Was ist die Webseite?

BrumSterd, Adendorf (2026)

11/02/2022

The threats behind the plight of the puffin
Puffins are facing a perilous future. Population numbers have fallen sharply, and there are even fears the sea bird could be heading towards extinction within the next 100 years.

A much loved and enigmatic creature, puffins are easily identified by their wonderfully coloured beaks. They waddle around in a characterful fashion and make the strangest of noises. Their endearing features have been used as the symbol of children’s books, and to illustrate many stamps – but they are now also appearing on lists of endangered species.

On Britain’s Farne Islands, numbers have gone down 12% on average over just five years, with one island’s population falling by 42%.

The common puffin, named after its puffed-up swollen appearance (although its scientific name, Fratercula arctica, arises from its resemblance to a friar wearing robes) has an extensive range across the northern hemisphere, with breeding colonies from Norway to Newfoundland.

Around 90% of the global population is found in Europe, with 60% of the population breeding in Iceland (which is also home to a tradition which involves children rescuing young, wayward puffins – “pufflings” – and returning them to the safety of the sea). The UK is home to 10% of the global puffin population, breeding on many islands and mainland coastal areas.

Although there are around 450,000 puffins in the UK, the species is threatened with extinction due to their rapid and ongoing population decline. Recent surveys of the Farne Islands revealed that despite a steady increase over the previous 70 years, numbers have declined by as much as 42% over the past five years.

Unfortunately, we know very little about the ecology of the puffin outside the breeding season. Although the birds amass in large numbers to breed, they spend two-thirds of their life alone, out in the north Atlantic sea. Consequently, they are very difficult to monitor.

What’s causing the decline?
Firstly, although puffins live for a fairly long time (the oldest recorded so far reached the age of 34), their breeding population is limited to a small number of sites. They also have a low reproductive rate, laying just one egg a year, which makes them particularly vulnerable to adverse changes in the environment and means they can take a long while to recover from negative impacts.

They are also hunted – by humans and other animals. Smoked or dried puffin is considered a delicacy (or a flavouring for porridge) in some places, such as Iceland and the Faroe Islands. But although they were once over harvested by people, hunting is now maintained at a sustainable level.

During the breeding season, puffins nest in burrows on clifftops. Although this offers the nest protection from aerial predators, such as gulls, chicks and eggs are not safe from mammals, including weasels and foxes. On Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel, the population of puffins fell to just 10 pairs, but since the eradication of rats there, things are looking up. Nevertheless, the Arctic skua can be a particular problem as it steals food from adult puffins which is intended for their young.

Living on the open ocean makes the puffin highly susceptible to pollution such as oil spills. After the Torrey Canyon oil spill in 1967, the number of puffins breeding in France the following year decreased by a massive 85%.

The puffin feeds almost entirely on small fish, including sandeels, herring and capelin, which make up over 90% of the diet of pufflings.

The birds have a specialised beak with backwards facing spines, which prevents their prey (up to around 60 fish at a time) from falling out of their mouths when foraging. But in years where the main food source is low, many chicks starve to death.

Puffins have also suffered increased mortality from the rising frequency and intensity of extreme weather events associated with climate change. A recent succession of severe storms caused 54,000 seabirds, half of which were puffins, to be washed up along coasts. Starvation was cited as the main cause of death.

On a cliff edge
Sea temperatures have increased over the past 30 years, causing indirect effects on puffin survival. The rise in temperature decreases the abundance of plankton, which in turn leads to a reduction in the growth and survival of young sandeel and herring on which the puffins rely, particularly during the breeding season. Conditions in the North Sea are even causing some puffins to travel into the Atlantic, rather than the North Sea, in search of food – a perilous trek involving greater distances and different habitats.

It seems that a combination of factors are to blame for the decline in puffins, but the reduction in their food supply, particularly as a result of increased sea temperatures, appears to be the main culprit.

We need to continue monitoring puffins worldwide to better understand factors affecting populations. Hopefully, we can put measures in place to minimise pollution, reduce introduced predators and promote sustainable harvesting to try and ensure that the fate of this wonderful bird is not the same as that of the dodo.

