Jan

23rd 2008

Maps aren’t just for humans

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According to a short item in the Smithsonian’s January magazine, white-crowned sparrows map their navigation routes to their wintering grounds in Mexico and the Southwestern United States. The study looked at the navigation path of 15 adult and 15 juvenile birds. As the birds mature they build a mental map of their wintering grounds so that they can return to the location even if their starting point changes. White-crowned sparrows normally summer in Alaska but the 30 captured birds were released from New Jersey. The adult birds accurately changed their route to a southwesterly direction while the juvenile birds, out of genetic instinct, flew due south, missing their target.

Nov

26th 2007

Longest Avian Non-Stop Flight

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E7 is a female bar-tailed godwit who has earned herself the distinction of the longest non-stop flight recorded for a land bird. 

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According to scientists at the USGS who tracked E7 using a satellite transmitted that she was fitted with in New Zealand:

On March 17, E7 departed Miranda on the North Island of New Zealand and flew nonstop to Yalu Jiang, China. She completed the 6,300-mile-long flight in about eight days. There E7 settled in for a 5-week-long layover before departing for breeding grounds to nest.

On the evening of May 1, she headed east out over the Sea of Japan and the North Pacific. Eventually turning east, E7 headed northeast toward Alaska, crossing the end of the Alaska Peninsula. She was on her way to her eventual nesting area on the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta in western Alaska. E7 also completed this flight without stopping, covering some 4,500 miles in five days.

Researchers then tracked E7 to the coast of the Yukon Delta where she joined other godwits preparing for their return flight to New Zealand.

E7, and the location of other Bar-Tailed Godwits currently being tracked, can be viewed from the “Where are the birds now?” map located on the USGS site. 

Source: A Nonstop Journey: Bird Completes Epic Flight From Pacific Alaska to New Zealand (seen via All Points Blog)

Aug

23rd 2007

The Mannahatta Project

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The Wildlife Conservation Project is sponsoring an interesting study to recreate the ecology of Manhattan from 1609 when Henry Hudson first sailed into the area and then compare it to the current ecology.

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The Mannahatta Project will help us to understand, down to the level of one city block, where in Manhattan streams once flowed or where American Chestnuts may have grown, where black bears once marked territories, and where the Lenape fished and hunted. Most history books dispense of the pre-European history of New York in only a few pages. However, with new methods in geographic analysis and the help of a remarkable 18th-century map, we will discover a new aspect of New York culture, the environmental foundation of the city.