This week in birds - #641

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

This little guy is the well-named White-browed Tit-Spinetail. It is only found in threatened Polylepis forests in the Andes of southern Peru. Its numbers are decreasing as its habitat is under attack. It is the American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week. 

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Of all the outrageous acts of our current administration in Washington, there are few that appall me more than the destruction of the Rose Garden. Apparently it is to be paved over.

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The battle over a mine to be built next door to the Okefenokee Swamp has ended in a victory for the conservationists who opposed it.

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But in a defeat for conservationists, the administration is planning to roll back the 2001 Roadless Rule that prevented roadbuilding and logging on roughly 58 million acres of federal forest and wildlands.

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A runestone found in a Canadian forest in 2015 may be the oldest such artifact yet found in North America.

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A black bear in Michigan has been freed from a plastic lid that was trapped around his neck for two years.

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The origin of radio pulses in Antarctica that were first picked up by scientific instruments ten years ago remains a mystery but researchers believe they are closer to figuring them out.

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Orcas massaging each other? Apparently that is a thing.

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The House Finch can sometimes be hard to distinguish from the Purple Finch, but here are some clues that might help.

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Japanese scientists have retraced the 30,000-year-old sea voyage of ancient humans, and they did it, as the ancients did, in a hollowed-out log. 

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Researchers have recreated a lifelike facial reconstruction of a woman who lived during the Mesolithic Period 10,500 years ago and here she is, in all her humanity.

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Although crocodilians and lemurs went extinct on the mainland, many continued to survive and thrive on islands.

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Ancient DNA has revealed that a previously unknown group of humans lived in Colombia but they disappeared about 2,000 years ago.

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Mangroves form an important buffer on the coastline of Florida, one that helps to protect the state from the worst effects of tropical storms and hurricanes.  

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I've long found Hatshepsut to be one of the most interesting characters from ancient history but why were statues of this female pharaoh destroyed? Perhaps not for the reasons one might expect.

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Night lizards like this one are descendants of an ancestor that lived 90 million years ago. Thus, that ancestor survived the impact of the Chicxulub asteroid that ultimately killed about seventy-five percent of species on Earth. 

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At one point in my life, I lived in an eighth-floor apartment in a high-rise building that overlooked the roofs of a couple of buildings where Pigeons gathered. I spent a lot of hours watching those birds and learned to appreciate them in a way that many city dwellers don't. But Ben Crair understands.  

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At another point of my life, when I was a child, I loved fireflies. I still do though I seldom see them anymore, but here are some ways that we might help them. 

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Do wolves still deserve endangered species status in the European Union? It's an issue that has become entangled in politics, rather than being considered as a scientific and environmental question.

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This is a splooting squirrel. Stretching out this way, or splooting, is one of the squirrel's methods for cooling off in hot weather.