11/02/2022

Dunstabzugshauben sind mehr als ein Haushaltsgerät: Sie sind wahre Designobjekte! 🌱 Die Dunstabzugshauben unserer neuen Einbauserie verbinden Hochleistung mit Stil und Design.

10/02/2022

Robin hushed: wind turbines are making songbirds change their tune
Wind turbines are a leading source of green energy which could supply 12% of the world’s energy by 2020. But their use is often criticised for its impact on wildlife, particularly birds. Larger birds can collide with turbines and some have even learned to avoid flying near them.

Impacts on smaller birds are less well documented as they tend to manoeuvre around turbines and can avoid impacting with them much more easily than larger species. My own research showed that birds associated with farmland, including a range of songbirds, were generally unfazed – their winter distribution didn’t change in the presence of turbines.

But there were also some intriguing patterns in the behaviour of skylarks in early spring. We noticed their numbers were generally lower close to turbines. I wondered then whether the noise emitted by the turbines might be responsible.

Rural sites are often chosen for wind turbines, bringing them into the habitat of robins and other songbirds. Maradon 333/Shutterstock
Wind turbines and songbird communication
Much of the evidence for how wind turbines affect birds concerns their distribution patterns around turbines, but we know little about why birds choose to avoid them. The robin, a widespread small bird which lives in rural areas where turbines are common, seemed a perfect candidate to investigate.

Robins are an aggressive but popular species in the UK, having recently been voted the nation’s favourite bird. Males are territorial beyond proportion to their diminutive size. Nevertheless, we subjected territorial male robins to one of three treatments – another robin’s song, a robin’s song with wind turbine noise, and wind turbine noise alone – via a sound recording device inside their territory.

Robins defending their territory typically respond to an intruder by increasing the proportion of low frequency sounds in their songs. We found that the robins subjected to robin song and wind turbine noise simultaneously had significantly fewer low frequency elements in their songs and so their songs sounded higher pitched. We interpreted this as interference from the wind turbine noise which occurs at low frequencies.

It’s suspected that lower frequency noises make the robin singer “sound” bigger and thus reduce the need for more direct physical encounters to defend their territory. But with the low frequency sound emitted by wind turbines drowning them out, there was a suggestion that robins were having to rely more on puffing out their red chest to deter aggressors.

Aggression between territorial male robins is mediated by puffed out red chests when they can’t be heard. Vishnevskiy Vasily/Shutterstock
Reconciling wind energy with wildlife
That may be why breeding songbirds, such as the skylark, avoid turbines. Recent work has found breeding bird populations such as the Dupont’s lark, a near-threatened species of songbird found in North Africa and Spain, declined in areas with wind turbines.

The underlying reason may be, at least partially, that birds avoid noisy habitat that makes communication more difficult. Another study looked at the long-term impact of noise from generators in a forest, and showed how it reduced territory quality for ovenbirds, a common warbler with a complex and beautiful song from the Americas.

Read more: Wind turbines aren't quite 'apex predators', but the truth is far more interesting

The impact of wind turbines on birds goes beyond the risk of direct collision or avoidance. Noise emitted from turbines could disrupt their communication and leave them vulnerable. This is particularly troubling when we consider that wind turbines are often located in remote areas, some with high densities of songbirds, such as meadow pipits and skylarks in upland areas of the UK.

Of course, it is important to remember the bigger picture. While wind turbines may harm birds nearby, renewable energy is a vital solution to climate change – perhaps the most pressing threat to biodiversity globally.

Nevertheless, noise pollution from wind turbines should be measured during environmental impact assessments of wind energy projects, to ensure effects on the surrounding wildlife are minimised. That way, the robin and other songbirds might hope for more peaceful Christmases in future.

10/02/2022

Ihr sucht einen passenden Scooter für den Skatepark? Dann ist dieses coole Modell im Neo Chrome Look genau richtig! 😎🛴

https://bit.ly/DE-StuntScooter
https://bit.ly/AT-StuntScooter
https://bit.ly/CH-StuntScooter

Die Stahlteile sind auf Langlebigkeit ausgelegt, während das Aluminium-Deck die ultimative Kraft-Gewichts-Balance bietet. Perfekt für Tricks, Stunts & eine reibungslose Fahrt. 🖤

09/02/2022

Happy Chocolate day to all.❤🍫

3D Art by. Pratibha Poudel

08/02/2022

Birds: we studied 4,000 ‘alien introductions’ to find out why some were successful
Species introduced by humans to areas where they don’t naturally occur are a worldwide problem. These “alien species” can cost a lot of money to deal with, and they’re the number one driver associated with recent extinctions worldwide. The rate at which new populations of alien species are establishing is increasing rapidly, and ideally we’d like to stop the process in its tracks.

