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Hidden Flyways

@hiddenflyways

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🦅 Migration routes, impossible journeys, vanished species, and the people who still notice.
📖 True stories. Visuals are digital recreations.

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A Great Reed Warbler is the largest warbler in Europe, and it nests in reedbeds near water, which makes a climb into thin air over the Sahara hard to picture.

The detail worth holding onto comes from the 2023 follow-up: the loggers measured temperature on the plumage side of the bird, so the sunlight idea is an inference, not a measurement of the bird's core.

If you have ever asked why do migrating birds fly so high, that gap between a measurement and a mechanism is the place to start.

Bird migration altitude is hard to measure on a bird this small, and it took a logger of about a gram to do it.

Recording: Sonothèque ADVL via Xeno-canto, XC1137579, CC0.

Have you ever watched a songbird climb until it vanished into a bright sky, and where were you standing?

#Birds #BirdMigration #NocturnalMigration #MigrationScience #BirdFacts
AI Disclaimer: Images were generated with AI for creative and artistic purposes.

Sources:
Lund University
BirdGuides
Current Biology
ScienceDaily
Animal Diversity Web
Xeno-canto by @hiddenflyways

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4 hours ago

The American Woodcock keeps a puzzle in its stride: why does the woodcock rock when it walks? Nobody has settled it.

Several explanations are on record, and none has been confirmed by experiment, so a careful look from an ordinary yard still counts.

The bill is worth a look too. It is long and sensitive, and the tip can open while the bill is buried in soil.

In spring, listen at dusk along a field edge for the woodcock peent. In fall, woodcock migration runs at night through October and November.

Recording: Jonathon Jongsma, XC78342, CC BY-SA 3.0. Have you ever caught a woodcock rocking, and was it out in the open or tucked under cover?

#Birds #BirdWatching #BirdFacts #BirdsOfNorthAmerica #NaturalHistory
AI Disclaimer: Images were generated with AI for creative and artistic purposes.

Sources:
Audubon
Pennsylvania Game Commission
The Auk
Northeastern Naturalist
Xeno-canto by @hiddenflyways

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9 hours ago

The Lord Howe Woodhen is a chicken-sized flightless rail found only on Lord Howe Island, off Australia.

So how did the Lord Howe Woodhen come back after the 2019 rat eradication on the island?

The accounts we read report the rise following the project and credit the whole effort. A few details the narration had no room for.

NSW government accounts say pairs mate for life and defend a territory of about three hectares.

Mount Gower, too steep and remote for pigs and cats to reach easily, was the last stronghold, and the 2024 survey skipped it because of Phytophthora risk, so its count was carried forward from 2022.

The survey recorded 1,420 woodhens in the settlement area alone. What is the one local patch of habitat you would most like to see bounce back?

#Birds #WildBirds #BirdConservation #BirdFacts #BirdBiology
AI Disclaimer: Images were generated with AI for creative and artistic purposes.

Sources:
NSW Government
Australian Museum
Lord Howe Island Board
ABC News by @hiddenflyways

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14 hours ago

The Willow Ptarmigan, Alaska's state bird since 1955, sits behind a puzzle on the Taylor Highway: how did Chicken, Alaska get its name?

Chicken Historic District is listed on the National Register, and sources disagree on which year gold turned up along Chicken Creek.

On the bird's side, the male is an unusual father among grouse and may take over every duty if the hen is lost.

Recording: Jimmy Utterström, XC1092073, CC BY-SA 4.0. Which story about your own town's name do you believe, and which one do you suspect was made up?

#Birds #Birding #BirdFacts #NaturalHistory #BirdsOfNorthAmerica
AI Disclaimer: Images were generated with AI for creative and artistic purposes.

Sources:
Audubon
Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Peninsula Clarion
U.S. Geological Survey
Xeno-canto by @hiddenflyways

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a day ago

The Old Abe eagle is the real Bald Eagle behind the 101st Airborne patch, and a few details never fit inside the video.

His regiment, the 8th Wisconsin, came to be called the Eagle Regiment, and Company C the Eagle Company.

In 2016, DNA from four of his surviving feathers pointed to a male.

Old Abe was a Civil War eagle mascot whose service ended in September 1864, when he was presented to the Wisconsin governor and kept at the Capitol as a state war relic.

A replica stands in the Assembly Chamber today, and a framed collection of his feathers survived the 1904 fire.

Search "what does a bald eagle really sound like" and Cornell Lab of Ornithology describes a series of high whistling notes.

Which eagle nest could you watch from a safe distance near where you live?

#Wildlife #BirdsOfNorthAmerica #RaptorWatch #BirdFacts #NaturalWorldHistory
AI Disclaimer: Images were generated with AI for creative and artistic purposes.

