and birds, such as the Galapagos rail (Laterallus spilonotus) have returned as well. The project is among the most spectacular of a new wave of very ambitious island eradications.
possibly because large birds that act as seed dispersers have gone extinct in the area. And most of the regrown areas surveyed by her team are within 100 metres to two kilometres of primary forest,
The work in question was done in 1947 by the Dutch researcher Niko Tinbergen on the begging behaviour of herring-gull chicks.
Adult gulls have a red spot on their lower bill. Tinbergen who shared the Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973,
presented wild chicks with model birds bearing spots and measured how much they pecked at the model.
but by the time of his books The Study of Instinct (1951) and The Herring gull's World (1953),
Tinbergen did other experiments with gull chicks showing for example, that they will peck even at a disembodied red spot on a stick
and found that Tinbergen's intuition had been correct after all the birds tended to peck more often at red spots.
who studies bird behaviour at the University of Cambridge in the UK and was involved not in the new study.
whether you're looking at bird behaviour or particle physics, says Harry Collins, a sociologist of science at Cardiff University.
The mountain pine beetle outbreak and the climate signal associated with it is the canary in the coal mine about future disturbances.
along with salt-poor ice grains that are formed like snowflakes from pure water vapour. Salt-rich grains are frozen directly ocean water dragged up by strong vapour flow
Whereas flu surveillance has improved over the past six years in poultry and wild birds, pigs have been below the radar,
The avian H5n1 flu virus leads to serious disease in poultry and causes huge economic losses,
such as the avian H5 subtype, explains Capua. The consensus was that a pandemic could not be caused by H1,
H2 and H3 bird viruses, meaning that they would have no immunity. This shows that the world needs a comprehensive surveillance system of all influenza subtypes
swine and human flu viruses would have swapped genes with avian viruses, ultimately giving rise to the dangerous assortment of genes carried by the 1918 virus. This work suggests that the generation of pandemic strains
not only in humans but in other mammalian and avian hosts, is key to identifying possible pandemic strains and their future evolution.
and their colleagues compiled the available data on known bird, swine and human flu viruses and created family trees based on DNA sequence information.
The results run counter to previous hypotheses that the human 1918 flu strain had evolved directly from a bird flu virus2.
Instead, the new findings suggest that an avian strain entered pig and human populations, and then swapped genes with mammalian flu viruses before becoming a pandemic.
Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak shared the 2009 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine,
Events Pelican recovery The brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis pictured) is being removed from a list of threatened and endangered species under the US Endangered Species Act after the government declared it officially recovered.
Pelican populations were devastated by hunting, habitat destruction and the pesticide DDT, but the US Fish and Wildlife Service says there are now more than 650,000 in the United states, the Caribbean and Latin america.
including the bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) and the Northern Rocky mountain grey wolf (Canis lupus). Research Lunar splashdown: A NASA probe sent crashing into the Cabeus crater near the Moon's north pole on 9 october ploughed up a plume containing water, hydrocarbons and, unexpectedly, mercury,
Andrew Weaver, a climate researcher at the university, claimed that there had been sustained a hacking attempt in recent weeks.
any given food source (such as krill) can support a lot more biomass in a whale than in a small animal such as a penguin.
Nature Newsbon appã tit! A team of European researchers has decoded the genome of the delectable PÃ rigord black truffle.
Nature Newsa study of sexually scrambled chickens suggests that sex in birds is determined in a radically different way from that in mammals.
Researchers were alerted first to the chickens by an employee in the poultry industry who spotted the unusual birds while visiting farms.
The'cockerel'side of these birds has white feathers, large wattles and breast muscles, whereas the smaller'hen'side has characteristic dark colouring.
One gynandromorph was named Sam, for Samantha on the right and Samuel on the left. Like the other gynandromorphs, Sam was infertile and a bit confused.