But first we need to answer two key questions: firstly, what features of species make them good at becoming alien? For instance why has the Indian myna bird managed to establish itself across the world while its relative the crested myna has not? And, secondly, what is it that makes some locations more susceptible to aliens establishing there? While we have made progress in answering the first question, we haven’t done nearly so well with the second.

Myna birds are invasive pests in Australia. PapilionemK / shutterstock
The reason for this is that the environment is very complicated and so many elements of it might be important for an arriving alien species. For instance the climate at a new location is likely to matter, not just in absolute terms, but in how well it matches what the alien is used to back home. Climatic extremes may be as or more important than averages in this regard.

Which species are already present at the location is also likely to be important. Too many and the alien may get easily outcompeted or eaten, too few might mean there wasn’t enough food in the area. Again, the identity of the alien matters in these regards. Habitat will matter, as will the extent to which humans have modified it. Finally, all of these features of the location vary over space and time, and which species get introduced as aliens also is not random, all of which introduces a range of complications.

In collaboration with colleagues in Australia and the US, my research group set out to attempt a rigorous global analysis of why some locations are more susceptible to alien establishment. We first assembled a catalogue of more than 4,000 alien bird introductions, featuring everything from Australian magpies in New Zealand to Southeast Asian zebra doves in Hawaii.

We then overlaid it with information on features of the local environment, species traits, and how many individuals got introduced (important because small founding populations can easily fail by accident), and used complex statistical methods to assess the impacts of all these different factors.

Egyptian goose in Regent’s Park, London. First introduced on country estates, the birds have now lived in the UK for centuries. By Martin Pateman-Lewis / shutterstock
Our results are now published in Nature. Overall, we found that environmental features were the most important, particularly human impacts on the environment – how many other alien species groups were already present, for example – and how well the new environment matched what the species was used to from its native range.

The matching effect is not surprising – introduce a tropical parrot to the Arctic and it’s probably not going to do very well – but it is reassuring, as it gives us confidence in our analysis. This makes the anthropogenic effects more worrying though, in particular that alien birds are more likely to establish populations in areas that already have more aliens of other sorts. This is consistent with the “invasional meltdown” hypothesis that previous invasions help facilitate future alien arrivals.

The meltdown result does not simply reflect general environmental disturbance, as we also found that alien birds are more likely to establish themselves in less disturbed habitats – for example, areas where lots of habitat had been converted to cropland in the run up to the introduction.

Another sort of disturbance that matters is bad weather – a big storm in the period immediately following introduction can cause the alien population to disappear. There was already anecdotal evidence for this – for example, the initial extinction of the alien house crow population from Mauritius following a storm – but our analysis shows that this is a general effect.

We did find some evidence that lots of native bird species meant alien birds were less likely to establish themselves, but alien birds do slightly better in areas with at least some similar native species rather than none. This makes sense – for example, an alien bird that eats insects might be expected to do better in areas where native insectivores live, as long as there aren’t too many for the aliens to make a living. Overall, however, the types of native plants and animals had a relatively weak effect on alien bird establishment success.

While the environment explained most variation in alien bird establishment overall, we also found large effects of species traits and number of individuals introduced. Founding population size needs to be large enough (more than about 50 birds) to avoid the alien population failing simply by chance (the same reason we worry about very small populations of threatened native species). Assuming there are enough birds, then it helps if they breed fast but don’t die too young. It also helps if they are not too fussy about what they eat or where they live.

Taken together, our results show how features of the environment, the species, and the founding population size have all influenced the global history of alien bird establishment. They also suggest reasons to worry. The world is showing signs of a global invasion meltdown, while ever more alien species are being introduced to new locations and getting the chance to test their environmental matches. Increasingly, the future is looking alien.

