Birds – Science Articles

Bird surveys have recorded declines in shorebirds passing through eastern North America during fall migration.

Some birds nesting in the central and eastern United States have moved their range over a hundred miles farther north in less than three decades.

Biotoxin poisoning is the leading cause of mortality among seabirds in the United States, killing tens of thousands every year.

West Nile Virus has decimated populations of some North American bird species, while sparing others.

Ten years after Confederation Bridge opened to link Prince Edward Island with mainland Canada, migrating seabirds still have trouble getting past the lengthy structure.

The incessant din from compressor stations located along energy pipelines in Alberta's boreal forest makes it difficult for male ovenbirds to find a mate.

Lesser snow geese have stripped the coastal marshes of Hudson Bay bare of vegetation and researchers say it will be decades before plants grow there again.

Tree swallows hatched near wetlands filled with tailings from Alberta's oil sands have above normal levels of thyroid hormones.

When more than half of trees are harvested from a mature forest, the populations of some bird species plummet.

Studies into the timing of seasonal bird migrations in United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland and Denmark have uncovered the same trend: birds are flying north earlier every year.

Barn swallows living near the contaminated Chernobyl nuclear reactor have a much higher frequency of physical abnormalities than do barn swallows breeding elsewhere in Europe.

Loss of wetlands and spreading urbanization in eastern and central North America are blamed for the dramatic decline over the last 40 years in the number of nesting birds.

Examining the differences in the genetic barcode among birds leads scientists to suspect that 15 unidentified species of birds breed on the North American continent.

Woodpeckers feeding on mountain pine beetles in trees treated with the arsenic-based pesticide monosodium methanearsonate (MSMA) have elevated levels of arsenic in their blood, levels toxic enough to harm nestling birds.

It takes a landscape scattered with an entire range of successional stages of vegetation to support a full complement of bird species.

Some songbirds breeding off the east coast of Louise Island hatched fewer young in the cool spring of 1999.

Snags remaining in clearcuts after logging are most useful to birds if left within 100 m of a forest edge.

Warmer than usual water off the southern British Columbia coast during the 1990s ultimately led to a crash in BC's Cassin's auklet population.

Endangered Birds

Colonies of ivory gulls nesting on gravel plateaus of northwestern Baffin Island used to be so thick that local Inuit mistook the birds from a distance for patches of snow.

Marbled murrelets may be having difficulty finding enough food for producing eggs because commercial fisheries have depleted the birds' critical food supplies.

Scientists conclude that maintaining between 0.6 to 1.2 million ha of coastal old-growth forest could ensure that marbled murrelets survive in British Columbia.

Cars and trucks hit 950 owls that were later found lying along highways in the lower Fraser Valley of British Columbia, killing all but ten.

British Columbia's only breeding colony of the endangered American white pelican has doubled in size since 1988.

Protecting more old-growth forest habitat will do little to increase British Columbia's spotted owl population within the next decade.

Western screech owls, once commonly observed in forests throughout British Columbia's lower mainland, had disappeared from 22 sites by 2002.