This week in birds - #630

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

The American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week is the Red-faced Parrot, a bird of the eastern slopes of the Andes and southern Ecuador and northwestern Peru. Its numbers are decreasing as its habitat is threatened by logging and clearing for agriculture, infrastructure development, and mining.

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The new administration in Washington has cut $4 million from climate research funding that had been allocated to Princeton University because it supposedly exposed students to "climate anxiety" and "exaggerated climate threats." It has also ended funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program which was charged with producing quadrennial reports on the impact on this country of rising global temperatures.

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We should not be surprised that this administration also apparently has plans to weaken enforcement of the Endangered Species Act. Its actions have brought out hundreds of thousands of protestors across the country. Let's hope they also show up at the polls for the next election.

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The new Health and Human Services secretary has told the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stop recommending fluoridation of public water systems. Fluoride strengthens teeth and reduces cavities by replacing minerals lost during normal wear and tear.

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Bonobos are our close cousins in the primate family and it seems that they, like us, use vocal sounds to communicate specific meanings.

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A hunting kit estimated at 6,500 years old has been found in a cave in West Texas near the town of Marfa which is about forty miles northwest of the border with Mexico.

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Have dire wolves actually been brought back to existence outside of "Game of Thrones?" They've been gone for about 13,000 years but scientists have now produced something close by using the DNA from their fossils. 

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The plastic waste that turns up in birds' nests can tell a story and not necessarily a happy one.

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The world's largest wildlife crossing is taking shape across Highway 101 in Los Angeles.

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The migration of Sandhill Cranes, like these that I photographed in New Mexico a few years ago, is underway in Nebraska and is a tourist attraction for the area. Some of those tourists are quite famous.

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Also in migration are Painted Lady butterflies. I can confirm that they have made it to Houston; I encountered one in my backyard just this week. Monarch butterflies, too, are moving north and I've been on the lookout for them but haven't seen one in my neighborhood yet.

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In Mongolia's Gobi Desert, paleontologists have unearthed the remains of a previously unknown species of dinosaur that had distinctive two-fingered claws.

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Invasive northern snakehead fish, an animal that looks a bit like a hybrid of a fish and a snake, are spreading through the waters of the United States. If you encounter one, you are being encouraged to just kill it to help control the spread.

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The Denisovans are one of the more enigmatic of human species that lived at least 10,000 years ago. Now an ancient jawbone of the species that was dredged up from the Taiwanese seabed is offering new insights into its appearance and range.

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Many animals are quite territorial and vigorously defend their domains and that even includes tiny caterpillars.

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If the U.S. military gets its way, it will be turning a remote Pacific wildlife refuge into a landing site for SpaceX rockets. 

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Freshwater mussels are dying in large numbers and it is not entirely clear why. 

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Louisiana's coastal wetlands have been destroyed over a period of decades by oil companies drilling and dredging. Now a civil court jury has found that Chevron must pay more than $744 million to a parish government to help restore those wetlands.

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We don't necessarily think of flies as being migratory animals but in fact American hoverflies do migrate.

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The Red-cockaded Woodpecker's status has been upgraded from endangered to threatened but that's not an unalloyed good thing as it decreases the amount of protection it gets. (On a personal note, one of my favorite memories as a birder is actually seeing those woodpeckers in the wild several years ago.)

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At Wrigley Field in Chicago, fans have a new reason to cheer: A Canada Goose has chosen a planter in the center field bleachers as the perfect place to make her nest.  

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The Milnesium tardigradum, or waterbear, a multi-segmented microscopic animal has been chosen as "Invertebrate of the Year." Thousands of readers of The Guardian newspaper from around the world voted in the contest that featured ten candidates.

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Part of the mission of a space probe called Biomass that will be launched soon will be to map the carbon content of the world's remotest tropical forests.

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An Italian village loves its local bears and has organized life in the village to accommodate them.

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Sargassum seaweed can be a problem for seaside communities but scientists in the Caribbean are working on ways to turn that problem into an asset.

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At the Philadelphia Zoo, they are celebrating the hatching of four endangered Western Santa Cruz tortoises. Their parents are both around 100 years old and the mother has lived at the zoo since 1932. She is now a first-time mother.  

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One of the pictures featured in The Guardian's "Week in Wildlife" is of a couple of quite adorable Great Egret chicks from a nest in Delray Beach, Florida.