08/02/2022

Why don’t hummingbirds get fat or sick from drinking sugary nectar?
If you have a hummingbird feeder filled with sugar water, you might have the impression that all that hummingbirds need to live a healthy life is to sip sweet drinks all day long.

Believe it or not, these tiny birds need other types of fuel as well. While sugar makes up a large component of their diet, they also need proteins, fats, vitamins and minerals to be healthy. Their largest source of protein is from eating insects. If you watch hummingbirds near your feeders, you might get to see them do some erratic, zigzag flying – this is how they catch small insects flying through the air.

I’ve been studying hummingbirds for 10 years, and as part of my research, I place tiny aluminum bands on thousands of hummingbird legs to help me learn where they migrate and allow me to monitor how healthy their populations are each year.

What else do hummingbirds eat?
Hummingbirds will also pluck insects directly off of flowers, shrubs and trees. Some of their favorite bugs includes small flies and gnats, ants, tiny insect eggs, larva and even small spiders.

Some people report seeing hummingbirds eating dirt, sand and campfire ashes too. Ornithologists suspect this is to gain certain vitamins and minerals. They are also known to eat pollen and even tree sap. So a hummingbird diet is actually quite complex and varied, and they can’t eat sugar alone to survive.

When humans eat too much sugar consistently, their blood sugar levels rise and they are at risk of getting diabetes. Hummingbirds’ anatomy and digestion are very different from humans. While nectar accounts for about 90% of their diet, hummingbirds don’t get diabetes since their bodies are designed specifically for digesting sucrose. With a heartbeat that can reach 1,260 beats per minute, hummingbirds need the sugar rush.

A hummingbird slurping nectar from Salvia officinalis flowers. Kit Leong
How to attract and feed hummingbirds
Diluted white sugar most closely resembles the sucrose nectar of flowers the birds feed on. You can easily fill your feeders with sugar water. Mix four parts water to one part white sugar and then boil, cool and fill the feeder. Remember to clean and refill your feeder every few days, especially in hot weather. A dirty or moldy feeder can make hummingbirds sick.

Don’t ever use brown sugar, honey, or any other type of sweetener, which can harm a hummingbird. For example, brown sugar has too much iron in it. Try not to make it too much sweeter than a 4:1 ratio because it is harder for them to digest. There is such a thing as too sweet, even for a hummingbird.

[You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors. You can get our highlights each weekend.]

Did you know that hummingbirds probably don’t want red dye added to their sugar water? Red dye serves no healthy purpose for their body (or yours). Most red dyes are petroleum-based, and it makes their p**p red, which is unnatural.

The red color on your feeder is enough for a hummingbird to find it. Or consider planting some red or purple flowers in your garden, like Salvias or Monardas – hummingbirds love them and they’re great sources of insects too.

So don’t be shocked if a hummingbird zips past you feeder and ignores a fresh batch of sugar water. It might be focused on getting its protein fix and catching a flying gnat right out of the air.

07/02/2022

We tagged Andean condors to find out how huge birds fly without flapping
Andean condors, at 10kg or more, are among the world’s heaviest flying birds. Once birds get this big, the energetic costs of flapping are so high they instead rely on currents of rising air to travel long distances.

My colleagues and I are experts in bird flight and we asked just how little flapping these condors and other soaring birds can get away with, and if there are particular environments or weather conditions that are more costly to fly in. Very little is known about what actually makes these birds work, and only recently have we been able to use tagging technology to spy on them in the sky.

A talented colleague of mine at the University of Swansea developed high-tech “flight recorders” for our team to attach to condors and record each and every wingbeat as they searched for food. The results of our five-year project in Argentina are now published in the journal PNAS.

How do you catch a condor? It takes time. A lot of time. As a field team we spent days sitting in the Patagonian steppe, drinking maté and waiting for the condors to land at sheep carcasses or bones left over from the slaughterhouse that had been specially placed to try and tempt them down.

This was the easy part. Ugo Mellone, Author provided
It turns out putting the tags on is much easier than getting tags back. Our tags record 320 different data-points per second, so much information that it is not possible to send the data back via the phone or satellite network. Instead, we designed a system so that the tags would fall off the birds when they were roosting on their cliffs at night. Using a GPS location, we found out where they spent the night and used a VHF signal to recover the tag from the bottom of the cliff.