We assumed that sex determination in birds would follow the mammal pattern, Clinton says. Accordingly, the researchers thought that one side of the gynandromorphs would be a normal female
The hen half was made, for the most part up of normal female cells with female chromosomes, whereas the cockerel side contained mostly normal male cells with male chromosomes.
He suspects that the same rules apply to other species of bird, although gynandromorphs probably go unnoticed much of the time
Combined with work on songbirds, this study strongly suggests that birds follow a different developmental pattern from mammals,
agrees behavioural neuroscientist Juli Wade at Michigan State university in East Lansing who works on sexual differentiation in the songs of zebra finches2.
Birds aren't the only exception to the rule. The mammal model also fails with some marsupials and invertebrates like fruitflies.
The problem is once people develop a hard and fast rule, it becomes the only game in town,
and ravens and the old and helpless were killed and thrown over cliffs, Patterson says. And according to his shells, it was indeed a difficult era,
is harboured in mammals, birds and even insects. It can trigger abortions in goats and sheep and causes flu-like symptoms and sometimes pneumonia in humans.
Mosquito spray affects bird reproduction: Nature Newsa widely used microbicide may not be as environmentally friendly as previously thought.
But a new study has revealed adverse effects on the reproductive success of birds. When ingested by water-inhabiting mosquito larvae,
But work1 by Brigitte Poulin, a bird ecologist at the Tour du Valat research centre in Arles, France,
The team shows that the breeding success of house martins (Delichon urbicum) in Bti-treated areas in a national park in the Camargue, France,
dropped dramatically compared with that of birds living in untreated sites. The fall in reproductive success was due to the loss of mosquitoes the birds'preferred food source.
We demonstrated that Bti clearly has an impact on house martins says Poulin. Before the Bti spraying in 2006, the researchers found no difference in type
and size of prey eaten by the birds in the control sites and the areas
which were to be treated. Over the next three years, the group recorded 9, 051 flights to obtain food
and 14,857 prey items collected by the birds across three control sites and three treated sites.
They found that birds inhabiting the control sites predominately ate mosquitoes and midges. But flying ants accounted for a larger proportion of the birds'diet in the treated areas.
They found that 58%of the differences in food source and 63%of the variation in the size of prey taken by birds in the control
and treatment sites is due to Bti application. In contrast, differences in these factors as a result of naturally occurring seasonal or yearly variations,
%The overall breeding success of birds at sites sprayed with Bti was lower than those at untreated sites.
In contrast, birds at the control sites achieved an average of three fledging chicks. Pounlin says she hopes that the results will stop a proposed expansion of Bti spraying in the Camargue,
Pierre Mineau, a pesticide ecotoxicologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, says that the results could help to explain the drop in numbers of insectivorous birds occurring in North america.
these birds are not doing well but we are at a loss to explain it, he says.
says Scott Weaver, who studies virus-mosquito interactions at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
Lazy crows pitch in when it counts: Nature Newsfreeloading crows start to contribute to group efforts
when hardworking birds become handicapped, a study shows. Carrion crows (Corvus corone) form stable groups that share the responsibilities of breeding
and caring for the young. Dominant breeders rely on helpers to feed chicks, but they also tolerate individuals that don't seem to help at all.
Puzzled about the reasons for this leniency, scientists have suggested that dominants may indirectly benefit from the survival and future reproduction of lazy relatives,
and that larger groups even those filled with dallying birds may have a lower risk of predation
The research team used camouflaged video cameras to collect data on how often 61 wild crows from 17 social groups in northern Spain fed chicks.
then trapped and clipped the wings of one bird from each group and repeated the data collection.
When clipped crows reduced their chick feeding by about 30, %only non-breeders intensified their care-giving efforts.
What's more, the laziest birds increased their helping behaviour the most. Five out of eight crows that had refused previously to visit the nest suddenly began feeding the chicks.
