Fogbow

The 2023 Audubon Photography Awards: The Top 100
Revel in the staggering beauty and surprising behaviors featured in this gallery of our favorite images. Also check out the story behind each shot.

Earlier this month, photographer Jeff Lewis was in an observation tower scanning the Outer Banks in North Carolina. He had heard rumors that flamingos were discovered in other states, and he wanted to look for himself. After a few hours, he saw a pink blur near the shore.
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When the view came into focus, Lewis saw a group of flamingos flying toward him. The 67-year-old, who had never seen a wild flamingo, almost fell over in shock.

People up and down the East Coast have had similar reactions this month as they’ve spotted wild flamingos. More than 150 flamingos, which typically live south of the United States, have been spotted in unusual states, including Alabama, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia.

Experts said the birds were probably flying between Cuba and Mexico when they were diverted by Hurricane Idalia, which made landfall in Florida on Aug. 30.

Scot Duncan, the executive director of Alabama Audubon — an organization that protects birds and their habitats — said flamingos get blown off-course by storms and fly to the United States every few years. But it’s unusual when more than a handful of flamingos settle down there, he said.

“To my knowledge, which goes back like 50 years, never anything as spectacular as this [has occurred],” Duncan told The Washington Post. “This is jaw-dropping how many flamingos have been seen.”

GIBRALTAR, MICH. -- Visitors to Lake Erie Metropark on Tuesday were treated to the incredible sight of more than 29,000 turkey vultures soaring overhead throughout the day, setting a new one-day record count for the species at that location.

The new high count was reported this week in a social media post by the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, which added that current visitors to the area should look up for the chance to see turkey vultures on their fall migration.

Turkey vultures spend the summer breeding season in the northeastern and western U.S. as well as southern Canada; this time of year they fly in groups called “kettles” either to southern U.S. states or much farther into Central America, according to Cornell University’s All About Birds guide.

The journeying vultures spotted over the metropark this week were counted as part of the annual Detroit River Hawk Watch, a long-running bird monitoring project that takes place annually from September through November.

northland10 wrote: ↑Wed Oct 18, 2023 11:53 am I think this is an immature yellow-rumped warbler, but those who know better please correct me (such as Chilidog though he may not be talking to me since I was a killjoy on another thread). The Merlin sound ID said was one but I don't always trust it, though the photos look like an immature one.

It was a flitty little thing so these were the best shots I could get, especially given the distance.

warbler1.jpg

warbler2.jpg

Okay, this is not really a bird shot but I bet there are many birds in those pretty trees. Up north is lovely in October.
elberta_trees.jpg

Chilidog wrote: ↑Sat Oct 21, 2023 7:31 pm Checked with my expert. -
"Probably."

Chilidog wrote: ↑Sat Oct 21, 2023 10:00 pm My "expert" is working on his thesis... On the white throated Sparrow.

Dozens of birds, including ones named after white supremacists, are being renamed

Dozens of bird species in the United States and Canada will get "imaginative" new names that reflect their traits and habitats rather than the names of people, the American Ornithological Society announced Wednesday.

The society plans to remove all human names from the common names for birds within its jurisdiction, to create a more inclusive environment for people of diverse backgrounds interested in bird-watching and ornithology. The public process, yet to be fully defined, will include 70 to 80 birds in the U.S. and Canada, the society stated.

Although the project was initiated in part "to address past wrongs" over links to historical figures known for their support of slavery or genocide of Indigenous peoples, the Society plans to remove all honorific human names. A committee that considered the recommendations noted the blanket removal would avoid potentially contentious value judgments about the character and morality of individuals from the past.

New bird names will favor more descriptive names like the blue-footed booby or red-headed woodpecker rather than nebulous names like Ross' goose or Bachman's sparrow that give no clues about how to identify the bird.

Several events helped kick off the society’s multiyear deliberations over bird renaming.

In 2018, college student Robert Driver proposed renaming McKown's longspur.
[https://bou.org.uk/blog-driver-english-bird-name/] The small bird that lives on shortgrass prairies in the Central United States was named for John P. McKown, who first collected a specimen of the species in 1851. That was before he fought in the Seminole Indian War in Florida in 1856 and 1857, before he participated in an expedition against Mormons in Utah in 1858 and before he became a general in the Confederate Army in 1861, according to the Central Arkansas Library System. Driver's renaming proposal was rejected, to the dismay of many birders.

In the spring of 2020, major events sparked a national outcry, protests over racism and police brutality, and a renewed focus on racism in the U.S. Two of those occurred on May 25. A white woman in Central Park called the police and falsely accused Black birder Christian Cooper of threatening her after he asked her to put her dog on a leash. Then in Minneapolis, police killed George Floyd.

By August of 2020, the society was looking at things differently. It accepted a rewritten proposal from Driver and a co-author and the longspur was renamed the thick-billed longspur. Other birders and ornithologists also were calling for the removal of names associated with past racism. The society apologized for derogatory remarks by a member about Hawaiian bird names distributed in 2011 documents and began some of the initial steps that led to Wednesday's announcement.

WILDLIFE NEWS : Fujiwara Koichi いきものニュース · 藤原幸一 @Fujiwara_Koichi wrote: StripedCuckoo (Tapera naevia) showing a
curious dance with two hands of 5 fingers each

Distribution: Latin America

Science girl @gunsnrosesgirl3 wrote: A jungle myna that was trained to find money, and bring it back to its owner.