Sources:
Wisconsin Historical Society
U.S. Army
Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Maine Public by @hiddenflyways

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a day ago

The elephant bird of Madagascar, Aepyornis, stood about three metres tall at most, and its closest living relative turns out to be the kiwi.

What was the elephant bird's closest relative? The DNA answered that, but the weight is harder to picture than the height.

A 2018 study put the mean Aepyornis maximus at 409.5 kilograms.

On the loss, a 2021 study of Madagascar's vanished big animals found the extinctions track the conversion of forest to grassland about 1,100 to 1,000 years ago.

The cause is still argued. Which animal that is gone would you most want to have watched walking, and why?

#Birds #NaturalHistory #ExtinctBirds #BirdScience #BirdFacts
AI Disclaimer: Images were generated with AI for creative and artistic purposes.

Sources:
Science
National Geographic
Quaternary Science Reviews
Guinness World Records
American Museum of Natural History
Royal Society Open Science by @hiddenflyways

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2 days ago

A Chilean Flamingo dozing on one leg is the sight behind a question people keep asking: why do flamingos stand on one leg?

In the flamingo study on one leg, the live birds were juveniles from the Zoo Atlanta flock, since adults do not handle change well.

The 2010 watchers also found the birds showed no leg preference, splitting their time between both legs.

And if you have ever wondered about the flamingo knee that is really the ankle, the true knee and hip sit up against the body, with the thigh held nearly horizontal and hidden close to the body.

Nobody has settled whether the pose is about heat or effort.

Next time you watch a flamingo or any wader rest on one leg, which leg is it on, and what was the weather doing?

#Birds #BirdWatching #BirdScience #BirdFacts #BirdBiology
AI Disclaimer: Images were generated with AI for creative and artistic purposes.

Sources:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article/13/5/20160948/62549/Mechanical-evidence-that-flamingos-can-support
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5454233
https://news.emory.edu/stories/2017/05/ting_flamingoes/index.html
https://qbios.gatech.edu/tech-study-stands-flamingos-unique-pose
https://www.discovermagazine.com/why-do-flamingos-stand-on-one-leg-137
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/study-explores-how-flamingos-stay-stable-one-leg-180963440/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19637281/
https://www.livescience.com/5732-flamingos-stand-leg.html by @hiddenflyways

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2 days ago

Barn Swallow migration puzzled Gilbert White even as he logged his swallows back at Selborne each spring.

He wavered between migration and hibernation and never settled it.

One Staffordshire swallow, ringed as an adult at its porch nest, gave the first answer eighteen months later.

The ring label carried the scheme's address in High Holborn, London, and the report that came back was a letter from a hotel proprietor in Utrecht.

That is the first ring recovery of a swallow in South Africa, and it shows where swallows go in winter: far to the south, for many British birds.

The autumn journey takes weeks, with the swallows feeding on the wing as they go.

What date do you write down for the first swallow of your year, and where did you see it?

#Birds #BirdMigration #BirdHistory #NaturalHistory #MigratoryBirds
AI Disclaimer: Images were generated with AI for creative and artistic purposes.

Sources:
https://www.bto.org/our-work/news/press/swallows-have-started-spending-winter-britain-instead-migrating-6000-miles
https://www.bto.org/volunteer-surveys/ringing/about/history-ringing
https://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2012/10/30/a-single-swallow/
https://bitesizedbritain.co.uk/however-we-have-not-always-known-where-swallows-go111
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(09)01172-5
https://britishbirds.co.uk/journal/article/recovery-marked-birds-0
https://britishbirds.co.uk/journal/article/notes-234
https://www.bto.org/learn/about-birds/birdfacts/swallow
https://laurencerose.co.uk/2020/04/letters-from-gilbert-3/
https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2017/13-october/features/features/airborne-over-selborne
https://scottishwildlifetrust.org.uk/?p=836159
https://www.discoverwildlife.com/wildlife/birds/facts-about-swallows
Marie-Lan Taÿ Pamart, XC492101. Accessible at www.xeno-canto.org/492101. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. by @hiddenflyways

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2 days ago

American Crow roosts are one of winter's great evening shows, and Danville, Illinois was billed as the world's largest crow roost in the late 1990s.

Why do crows gather in huge winter roosts? Cornell's crow FAQ describes the reasons as still unsettled, but the timing is easy to watch.

Crows come in waves from every direction at dusk, and the first few thousand leave about an hour before sunrise.

The recording under the reel was made by Jonathon Jongsma in Powderhorn Park, who described an urban flock of perhaps twenty thousand in the trees around his house.

To follow a crow roost at dusk, watch the sky an hour before dark and see where the lines of birds come from.

Do the crows near you roost in a park, a parking lot or a stand of old trees?

#Birds #BirdWatching #NaturalHistory #BirdLife #BirdsOfNorthAmerica
AI Disclaimer: Images were generated with AI for creative and artistic purposes.

