Fogbow

Jeffrey and Shirley Caldwell have been attracting birds for 25 years with carefully tended backyard feeders. But the lifelong Erie, Pennsylvania, residents have never seen a creature so wondrous as the half-vermillion, half-taupe cardinal—its colors split right down the middle—that first showed up a few weeks ago in the dawn redwood tree 10 yards from their home.

In fact, they weren’t sure they saw it correctly until it came in closer. “Never did we ever think we would see something like this in all the years we've been feeding,” Shirley Caldwell says.

The anomaly is known as a bilateral gynandromorph. In plain language: Half its body is male and the other half is female. “This remarkable bird is a genuine male/female chimera,” says Daniel Hooper, a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, in an email.

Gynandromorphs, known as “half-siders” among ornithologists, are uncommon but not unheard of. They likely occur across all species of birds, Hooper says, but we’re only likely to notice them in species where the adult males and females look distinct from each other, a trait known as sexual dimorphism. “Cardinals are one of the most well-known sexually dimorphic birds in North America—their bright red plumage in males is iconic—so people easily notice when they look different,” Hooper says. (Further reading: This yellow cardinal is one-in-a-million.)

Estiveo wrote: ↑Wed Feb 24, 2021 2:44 pm The Santa Clara/Santa Cruz/San Benito counties area is suffering an avian outbreak of salmonella. It's mostly affecting finches and Pine Siskins are being especially hard hit. The main vector seems to be bird feeders, illustrating the importance of regularly cleaning your feeders.

Tiredretiredlawyer wrote: ↑Mon Mar 08, 2021 3:05 pm Spring has arrived. The downy woodpecker is calling and drilling on our metal chimney looking for his girlfriend. Littles, our granddoggie heard it and came charging in from the deck to hide on the bed with Mimi. He had looked at Hubby when on the deck like, What the F**K is THAT!!!!”

Across the United States, small songbirds have faced a rise in salmonellosis, a deadly infection caused by the salmonella bacteria.

A small finch called the pine siskin has taken the brunt of the disease, Amanda Bartlett reports for SFGate. Pine siskins migrate south from Canada each autumn when they run out of food, and this year, the birds have come to the U.S. in remarkably large numbers. Once a few birds pick up salmonella in the environment, they can easily spread it to others in the places where birds congregate.

To slow the spread of salmonella, local watering holes and eateries—birdbaths and bird feeders—need to close down for a few weeks. That will give the birds a chance to get some distance from one another and find dispersed, wild food sources.

“Once there’s an outbreak, it starts spreading pretty rapidly,” says ThinkWild wildlife hospital’s executive director Sally Compton to Bradley W. Parks at Oregon Public Broadcasting. Cases of salmonellosis began to rise in mid-November, per SFGate, and in early February California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife released a statement raising concerns about the disease outbreak and asking residents to take down their bird feeders.

fierceredpanda wrote: ↑Fri Mar 12, 2021 8:09 am Mrs. FRP and I heard the Song of Destruction this morning, which means that our resident dinosaurs (a/k/a, the group of sandhill cranes that spend the warmer months in the industrial park adjacent to our home) have returned. No pictures yet, but they're making themselves heard. One morning last year, they literally walked out in front of my car as I drove through the park and stared me down while crossing the road.