Bird watcher Lloyd Moon, 76, recently spotted the rare snail kite for the first time in South Carolina, sparking a debate among birders and scientists about what the bird was doing so far north.

The snail kite is an endangered species seldom seen north of central Florida, experts say, and is included on the endangered species list in part because of the shrinking habitat of its main food source, the apple snail.

Moon first spotted the bird last week at a crawfish farm near Rimini, about 35 miles southeast of Columbia.

The bird’s taste for crawfish surprised scientists, and it could lead to experiments with crawfish ponds in Florida.

The Associated Press picked up the story Tuesday.

But birders on the ALBIRDS listserv and other online communities have been talking about the rare sighting since last Friday.

The first fuzzy photographs were published on the Carolina Bird Club site here.

That was followed up by better photos from the Cape Romain Bird Observatory.

BirdLife International

The gorgeted puffleg [eriocnemis isabellaea].

A rare hummingbird that boasts a plumage of violet blue and iridescent green on its throat has been discovered living in the cloud forests of southwestern Colombia, researchers announced Sunday.

But they warned that the newly-discovered bird, the gorgeted puffleg, is in danger from the slash and burn system of the region’s coca crops, the raw material used in the production of cocaine, according to the AP.

The species belongs to the puffleg genus, which appear to have “little cotton balls above their legs,” said Luis Mazariegos-Hurtado, who has spent 30 years documenting hummingbirds and founded the Colombian Hummingbird Conservancy

Investigators caught their first glimpse of the bird while surveying a mountain ridge in the Cauca province in 2005.

Braving the zone’s leftist rebels and drug traffickers, they returned to confirm the sighting.

There are concerns over the bird’s future because the Serrania del Pinche mountains where it was discovered are unprotected, according to ornithologists Alexander Cortés-Diago and Luis Alfonso Ortega, who made three sightings of the new hummingbird during surveys in 2005 of montane cloud forest in the Serrania del Pinche, south-west Colombia.

“We were essentially following a hunch,” said Alexander Cortés-Diago of The Hummingbird Conservancy (Colombia) and co-discoverer of Gorgeted Puffleg. “We had heard that a new species of plant had been discovered in the region in 1994. This discovery and the isolation of the Serrania led us to believe there could also be new species of vertebrates.”

For more information, check out the story in Birdlife International.

In a new report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a project established by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations, found that 20 to 30 percent of all the world’s bird species are vulnerable to extinction due to global warming. The panel warns that if average earth temperatures rise by more than 2.5 degrees Centigrade, a rise in sea levels could threaten many low-lying areas which currently are vital breeding grounds for many bird species.

The panel recommends a concerted effort to preserve the world’s forests. Not only are these forests important bird habitats but they also remove a great deal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The panel also warns that the rush to produce fuels from corn and energy from wind turbines could adversely impact bird populations. The report urges careful planning for such projects to alleviate any dangers to birds.

From Birder’sUnited.Com.

Nuthatches appear to have learned to understand a foreign language - chickadee, according to a study published in the National Academy of Sciences Proceedings today.

Photo by Glynn Wilson

A Carolina chickadee in a dogwood tree - chasing away the nuthatches?

Study Abstract

It’s not unusual for one animal to react to the alarm call of another, according to the study, but nuthatches seem to go beyond that - interpreting the type of alarm and what sort of predator poses a threat.

When a chickadee sees a predator, it issues warning call - a soft “seet” for a flying hawk, owl or falcon, or a loud “chick-a-dee-dee-dee” for a perched predator.

The “chick-a-dee” call can have 10 to 15 “dees” at the end and varies in sound to encode information on the type of predator. It also calls in other small birds to mob the predator, Christopher Templeton of the University of Washington said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press.

“In this case the nuthatch is able to discriminate the information in this call,” said Templeton, a doctoral candidate.

The findings by Templeton and Erick Green, an associate professor of biological sciences at the University of Montana, are reported in this week’s online edition of National Academy of Sciences Proceedings.
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An international team of scientists is assembling a barcoded genetic portrait of bird life in the United States and Canada - the prelude to a genetic portrait of all animal life on Earth.

Scientists have developed a new technique for species identification in the form of a DNA barcode, similar to ones used to identify consumer products in the supermarket, only a species barcode can identify unique animals or plants.

Based on DNA barcode identifiers, the scientists have discovered 15 new genetically distinct species, nearly indistinguishable to human eyes and ears and thus overlooked in centuries of bird studies.

The barcoders also logged the DNA attributes of 87 bat species in the South American country of Guyana and reveal six new species, each characterized by its unique genetic make-up.

“People have watched birds for so long we might think every different tweet has been heard, every different color form observed,” says Dr. Paul Hebert of the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario at Guelph University, who co-authored both the bird and bat papers. “However, there are a number of cases of deep genetic divergences within what are currently called single species.”

“Now, with the vast majority, 93-94 percent, of birds on the continent barcoded it’s hard to argue that barcoding might work for the easy stuff but miss the difficult cases of closely-related taxa,” Dr. Hebert said.
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