Sources:
https://www.birds.cornell.edu/crows/crowfaq.htm
https://www.birdnote.org/node/11120
https://sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/auk/v114n04/p0628-p0637.pdf
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1088676
https://www.wbez.org/curious-city/2022/04/29/west-nile-virus-decimated-the-illinois-crow-population
https://corvidresearch.blog/2017/12/08/15000-crows/
https://xeno-canto.org/164831
Jonathon Jongsma, XC164831. Accessible at www.xeno-canto.org/164831. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0. by @hiddenflyways

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3 days ago

A Ruddy Turnstone's migration is hard to follow with a light sensor, because the tag needs a real day and a real night to fix a position.

One detail the narration had no room for: the bird that reappeared in the Aleutian Islands on 26 July stayed until 15 October before flying on.

A turnstone known as bird 9Y later repeated the Pacific circuit two years running, about 27,000 km each time, the first wader tracked with a geolocator across two full migrations.

Wondering how far a Ruddy Turnstone can fly nonstop?

The answer came indirectly, from tags recovered the following season in a shorebird geolocator study at Flinders, Victoria.

Which shorebird on your own coast would you most want to see tracked?

#Birds #ShorebirdMigration #BirdMigration #MigrationScience #BirdScience
AI Disclaimer: Images were generated with AI for creative and artistic purposes.

Sources:
https://www.waderstudygroup.org/article/2140/
https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/502003/
https://vwsg.org.au/waders/geolocator-studies/ruddy-turnstone/
https://nationalzoo.si.edu/node/10352
https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2011/03/migratory-bird-clocks-up-27000-km-journey/ by @hiddenflyways

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3 days ago

The Eastern Screech-Owl in the Baylor study did something that looks backwards: it carried a live Texas blind snake to its nest and left it alive among the owlets.

Why do screech owls bring live snakes to their nests?

The authors called the arrangement a commensalism, a label that was their own proposal, and the snake in their title is Leptotyphlops dulcis, a name since changed to Rena dulcis.

If you want to host an owl, Cornell's NestWatch plan puts a screech-owl nest box on a live tree, or on a pole with a predator guard, with two to three inches of wood shavings on the floor and a site near a woodland edge, a field or wetland.

Which tree in your yard would you pick for a box, and what would you watch for first?

#Birds #BirdScience #OwlSeason #NestingBirds #BirdWatching
AI Disclaimer: Images were generated with AI for creative and artistic purposes.

Sources:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00379297
https://www.marfapublicradio.org/show/nature-notes/2015-09-10/a-curious-commensalism-the-screech-owl-and-the-texas-blindsnake
https://audubon.org/news/what-would-screech-owl-want-blind-snake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rena_dulcis
https://nestwatch.org/learn/all-about-birdhouses/birds/eastern-screech-owl/
https://dnr.maryland.gov/wildlife/Documents/wascreechowlnestbox.pdf by @hiddenflyways

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3 days ago

The Ribbon-tailed Astrapia male measures about 125 centimetres counting the tail, so most of his length is feather.

If you wondered what the Ribbon-tailed Astrapia's long tail is for, it is courtship, and the 1939 description came from forest roughly eighty to a hundred miles west of Mount Hagen.

Males gather at set perches in the high-altitude moss forest and show the tail to females.

Princess Stephanie's Astrapia is named for a Belgian princess, and it often crosses with its ribbon-tailed neighbour, which is how a blended bird once got a species name of its own.

The Barnes's astrapia hybrid is the result. Which bird near you has a feature you only noticed years after you first saw it?

#Birds #BirdWatching #BirdBiology #BirdFacts #NaturalHistory
AI Disclaimer: Images were generated with AI for creative and artistic purposes.

Sources:
https://australian.museum/about/history/exhibitions/birds-of-paradise/ribbon-tailed-astrapia/
https://avibase.bsc-eoc.org/species.jsp?avibaseid=8F49F932
https://datazone.birdlife.org/species/factsheet/ribbon-tailed-astrapia-astrapia-mayeri
https://digitallibrary.amnh.org/items/50387de3-60de-4c0f-b8a1-6bd661d6eadb/full
https://earthlife.net/barnes-astrapias/
https://earthlife.net/ribbon-tailed-astrapias/
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/birds-paradise-beauty-kings/3rd-grade/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes%27s_astrapia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbon-tailed_astrapia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie%27s_astrapia
https://pngbirds.myspecies.info/taxonomy/term/8627/descriptions
https://www.aviansystematics.org/uploads/texteditor/AS_1_1_PDFA.pdf
https://www.birdforum.net/threads/astrarchia-barnesi-iredale-1948.417708/
https://www.oiseaux-birds.com/card-ribbon-tailed-astrapia.html
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1071/MU9930012 by @hiddenflyways

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