This week in birds - #593

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment: 

Typical Barn Cliff Swallow nests under a bridge.

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Most birds seek to avoid hurricanes but one seabird actually flies straight into them.

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Maryland is trying a unique method for getting rid of invasive fish; it is encouraging people to eat them!

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A carcass of the world's rarest whale has washed up on a New Zealand, affording scientists a golden opportunity to dissect and study it.

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A sea-level rise has driven the Key Largo tree cactus to extinction.

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The Xerces blue butterfly went extinct in San Francisco in the 1940s but now scientists are releasing a closely related species in the area in an effort to establish it there.

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Houston is called the Bayou City and when hurricanes pass through it sometimes becomes more bayou than city.

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Climate change affects insects in myriad ways, including their colors and their sex lives. 

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Even Afghanistan's Taliban who reject so much of science have to admit the reality of climate change.

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The Guadalupe Murrelet is the rarest of all the Alcids. It is also the American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week.

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Insects - especially ants - are some of the most amazing creatures on Earth.

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Nevada is the driest state and it is testing a pilot program that will encourage farmers to conserve the precious water resource.

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This is a Sumatran orangutan named Tua and her baby who was born recently at the Philadelphia Zoo. Both mother and baby are doing well according to zoo officials.

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And here is another recent birth, a Siamese crocodile, one of sixty born in the wild last month. This is notable because the Siamese crocodile was listed as virtually extinct in the wild in the 1990s.

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Asian honeybees have some impressive weapons with which to defend their hives from invaders such as ants.

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Paint Rock in Central Texas was an ancient ceremonial site for Native Americans and it contains more than 1,500 individual images that were painted by them over many centuries.

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Mysterious fossils from 310 million years ago may have finally been deciphered by paleontologists.

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Forests that are being restored in Borneo are proving to help not only the creatures of those forests but the people who live there as well. 

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4,000 ancient skeletons unearthed in Berlin are being reinterred with honor, after having been studied by scientists for years.

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Melting ice sheets are making Earth bulkier causing it to rotate more slowly and having the effect of making our days longer.

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China has long been the world's biggest source of greenhouse gases but that era may be coming to an end.

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A new study has postulated that Pompeii was actually hit by a double whammy - not only the well-known volcano but also an earthquake that happened about the same time as the eruption.

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A wildfire destroyed Lahaina in the Hawaiian Islands but it is now being rebuilt as a wetland.

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A new book, Women in the Valley of the Kings, details the history of 19th-century women archaeologists who explored the region. 

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Courtship among frogs can be a deadly enterprise for the males.