It’s possible animals — pets and wildlife alike — will behave unusually during Quebec’s total solar eclipse on April 8 , according to experts on their behaviour.
David Bird, emeritus professor of wildlife biology at McGill University, told the Montreal Gazette that birds, insects and bats are the main groups expected to be affected, or “the main ones that everybody’s sort of keeping an eye on.”
As climate change intensifies extreme heat, farms are becoming less hospitable to nesting birds, a new study found. That could be another barrier to maintaining rapidly eroding biodiversity that also provides benefits to humans, including farmers who get free pest control when birds eat agricultural pests.
The number of American kestrels has dropped sharply. That goes against the trend for birds of prey, broadly seen as a conservation bright spot.
Hypotheses about the decline abound. In a newly published special issue on kestrels in The Journal of Raptor Research, Dr. Smallwood and David Bird, an emeritus professor of wildlife biology at McGill University in Montreal, list seven possible factors for kestrel declines that they argue merit more research, in no particular order.
Many Canadians are familiar with the honking and hissing that marks the beginning of the spring season, some might be more intimately familiar with the feeling of large wings batting about the sides of their head, but one thing is for certain: most Canadians have a Canada goose story.
Canada geese flying in their V formation are usually one of the first signs of the return of warm weather, but it also marks the return of the pesky waterfowl taking over our waterfronts, golf courses and parks. Here’s what you should know about the birds that have become a national symbol.
Once prevalent in Montreal, the littlest falcon's downfall is a bellwether for hard times. “The story of the kestrel is happening to other bird species.”
Throughout the 1900s, North America’s littlest falcon was also described as the continent’s most common and widespread. Small but fierce and marked with bright plumage rare in the raptor world, the American kestrel could be seen throughout the continent, diving and swooping in fallow fields or under the stadium lights at baseball games, hunting for plump moths or small mice.
“It’s like a big black hole — we have no idea why they’re declining,” said David Bird, professor emeritus of wildlife biology at McGill and a former bird columnist for the Montreal Gazette, who created and ran the university’s prolific breeding colony. “We saw after a while that they were breeding well, but the youngsters weren’t coming back. They weren’t surviving. What’s particularly interesting is that the story of the kestrel is happening to other bird species.”
Conducting a bird census by foot can also be disruptive, David Bird, an emeritus professor of wildlife biology at McGill University, told Popular Science. “While you’re doing that, you’re disturbing the hell out of the birds,” Bird said.
Atlas Obscura
Drone technology has been applied in support of bird science for more than a decade now. With the cost of this technology continuing to drop, the use of it is broadening across North America.
In the same way that retail, military, and hobby sectors have embraced drones, bird scientists have realized drones can be deployed to do some bird census work and gather data in remote or otherwise inaccessible locations.
