Has Leighton Buzzard run out of birds?

Will Leighton-Linslade Town Council get in a flap if it has run out of bird names for new streets in the town?



The council has been asked for suggestions for the 75 new homes planned for the Pratts Pit development off Billington Road.

Previous new streets in the area included Kestrel Way, Hawfinch Grove, Fieldfare and Kingsfisher Drive.

Central Beds Council has written to the town council looking for four further names. Anne Smith, of CBC, said: “The street names for the last few phases have been based around a bird theme.

“It would appear that I have exhausted the list of names the list of names the town council originally put forward.

“Would the town council like to propose any further bird names or any other suitable proposals?”

The council’s planning and transport committee will be considering ideas.

For bird watchers in Pune

From dawn to dusk, they will have their eyes glued to the sky—looking out for all species of birds and keeping a record of them— engaging themselves in a race to beat other teams who are on a similar pursuit. This is the Pune bird race, which will be held on January 24 in the city, a unique competition wherein people passionate about bird watching, and not just ornithologists, but from different walks of life will come together to beat one another in the count of birds they have collected over the day.


Some of the rare bird species that have been recorded during the Pune Bird Races in the past include Isabelline Wheatear, Northern Goshawk, Sirkeer Malkoha, Mottled Wood owl, Eurasian Wryneck Common Buzzard, Bonelli’s Eagle, Greater Spotted Eagle and Eurasian Thick Knee, among others. “With well over 250 bird species recorded over the years in and around this city, and with a rising band of enthusiastic birdwatchers and photographers, Pune sure is a ‘bird hotspot’,” says Patil.

For the first time ever, Cornell scientists have tracked 118 species of birds migrating throughout the Western Hemisphere. The analyses’ results were published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Birds in Trouble

A visit to the California Academy of Sciences, located in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, speaks volumes about the disaster that has befallen birds with the spread of humanity. A maze of narrow corridors in the scientific collections leads an explorer to the Ornithological Collection. There you will find a cabinet with a sign: “Extinct Birds.”


A well-known scientist, Warwick Kerr, thought that by hybridizing African and Brazilian bees he might be able to create a strain that was both calm and yielded a rich lode of honey. But before Kerr could do the experiment, a Brazilian beekeeper visiting Kerr’s lab deliberately allowed some of the African bees to escape. That beekeeper’s motives are unknown, but besides possibly hastening the exit of Spix’s macaws, he has been responsible for the deaths of numerous human beings.

In a poignant twist, the last known wild male Spix’s macaw was discovered in 1990 paired with a female, but the female was not of his own species. The male Spix was trying to reproduce with was a female blue- winged macaw. The mismatched couple did mate, and she even laid eggs, but, as one might expect, the eggs were infertile.

More than seventy Spix’s macaws now live in captive breeding programs run by conservationists. To counter the risk of losing genetic variability due to inbreeding, individuals have been exchanged between various institutions in an effort to maintain their genetic diversity.

Smart Birds Make the Worst Parents

After patching up the hawk mount I continued my experiment, but I also wanted to know how both parents responded to a predator after having invested even more in their offspring. Since both parents feed their chicks, I conducted similar trials once the chicks had hatched and the parents were feeding them as nestlings. I found that both when parents were incubating, and when they were feeding their nestlings, they were hesitant to enter their nests in the presence of these ‘hawks’. However, the parents responded differently depending on how far up the mountain they lived. If they were from high elevation, the parents were much more likely to be scared away by the ‘hawk’ predator.



To find out whether chickadees that live high up behave differently in response to predators, I carried out an experiment. To do this, I placed a tripod at the entrance to a nestbox and scrambled away to become one with a distant pine tree, while keeping my binoculars trained on the recently departed female and the nest. When the female returned, what did she do? The mother stopped short of the nest area, rather than ‘bird’-lining it straight for the entrance. She was agitatedly hopping from branch to branch scolding the hawk for being near her nest. She flew off, only to return later. Eventually, she entered the box to make her eggs hot.


How might these unexpected results be explained? One possibility comes from a study on a closely-related English bird called the Great Tit (leave it to old English men). Ella Cole and her colleagues found that parents who were better at solving a novel problem were also more likely to abandon their offspring when disturbed. High elevation chickadees, like their problem-solving cousins, have superior cognition compared to their less smart low elevation counterparts. Mountain Chickadees use food-storing as a way to survive winter. Since high elevation chickadees contend with harsher environments, they have superior spatial memory than low elevation chickadees, allowing them to recover enough stores to survive more severe winters. So, could it be that there is some kind of trade-off between being smart and being willing to take a risk? The reason behind these results remains intangible, but maybe smart individuals just make poor parents.

Let's talk about birds

It’s that most wonderful time of year when the word “nutcracker” enters into conversations again, and mostly because of the title character in a fanciful holiday ballet. In the story, the Nutcracker is not a bird, but there are birds that are nutcrackers.



In fact, there are two birds, both members of the crow family, named nutcracker. The Clark’s nutcracker is found throughout the high mountains of western North America; the spotted nutcracker lives in the mountains of Eurasia, including the Himalayas. Both of these birds feed primarily on pine “nuts,” the hard seeds found inside pine cones. Their long, strong bills enable them to extract the seeds from in between the stiff scales of pine cones.

Other avian nutcrackers are the macaws, large members of the parrot family. The birds’ name, macaw, comes from an indigenous South American word for palm nut. Macaws are among the few animals capable of cracking very hard-shelled palm nuts to feed on the high-energy oily nut meats inside. Their formidable nut-cracking ability is thanks to their very tall, stout, hooked beaks and their strong jaw muscles, which enable them to exert a maximum bite force of up to 2,000 pounds per square inch — 10 times that of a human and twice that of a snapping turtle. Only crocodiles can bite as hard as a macaw, but they don’t like nuts.

At this time of year, people often put out bowls of nuts in the shell for holiday gatherings. It is nearly impossible for anybody to crack them with their bare hands or teeth, though, so if we want the nuts to be more than just decoration, we will make sure there is a mechanical nut cracker and nut pick nearby. But, if our guests were large macaws, they could easily help themselves, exerting the bite force needed for cracking even the hardest nutshell, and then using their nimble feet and pointed beak to deftly extract every little bit of nut meat.

From starving chicks come fat birds

Dr Andrews, of the Newcastle University Centre for Behaviour and Evolution said: "Building up body fat reserves as a safeguard against times of potential future famine is an evolved survival mechanism. What we have shown is that birds that had struggled against larger brothers or sisters for food early on were keener on finding food and tended to overeat when they became adults".



To ensure that some birds were disadvantaged by experiencing greater competition, smaller starling chicks were placed in a brood with significantly larger hatchlings. These chicks had to work harder than their siblings to be fed, spending more energy on calling to their parents for food and jostling to the best feeding position.

Dr Andrews explains: "The smallest chicks were bottom of the heap and had a tougher time because they would have had to beg hardest for food."
These disadvantaged chicks were compared with birds that were placed in broods with significantly smaller chicks. After ten days, disadvantaged and advantaged chicks all lived together in relative luxury so that it was only their 'chickhoods' that differed.

Birds that had a tougher start spent more time searching for hidden crumbs despite the ready availability of alternative sources and ate more of the freely available crumb when they accessed it. The birds that had an easier start, having been the largest in the nest, opted instead to take the easy pickings in moderation.
The scientists suspect that the birds with a tougher start, the disadvantaged starlings, were behaving as if they were worried food might run out suggesting that they have a 'memory of hunger' from when they were small which drives them to overeat when presented with freely available food.