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Birds: Miscellaneous Notes, Observations, Etc.

700 pounds of acorns found stuffed by woodpeckers inside walls of California home​

The Sonoma County homeowners called on Nick Castro, owner of Nick’s Extreme Pest Control, when they spotted worms coming from a bedroom wall. They turned out to be mealworms, feasting on an incredible hoard of acorns, believed to be amassed by a pair of aptly named acorn woodpeckers.

“It was really strange. I had never really seen worms with acorns before,” Castro told CNN. But the weirdness was just beginning.

After making a small 4-inch-square hole in the wall, Castro said the acorns began spilling out. That alone wouldn’t be terribly unusual, but they “just kept coming,” he said.
“It was pretty incredible to see the amount,” said Castro. He estimates there were at least 700 pounds of acorns, likely collected over the past two to five years.

Often woodpeckers store acorns on the outside of homes, sometimes in rain gutters, but rarely do they get them inside. In this case,

Castro discovered the birds dropped their treasures through a hole in the chimney and entered the attic through a separate hole to feast on their stash.

“On a scale from 1 to 10, this is a 10. It’s a one in a million chance to find something this significant,” said Castro. “I expected to find a few handfuls, nothing like this.”

It took creating another three holes in the home’s walls to remove all the acorns

Castro and his crew of three spent a full day extracting the nuts.

“We filled eight big black garbage bags. They were so heavy we could barely pick them up,” said Castro. “They had to have weighed at least a hundred pounds each.”
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Did this old bird still have any red in it's [lumage?

A red kite has been identified as the oldest to survive in the wild in Britain and Ireland.

It was spotted in Llanybydder, Carmarthenshire, in July and found to be 9,518 days - or 26 years - old.It had collapsed and was unable to fly, so the RSPCA was called.

While the bird had to be put down, the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) recently confirmed it was ringed on 20 June 1997 and was the oldest it had ever seen.

BTO officials were shocked to find this was the first and only report of it in all the time it had been in the wild.

According to the RSPCA, red kites are expected to live for 10 years in the wild.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-67063678
 
Some good news about seabirds for a change. This is from the guardian yesterday - can’t find the link now.

Number of nesting seabirds on Lundy island at nine-decade high​

A scheme to eradicate rats seems to be a major factor

The tiny island in the Bristol Channel, a globally famed location for Britain’s seabirds, is now home to 25,000 Manx shearwaters – 95% of England’s breeding population – as well as 1,335 puffins and more than 150 pairs of storm petrels, a species that only arrived on the island in 2014.

Despite the recent threat of avian flu, which has decimated wild bird populations in some of the world’s most sensitive locations, and the problematic decline in wild sources of food such as sand eels, the total number of seabirds on Lundy stood at 40,000 this summer.

This is a massive turnaround after just 7,351 remained in 2000. Puffins were close to extinction, with just 13 counted on the windswept 450-hectare island in 2001.

Since the island was declared rat-free in 2006, its seabird populations have bounced back, as they have on other small islands when invasive predators let loose by humans have been removed.

Paul St Pierre, a conservation officer for the RSPB, said: “Partnership projects like this show just how much potential there is to restore species and landscapes on an incredible scale.

“If we can restore over 30,000 birds to one small island in the Bristol Channel, just imagine how much could be achieved if everyone came together to restore nature right across the UK.”
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Almost a symbiosis.

Roughly 14,500 to 10,500 years ago, in the transition from the last glacial period, Epipaleolithic and Neolithic peoples harvesting vegetation from the wetlands of eastern Jordan created a habitat for birds that would otherwise have migrated, a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory reveals.

It shows that human activity is not necessarily detrimental to biodiversity but may allow for species to co-inhabit specific environments, the researchers suggest.

The presence of humans is usually associated with negative effects on flora and fauna, and our species has demonstrably influenced biodiversity negatively in the course of history.

But in the study, titled "Waterfowl Eggshell Refines Palaeoenvironmental Reconstruction and Supports Multi-species Niche Construction at the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in the Levant," a team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen and the University of Turin has discovered that some human activities may have had an encouraging effect on biodiversity through modification of specific ecosystems.

"The ecosystem in question is the Shubayqa wetlands of eastern Jordan that is now only seasonally flooded. But recent evidence has shown that water was likely available through much of the year, and therefore it was also possible for waterfowl and other species to exist there all year round if they had a suitable habitat," said zooarchaeologist Lisa Yeomans from the University of Copenhagen.

The team's excavations at the sites of Shubayqa have produced evidence that the Neolithic peoples who occupied these sites for longer or shorter periods of time not only harvested emergent vegetation from the wetlands, but also hunted waterfowl and collected their eggs and feathers. ...

https://phys.org/news/2024-02-birds-human-millennia.html
 
Vid at link.

Bird mimicking police siren at Bicester station confuses officers​

A bird's impression of a police siren was "so accurate" it left officers believing their cars were faulty.

Thames Valley Police's roads policing team, based at Bicester police station, were left "a little bit confused" by the two-tone impression. Posting on social media, a team spokesperson promised it was "100% real and NOT a late April Fools joke".

Followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, replied asking if the bird was part of "special branch" or the "flying squad".

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-68785461
 
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