It sounds simple. But there are very few roads in Patagonia, and in order to access the condor roosts the team had to walk tens of kilometres, travel on horseback, use crampons and cross rivers while tied together with ropes. For every tag that we found, we lost at least seven. A key breakthrough came when we started tagging immature birds, as they spend their time at communal roosts, which tend to be more in the gently rolling hills of the steppe, rather than in the high and inaccessible Andes where the adults often nest.

The vast dry steppe of Patagonia with the Andes mountains in the distance. Alexandr Vorobev / shutterstock
Our results showed that on average, condors fly for three hours a day, but they flap for less than two minutes of this – just 1% of their flight time. One bird even flew for more than five hours without a single flap, covering 172km. Surprisingly, the amount they flapped hardly changed whether they were in the Andes or the steppe, or whether it was windy or not.

Moving between weak thermals of air seemed more challenging as birds flapped towards the end of the glides, when they were likely to be close to the ground. This is a critical time as birds need to find rising air to avoid an unplanned landing.

Thermals can behave like lava lamps, with bubbles of air rising intermittently from the ground when the air is warm enough. Birds may therefore arrive in the right place for a thermal, but at the wrong time. And the lengths of time when the bubbles are not rising sufficiently rapidly to be useful to a condor will be longer when thermals are weaker.

Bird researcher Orlando Mastrantuoni recovers a condor tag in the Andes mountains. Orlando Mastrantuoni, Author provided
Nonetheless, even in weak thermal conditions, which may occur in winter, our results suggest condors may flap for only around two seconds per km. This remarkably low investment in flapping flight is on a par with albatrosses. In fact, albatrosses appear to flap more than condors – between (1% and 15% of their flight time outside take-off) –although it is unclear how their overall energy expenditure compares.

What is particularly striking about our findings is that all the birds we studied were immature. There was some suggestion that flight performance improved with age, but the demonstration that all birds flap so rarely shows that it is possible for even young condors to invest little energy in flying.

Condors are big by today’s standards, but 6 million years ago Argentavis magnificens, a bird with twice the condors’ wingspan dominated the Argentinian skies. It has always been assumed that these and other aerial giants used air currents to fly without flapping. The new data from the condors supports this hypothesis and shows just how far terrestrial birds can fly without needing to turn their engines on.

The main cost for large fliers in general seems to be the energy required for take-off. In our study, 75% of the flapping observed in foraging flights was related to take-off. This highlights the importance of decisions about when and where to land. On the wing, condors are confident and often fly low overhead to investigate you. On land they are ungainly, turkey-like birds that are rightly cautious. Their huge size means that take-offs are difficult and costly. But once up – at least in the areas they usually fly – it seems they are free to soar for hours on end.

07/02/2022

Native birds have vanished across the continent since colonisation. Now we know just how much we’ve lost
In the 250 years since Europeans colonised Australia, native birdlife has disappeared across the continent. Our new research has, for the first time, registered just how much Australia has actually lost – and our findings are astonishingly sad.

We focused on 72 species of birds faced with extinction today, including the Kangaroo Island glossy black cockatoo, regent honeyeater, and night parrot. We found 530 million hectares, or 69%, of Australia, has lost at least one bird species. In some parts of the country, we’ve lost up to 17 birds.

Land clearing, along with threats such as cat predation, have driven ten birds to disappear from over 99% of their historical habitat. Indeed, we show the last 250 years has seen more than 100 million hectares of now-threatened bird habitat cleared on mainland Australia – that’s 15% of Australia’s landmass.

For many of the species we examined, their remaining habitats occur in patches surrounded by farmland, towns and cities. To give birds and other animals a chance at survival, we need effective national leadership not only to protect existing habitats, but also to restore lost habitat and manage future habitat under climate change.

Lost, but not forgotten
In the last 250 years, 22 native birds have gone extinct. We found two more currently listed as threatened under Australia’s environmental legislation may also be now extinct.

One is the eastern star finch. This bird was once found from northern New South Wales to Queensland’s Burdekin River. A victim of overgrazing, it has not been seen since 1995. Surprisingly, this bird is only listed as “endangered” rather than “critically endangered” under [Australian law]

The other is the Tiwi Islands hooded robin, which has not been seen for 27 years. Changed fire patterns from European colonisation and invasive species such as cats and weeds have likely driven it to extinction.

