For this week’s installment of Birding News, I have something a bit different — a few news stories but for the most part a round-up of articles remembering the Passenger Pigeon and the largest-scale human-caused extinction in history:
Mercury contamination in the environment affects birds‘ songs and feather colour
From now until the end of October, British nature and bird lovers have the chance to vote on a national bird
The state of Mississippi’s Commission on Wildlife, Fisheries & Parks accidentally banned backyard bird feeders last week.
The Madagascan Pochard, already the world’s rarest bird, is in danger of dying out because of human threats to the one wetland the duck calls home.
The University of Kansas Libraries has digitized 6,000 bird illustrations by 19th century ornithologist John Gould, considered by
some as “the greatest figure in bird illustration after Audubon”
A “poor innocent pelican is off the hook” after court officials found that a sports car aficionado who drove a Bugatti into a saltwater marsh and totalled the vehicle was not distracted by the bird but behind an insurance scam.
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Remembering Martha and the legacy of hunting a species into extinction:
“Saving Our Birds” by John W. Fitzpatrick, executive director of The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, an op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times
“A Century of Extinction” by Elizabeth Kolbert, in The New Yorker
“Century After Extinction, Passenger Pigeons Remain Iconic—And Scientists Hope to Bring Them Back” by science writer and blogger Carl Zimmer for National Geographic
“Post-pigeon: 100 years since most common bird’s extinction” by Mark Avery, author of A Message from Martha (Bloomsbury, July 2014), in The Guardian
“How America’s most plentiful bird disappeared”, an interview by Shannon Heffernan for WBEZ with naturalist Joel Greenberg, author of A Feathered River Across The Sky, The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction (Bloomsbury, January 2014)
“One Hundred Years after Martha, the Last Passenger Pigeon” by Jon McCracken, director of national programs for Bird Studies Canada (BSC), in the Summer 2014 issue of BSC’s magazine, BirdWatch Canada
“13 Memories of Martha, the Last Passenger Pigeon” by Chelsea Harvey and Elizabeth Newbern for Audubon Magazine
“100 Years After Her Death, Martha, the Last Passenger Pigeon, Still Resonates: The famed bird now finds itself at the center of a flap over de-extinction” by William Souder for Smithsonian Magazine
“A Centenary for the Last Passenger Pigeon”, an op-ed by Steve Zack, co-ordinator of Bird Conservation for the Wildlife Conservation Society
GrrlScientist’s new books party/”mini” review in The Guardian — as she writes, “A more detailed review of this book is forthcoming, so I won’t tell you any more here, except to say that this book is worth buying and reading” — of Errol Fuller’s The Passenger Pigeon, to be published next week, September 7th, by Princeton University Press
“Ancient DNA Could Return Passenger Pigeons to the Sky” by David Biello for Scientific American
“A silver lining in the passenger pigeon’s demise” by Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife, for The Cleveland Plain-Dealer
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