Some good news about a species that’s been declining.

With its gleaming red, blue and green feathers, the painted bunting is often described as the most beautiful migratory songbird in North America.

After a 30 year decline and extirpation from parts of its U.S. range, the species appears to be recovering. Now scientists at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington are reaching out to citizen scientists to help them confirm this observation and help advance the bird’s survival.

The eastern population of painted buntings breeds in summer along the Atlantic coast from North Carolina to Florida and migrates south for the winter into southern Florida and the Caribbean. It is this population that is the focus of Painted Bunting Observer Team research.

Helping out can be as simple a matter as keeping track of buntings that visit your bird feeder.

In Florida, the team wants to recruit and maintain an active group of volunteers who can make observations and collect data at backyard bird feeders and can help band and monitor banded buntings, especially during the winter.

So if you’re a backyard bird feeder living from North Carolina to Florida and want to help out with learning more about the painted bunting, click here.

We talk so much about species going extinct that it’s easy to forget that there are still times when new species emerge.

The latest is a new finch in the Galapagos islands, which is a little bigger and sings a different song than its neighbors. There aren’t lot of them yet, but they are clearly forming a new distinct species.

That doesn’t mean they’ll be around long, however.

It’s possible that they’ll be out-competed by other finches on the island. Their initial gene pool may contain flaws that will be magnified with time. A chance disaster could wipe them out. The birds might even return to the fold of their parent species, and merge with them through interbreeding.

But for now, we can welcome a new kind of finch to the world. Long may they fly.

Whether you call it critical habitat or an Important Bird Area, the idea is the same, provide a place that’s protected and can support the species who live there.

Lake Nakuru National Park in central Kenya, internationally known for its concentration of bright pink flamingos, has been designated as an international bird sanctuary.

It becomes the first national park in Africa to be recognized as an Important Bird Area under the international IBA program established by the UK-based global organization BirdLife International and its worldwide network of partners.

Lake Nakuru National Park was created in 1961 as a bird sanctuary. At that time, the famous American bird artist and author Roger Tory Peterson called the massed flamingos on the lake “the world’s greatest ornithological spectacle.”

Even with the climate changing, I wouldn’t have thought that an Alaskan winter had become warm enough to cause this big a change in behavior.

As the climate warms, Arctic-nesting geese called Pacific brant are choosing to winter in Alaska instead of migrating to Mexico as they used to do, finds a study led by scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey, USGS.
Until recently, 90 percent of Pacific brant wintered in Mexico, but now as many as to 30 percent are opting to spend their winters in Alaska instead, the research shows.

“This increase in wintering numbers of brant in Alaska coincides with a general warming of temperatures in the North Pacific and Bering Sea,” said David Ward, the lead author of the study and a USGS researcher at the Alaska Science Center. “This suggests that environmental conditions have changed for one of the northernmost-wintering populations of geese.”

Of course, it could be that the recession is causing more geese than usual to cut back on their travel, but that seems unlikely as they save so much on airfare. whatever the reason, Alaskans are going to have to get used to more Pacific Brants hanging around through the winter.

The whooping crane has long been the symbol of efforts to save a species from extinction. It takes a lot of effort to help the cranes, which can be very vulnerable to threats of any kind and are slow to reproduce. This latest news, about the decline of the only freely migrating whooping crane flock in existence, should be seen as bad news.

It doesn’t mean that the cranes are about to become extinct. But it does mean that in a species whose numbers are measured in the hundreds, the loss of a few dozen individuals has the potential to set back efforts to save the cranes by a generation or more.

When its been over a hundred years, even one egg is cause for celebration.

For the first time in more than 125 years, an egg of a common guillemot, Uria aalge, also known as common murre, has been discovered south of the Canadian border on the east coast of the United States.

The egg was discovered by a volunteer working for Audubon’s Seabird Restoration program on Matinicus Rock, one of 50 islands in Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge.

It marks the first time since 1883 that the species, which spends most of its life at sea, has nested south of the Canadian border on east coast of the United States.

So you may be wondering, how did the birds decide to move to a nesting ground that they hadn’t visited for over a century. Well, it didn’t just happen, they were lured there with decoys.

The volunteer noticed a pair of murres in typical incubating posture surrounded by about 50 murre decoys, and artificial eggs, and close to a sound system that emits murre calls to encourage the long-absent birds to establish new nests.

You can almost hear the admonishing words: “real birds don’t get lured, they are responsible for their actions.”