Eastern star finch is now thought to be extinct. Stephen Garnett
Other species are on their last legs. The western ground parrot, for example, once swept across large parts of Western Australia, but are now in just two locations: Cape Arid National Park and Nuytsland Nature Reserve.

They’ve become locally extinct across more than 99% of their historical habitat because of habitat destruction, invasive species, and changed fire patterns. They’re at significant risk from isolated catastrophic events such as major bushfires. For example, the 2019-2020 fires alone destroyed 40% of the bird’s last remaining habitat.

Kyloring (the western ground parrot) is one of Australia’s rarest birds. It’s estimated fewer than 150 are left in world. J Riggs/Riggs Australia/Friends of the Western Ground Parrot
The plight of the regent honeyeater is another tragic story of decline. Flocks of thousands once occurred from Adelaide to north of Brisbane, with the naturalist John Gould writing in 1865:

I met with it in great abundance among the brushes of New South Wales […] I have occasionally seen flocks of from fifty to a hundred in numbers, passing from tree to tree as if engaged in a partial migration from one part of the country to another, or in search of a more abundant supply of food.

Today, only 100 breeding pairs are left, and almost all breed in just three sites in NSW. The species has lost more than 86% of its historical habitat, with land clearing the main driver of decline. So few remain that young birds cannot learn to sing properly, so have trouble attracting a mate.

The extinction wave
Our research used a combination of historical field guides, reference books, research papers, government records, spatial data, and expert elicitation to create maps of past habitats, and compared those to current habitats.

We found certain areas across continental mainland Australia to be in worse shape than others.

Number of threatened species that have experienced local extinction per subregion (Ward et al. 2022). Clockwise from top left: golden- shouldered parrot (source: Jan Wegener); red goshawk (source: James Watson), night parrot (source: Bruce Greatwich), and Kangaroo Island glossy black-cockatoo (source: Maureen Goninan).
For example, we revealed extinction hotspots in areas between Swan Hill in Victoria and Marmon Jabuk range in South Australia. In this region, up to 17 birds have gone extinct (red areas in map), such as the black-eared miner.

Likewise, over the last century, almost 10% of all known breeding land-based birds have vanished in SA’s Mount Lofty ranges. This includes the rufous fieldwren, bush stone-curlew, ground parrot, king quail, azure kingfisher, barking owl, regent honeyeater, and swift parrot.

The story of decline is not limited to only threatened species, with more common birds such as willie wagtails, brolgas, boobook owls, and even magpies now disappearing from many places they were once common.

Indeed, the loss of so many species is the canary in the coal mine of total ecosystem collapse. And total ecosystem collapse poses an existential threat to food systems, water quality and climate stability.

If we don’t make fundamental changes in the way we manage and use landscapes, the extinction wave will continue to inundate Australia.

Swift parrot
Swift parrots have vanished from the Mount Lofty ranges. Shutterstock
What can we do about it?
We need federal leadership to curb the extinction crisis, and an important start is to implement promises we’ve already signed up to in, for example, the UN’s Aichi biodiversity targets.

At the ongoing international biodiversity conference – COP15 – a key ask is for countries to halt human-induced species extinctions from now onwards, to bring the overall risk of species extinctions to zero, and to bring population abundance of native species back to 1970s levels by 2050. This is a basic commitment to Australia’s heritage and culture.

Crucially, we need fundamental reform of Australia’s key environment legislation: the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act.

A major, independent review last year revealed that the EPBC Act has failed native wildlife. One of its key recommendations was to implement strong national environmental standards, such as not allowing any degradation of critical habitat.

These standards must be put in place as a matter of urgency. They must be legally enforceable, concise, specific, and focused on the conservation outcomes to properly protect Australian biodiversity and reverse the decline of our iconic places.

BrumSterd

11/02/2022

11/02/2022

10/02/2022

10/02/2022

09/02/2022

08/02/2022

08/02/2022

07/02/2022

07/02/2022

Adresse

Webseite

Benachrichtigungen

Verknüpfungen

Teilen

Kategorie