This week in birds - #609

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

This magnificent bird is the American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week. It is the Zone-tailed Hawk, a resident of the American Southwest, Central America, right down into South America. The bird's status is threatened by habitat loss.

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Drought conditions now cover as much as 87 percent of the United States. Moreover, severe drought has put at risk nearly half a million children in the Amazon region. The drought is also a threat to the Panama Canal as well as to the entire country of Panama. 

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With all of that as a background, this year's U.N. climate summit has been taking place. Meanwhile, the U.N. Secretary-General warns that we are still underestimating the threat of catastrophic climate breakdown and ecosystem collapse. 

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A new agreement would shift some of the profits from the use of genetic information to help pay for global conservation efforts.

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It will not come as a surprise that 2024 is virtually certain to become the hottest year on record.

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Chemists believe they have now solved the mystery of these white blobs that have been washing up on Canadian beaches.

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And another mystery - why methane in the atmosphere is rising - may have been solved as well.

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The world's climate leaders are facing the catastrophe of the United States shifting away from the focus on clean energy to a policy of "drill, baby, drill" following our recent election.

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Papua New Guinea has come to believe that climate summits do not produce any results and has pulled out of the Cop29. Could other countries follow?

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A Cornish monument has been determined to date from the middle Neolithic period, some 5,000 to 5,500 years ago.

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Scientists are still learning new information from genetic material recovered from the victims of the volcanic eruption that destroyed Pompeii in 79 A.D. 

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Plastic pollution is having an effect on all of Earth's processes.

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President Biden has moved to try to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling. We can only hope that the protections he puts in place will remain once he leaves office.

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The government of Saudi Arabia(!) has stated that the degradation of Earth's soils and landscapes is a threat to human life and needs to be addressed urgently.

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As leaves begin to change color and fall, here is the year's journey that they have taken.

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Forty-three rhesus monkeys escaped from a research facility in South Carolina this week.

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Who's that bird? This is an easy one for any North American birder.

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The global climate crisis ultimately means extinction, something we should never forget. 

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I guess we should be glad that the giant "terror birds" of the Middle Miocene epoch are no longer around.

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Still more ruins of Mayan cities are being found in Mexico and Central America, proving that the Mayan civilization was even more widespread than once believed.

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Here's the Week in Wildlife from The Guardian.

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A cloned ferret has given birth in Virginia, offering hope for another way to aid endangered species.

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This Emperor Penguin is pictured on an Australian beach, 2,000 miles from where one would expect to find it.

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I think Santa Fe has the right idea; maybe we all need our personal Zozobra to burn.

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And finally, here's Haggis.

Haggis is the utterly adorable pygmy hippopotamus born at the Edinburg, Scotland Zoo last week.