There’s a saying out there about people being entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. That’s one piece of reality that the Bush Administration never seemed to get into their collective heads.

The Bush administration made “greatly exaggerated claims” about the severity of wildland fire in the 2008 Recovery Plan for the Northern Spotted Owl, according to new research published Monday.

The controversial recovery plan recommended the elimination of forest reserves on over half of the owl’s range in order to promote widespread thinning in forests used by the owl, which is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

“The Recovery Plan is simply not scientifically justified, and would create substantial risks for the spotted owl,” said Chad Hanson, lead author of the study and a research associate at the University of California at Davis. “Areas of intense fire support peak numbers of wildlife species, including prey species upon which spotted owls depend,” he said.

“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service should start over again with a science-based recovery plan that builds on the protective measures of the Northwest Forest Plan to recover spotted owls and hundreds of other old-forest dependent species regardless of fire,” said Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at the National Center for Conservation Science and Policy and former member of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recovery team for the owl.

“There is certainly ample time to carefully design experimental thinning treatments in fire prone forests such as tree plantations without eliminating old forest reserves,” said DellaSala.

Of course, we all know that when the Bush Administration talked about a “Spotted Owl Recovery Plan”, what they were really looking for wqs an excuse to log the forests the owl depends on for its habitat. That they would resort to basically making things up in order to justify their actions is, unfortunately for the owls, the forests and conservationists everywhere, simply the way the Bush Administration went about its business.

Here’s a surprise. When birds migrate, they pay no attention to national boundaries. That raises a significant problem for conservationists. What good does it do to protect a bird’s summer home, for example, if their winter habitat is being destroyed by development, pollution, or any of the other obstacles presented by encroaching human activities?

Obviously, there’s a need for international cooperation here, and for once, it appears that protecting migrating birds is actually getting some.

The work of BirdLife International partner organizations throughout the Americas is advancing due to $4.8 million in U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grants for 36 neotropical migratory bird conservation projects first announced on May 13, International Migratory Bird Day.

Now, companies, institutions and individuals have contributed an additional $18 million in matching funds to support habitat restoration, environmental education, population monitoring and other priority activities in the United States, Puerto Rico, Canada, Mexico, and 12 Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Notice this is also a public/private partnership, which should alleviate any conservative qualms about international agreements dictating U.S. policy. (As an aside, why is there evidently such a gap between the attitudes implied by the words “conservative” and “conservation”?)

The upshot, though, is that many species of migratory birds in the western Hemisphere will now find their habitat protected at both ends of their journey, and along their route. Here’s one example of what that can mean here in the United States.

The approach of linking the communities at the Important Bird Areas with each other and with the community of Great Salt Lake has proved successful in Canada and Mexico, says Clay.

Great Salt Lake supports between two and five million shorebirds, as many as 1.7 million eared grebes, and hundreds of thousands of waterfowl during spring and fall migration. Because of its importance to migratory birds, the lake was designated a part of the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network in 1992. The lake and its marshes provide a resting and staging area for the birds, as well as an abundance of brine shrimp and brine flies that serve as food.

For a complete list of current projects being funded by the international bird program, click here.

With world-wide concern growing as to the health of bird populations, it’s going to take large-scale thinking to get a grip on the problem. That’s why it’s good to see people thinking about approaches that work on a continent-wide scale.

A network of wildlife conservation areas across Africa will be vital in helping to save up to 90 percent of bird species on the African continent affected by climate change, according to new research released today.

Led by biologists at Durham University, the computer modeling study probed the effects of “moderate” climate change on 815 bird species of conservation concern in sub-Saharan Africa and on the network of sites designated for them, known as Important Bird Areas.

The findings suggest that it is up to African legislators to protect ecosystems that can serve as what the scientists call “green corridors” to help wildlife find new, more comfortable areas when their habitat heats up. More than 40 percent of African Important Bird Areas lack any form of legal protection under national or international law.

An endangered species of birds gets a sanctuary:

An idyllic stretch of beach in Indonesia has been sold — not to developers but to protect an endangered bird species, and it only cost $12,500 to acquire the exotic address.

The 36-acre parcel on the island of Sulawesi has become a protected nesting habitat for the maleo, which buries and incubates its eggs in the warm sand, the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society said in a statement Tuesday.

Maleos — about the size of chickens with black backs, ping stomachs and yellow facial skin — are found only on Sulawesi. Like many birds and sea turtles, maleos have been targeted by poachers for their eggs.

Sounds idyllic. Here’s hoping the maleo like their new beach.