This week in birds - #656

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


These are Lava Gulls, a bird of the coastlines of the islands in the Galápagos archipelago. The species is endemic to that island chain and it occurs nowhere else. Unlike other gulls and terns, it is a solitary nester and it maintains a large territory which it defends aggressively against intruders. It is an adept flyer but tends to stick close to shore. The Lava Gull is the American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week. 

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Remembering Jane Goodall...

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The current administration "leading" this country is certainly no friend of climate science but climate scientists are doing their best to keep the issue alive and in the public eye.

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India's first Red List of Endangered Species was to be revealed this week at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

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Our president has this week frozen billions in funding for renewable energy projects in states led by Democrats. What damage will he be able to do over the next three years? Nevertheless, on a more hopeful note, at the grassroots, people are still working to combat the effects of climate change.

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One of the things the president did was to approve that 211-mile road through the Alaskan wilderness that the Biden administration had rejected after an environmental review.

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Zimbabwe's vultures face threats of many kinds, but they are vital weapons in the fight against the spread of deadly diseases and it is essential that they be protected.

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The Toronto Subway Deer, Torontoceros hypogaeus, has at last been identified using its DNA fifty years after the fossil was discovered by construction workers.

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According to a new global assessment, more than half of the world's species of birds are in decline.

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Thirteen baby giant tortoises are thriving in the Seychelles after the first successful artificial incubation.

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This is the British swallowtail butterfly. Its survival as a species is threatened by habitat loss, climate change and genetic erosion due to its limited geographical range in East Anglia, but scientists hope to use cryopreservation to help save it. 

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It's been fifty years since the good ship Edmund Fitzgerald sank with all of its crew during a storm on Lake Superior but the legend lives on from the Chippewa on down...   

Comments

  1. David M. Gascoigne,October 11, 2025 at 1:38 AM

    Good morning, Dorothy. Thank you for the roundup. Even though we all know that the Trump administration would attack environmental sanity, the pace and scope of their destructive acts still defies belief. As for the decline in bird populations it is noticeable everywhere. I am in England right now, have been here for six days and have not yet seen a Blackbird (Turdus merula) or a Dunnock (Prunella modularis), two species one would normally expect to be common on suburban lawns. Humankind has learned very well how to ruin a good thing! Have a great weekend - David

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