in a number …
Clearly, the normal functioning of the world’s activities has been upset by the coronavirus as I write this blog in mid-March 2020. Stores are closing, meetings are cancelled, travel plans postponed, and the grocery stores that remain open are having their shelves denuded of canned goods and toilet paper. We’re all trying to adjust to …
I receive emails on a regular basis from readers of my blog or visitors to my website, asking questions, usually, or telling me about some interesting observation they made. A significant number of these have to do with the unusual presence or absence of birds. One recent comment was from a Canadian who observed American …
I regularly receive reports of birds with unusual coloration. Often it is just partial albinism in which patches of white show up on the bird in various places, or incomplete albinism in which the eumelanin (dark pigment) is diluted instead of absent, so a dark bird might appear gray instead of black or tan instead …
