This week in birds - #649

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


The American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week is another Hawaiian species, the ʻAlawī, a small, inconspicuous honeycreeper. There are four disjunct populations of the bird on the big island, Hawaii. Each of the populations is nonmigratory and show strong site fidelity throughout the year.

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Light pollution at night is a big problem for birds during migration and there is a movement afoot to "take back the night" and change that. 

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Streaked Shearwaters spend much of their time in the air and a lot of that time they are pooping! This behavior was accidentally discovered through video coverage that was meant to investigate something else altogether.

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A partial dire wolf skull (a species that went extinct around the end of the last ice age) that is set to be auctioned is expected to bring as much as $30,000. 

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Our current president is strongly anti-environment and is planning to dismantle the country's efforts to fight climate change. (Honestly, the stupidity, it burns!) 

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I've never understood some people's antipathy to gulls. I've always found them interesting and engaging creatures.

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This is the Blue Dasher, a beautiful dragonfly that actually thrives on pollution.

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The recent floods in Travis County, Texas washed away sand and revealed dinosaur tracks from 115 million years ago.

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The Eastern Massasauga Rattlesnakes in Michigan are becoming more isolated because of habitat fragmentation and that is leading to inbreeding.

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Stone tools from more than a million years ago discovered on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi reveal clues about some of our earliest human relatives.

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It seems that dolphins and whales actually interact with each other more than previously thought.

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And speaking of whales, did you know their ancestors walked on land?

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Here's how to attract goldfinches to your yard.

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And here's how one woman learned her appreciation of Nature.

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Nature seems to REALLY like its crabs. Why else would it keep evolving new ones?

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Fossilized hominin teeth that have been discovered suggest there may have been as many as four different lineages living in East Africa between 2.5 million and 3 million years ago.

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Ancient flip-flops? Maybe.

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