This week in birds - #692

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

A hummingbird that is about the size of a butterfly is the American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week. It is the Short-crested Coquette, a bird of the state of Guerrero in Mexico. It is one of the rarest of Mexican hummingbirds. It is estimated that there are less than 1,000 left in the small area that it inhabits and that its population is decreasing. The main threat to its habitat comes from unsustainable logging and agricultural expansion.

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A new species of cat has been discovered in the cloud forests of the Andes in Bolivia. It is smaller than our house cats.

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It turns out that not all "invasive" plants are all bad. Some serve a useful purpose. 

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Three wild dogs in Zambia have made a record-breaking journey of more than 2,500 miles in search of mates.

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It seems that human evolution (which is still ongoing) favors genes linked to red hair and less male-pattern baldness.

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The current iteration of the Environmental Protection Agency, which does not live up to its name, has announced that it is eliminating a rule that limited planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from power plants fueled by coal and natural gas.

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A federal judge has ruled that the administration's plan to halve the workforce of the Federal Emergency Management Agency is illegal.

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A 66-million-year-old feather trapped in dinosaur poop may offer a clue as to how some birds survived extinction.

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Meanwhile, dinosaur footprints discovered in North Dakota might represent the first T. rex trackway that has ever been found.

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Five hundred adult Partula snails are being mailed from the Detroit zoo to Tahiti giving a whole new meaning to the term "snail mail." It's part of an international effort to reestablish wild populations of the snail.

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A new study suggests that some of the fish living in the Great Lakes might be more than four hundred years old.

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A strange object sticking out of a creek in California turned out to be a mastodon tooth.

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Iceland is one of the three countries that still hunts whales but it is currently considering a bill that would ban the practice.

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A tomb discovered this year in Peru contained 38 individuals and a rich trove of funerary goods from the pre-Inca Chimu' civilization of 600 years ago.

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A new map that traces where petrochemical emissions come from shows that just ten percent of facilities produce 53% of the industry's emissions.

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When elephants raid farms they may actually be looking for medicinal plants.

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Tasmanian devils and humans lived alongside each other in northwestern Australia as far back as 45,000 years ago.

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Here are some ways that people of the past used magic to protect their homes.

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Two mountain-dwelling marmots have been discovered living in the San Francisco Bay Area many miles from normal habitat. It's unclear how they got there but there is speculation that they hitched a ride in the engine compartment of an automobile. Regardless of how they got there they were described as "chonky" and very well-fed.