Ornithology.com Blogs

There are hundreds of short, 500 or so word, blogs for you to peruse. The most recent ones are excerpted below. Below them is a list of archived blogs by month all the way back to 2015. Enjoy and feel free to comment. And consider subscribing.

  • Economic View of Birdwatching

    There’s a recent (Oct 2023) article in the journal Ornithological Applications entitled “Historical racial redlining and contemporary patterns of income inequality negatively affect birds, their habitat, and people in Los Angeles, California.” It’s rather complex but the basic idea is that well-to-do or even moderate-income neighborhoods have a greater diversity of birds than do low-income…

  • The Twelve-wired Bird-of-Paradise

    Regularly I like to blog about some of the more interesting birds of the world. Today, one of the 45 species of Birds-of-Paradise. Birds-of-Paradise, family Paradisaedae, are only found in Indonesia, New Guinea, and a small part of Australia. In the early years of exploration, European Traders shipped Bird-of-Paradise skins from New Guinea to collectors…

  • The Naming Controversy

    I earlier discussed the proposal by the American Ornithologist’s Union (AOU) to change the common names of birds named after people. Let me add a little more here. Will this lead to a change in scientific names as well? The AOU changed McCown’s Longspur to the Thick-billed Longspur because of McCown’s support of slavery as…