This week in birds - #592

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment: 

Step into my backyard these days and you will hear a chorus of the "song" of these guys - cicadas. They are everywhere in the trees around our yard. This one decided to rest for a bit on the ground under a tree.

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The big stories this week have mostly involved the record hot temperatures that have occurred right around the world. 

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The heat in the Las Vegas area broke records and stunned even the forecasters there. 

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In fact, the average global temperature has now warmed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial records for twelve months in a row. 

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Here in the Houston area, we've had the added problems caused by Hurricane Beryl which left thousands without electricity during the sweltering heat. (Personal note: Our power came back relatively quickly. Some are still without. As one born and raised in the South, I can take the heat; it's when the power goes off in winter when the temperatures are in the teens that I suffer.)

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 And apparently heatwave tourism is now a thing. 

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On a more pleasant note, here are pictures of the week in wildlife which includes a blue frog.

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Burials from as long as 2,000 years ago indicate that the First Australians may have kept dingos as pets.

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Can planting more trees in urban areas help shield residents there from heat waves and storms?

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The story of seventy young Mojave Desert tortoises hatched and reared in captivity and then released into the wild has captured the attention of the public.

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A new study indicates that global migratory freshwater fish populations have plummeted by as much as 81% between 1970 and 2020.

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It seems that there were several waves of early humans migrating out of Africa and that the earliest of these came much sooner than had previously been believed.

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Scientists have extracted DNA that retained its original structure from a woolly mammoth that lived some 52,000 years ago, a feat never before accomplished.

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Cargo ships off the coast of California are reducing their speed in order to protect the whales that frequent those waters.

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A population collapse of humans during the Neolithic Age may have been precipitated by an outbreak of the plague.

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Give "weeds" their due; they are not all bad guys. In fact, many of them are quite useful.

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Even in war-torn Syria, conservationists are at work trying to save the environment and especially one particular river.

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It is important to help Indigenous peoples protect forests and other shared resources in order to fight against climate change and other environmental threats.

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One of my fondest memories of summer nights when I was a child is the fireflies that twinkled and lit up the yard around our house. Like so many other species, they are now imperiled but one Malaysian conservationist has made it her life's work to protect and preserve them.