It's really important to investigate individual variability in helping behaviour because it could help us understand the evolution of cooperation,
Loitering crows may help the whole group by ensuring that provisions for offspring remain constant during tough times:
the increased effort of non-breeders compensated fully for the diminished offerings of the disabled crows.
or because dominant birds force them to contribute. Dawdling animals may be more likely to chip in voluntarily
because they may derive indirect gains from the group's overall reproductive success. The factors that influence helping behaviour are difficult to examine using skittish crows in the wild,
so Baglione next plans to use tame birds in aviaries. There's still a lot more to learn about how different individuals adjust their cooperative behaviour depending on the actions of others in the group he says.
Bird blues: As many as 1, 240 bird species are threatened with extinction, amounting to 12%of the 10,027 recognized bird species,
says the latest update of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. The bird count was conducted by Birdlife International, a global partnership of conservation organizations.
The IUCN list also confirmed the extinction of the Alaotra grebe (Tachybaptus rufolavatus), 25 years after the last confirmed sighting.
The waterfowl, found mainly in Lake Alaotra in eastern Madagascar, is thought to have been killed off by poaching and the introduction to its habitat of carnivorous fish.
See go. nature. com/tswuze for more. Business Genzyme fined: On 24 may, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fined Genzyme US$175 million for poor oversight at one of its manufacturing plants.
Efforts by the biotechnology company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to clean the plant will cause shortages of three drugs,
met less resistance when she encouraged village weavers to switch from artificial to natural dyes in the production of their woollen carpets and kilims,
which improved the weavers'business. That was very easy, she says. We showed them they could make more money.
¢go. nature. com/AD8G6E 22 28 august The 28th International Ornithological Congress discusses all things bird-related in Campos do Jord ae'£o, S ae'£o
making plants more threatened than birds, according to the first global analysis of the status of plant biodiversity.
and budget hawks who see the roughly US$6-billion-a-year benefit as wasteful spending on a mature industry.
On 8 december, its reusable'Dragon'capsule was launched on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape canaveral, Florida.
is scheduled to make its first attempt to launch a spacecraft into orbit on its Falcon 9 rocket and return the craft to Earth.
Researchers have begun already sampling birds and will begin to do the same for insects in February.
Nature Newsresearchers have made genetically modified chickens that can't infect other birds with bird flu. The H5n1 strain of influenza which raged through Southeast asia a decade ago
The birds carry a genetic tweak that diverts an enzyme crucial for transmitting the H5n1 strain.
although large-scale distribution of the genetically modified (GM) birds will one day be feasible, their study is meant only to show proof-of-concept of the technique.
few health regulations and long-held cultural practices involving birds. In the developing world, we cannot follow the slaughter strategy used in the developed world,
Instead, developing countries try to control H5n1 by vaccinating birds. This doesn't prevent them from silently acquiring mild forms of the disease and
transmitting it to healthy birds. What's more, flu viruses mutate quickly and are famous for evading vaccines.
the GM birds wouldn't have these issues. They carry a genetic'cassette'dubbed a short-hairpin RNA,
The researchers infected decoy-carrying birds with H5n1 and housed them with uninfected birds, some with the transgene and some without.
Most of the birds that received the primary infection died, but didn't pass on the flu to any of their uninfected cagemates.
The researchers found that the amount of virus present in the infected GM birds was not significantly different from that in non-transgenic controls.
It must be something above and beyond the effect on replication that's having this effect,
it costs approximately £50, 000 (US$79, 000) to produce a small number of stable transgenic birds you can characterize
She and Tiley argue that getting similar transgenic birds into global production would be possible
and put the fish on a par with other long-distance seed movers of the animal world African hornbills and Asian elephants.
in part because it is much easier to study seed distribution by birds and terrestrial mammals.
Almost two-thirds of species, including many birds, frogs, butterflies, trees and grassland flowers, breed or bloom earlier.
Koh and his colleagues found that the conversion to oil-palm plantations had put four species of bird at risk of extinction in Borneo,
birds and forest-dwelling mammals were exposed to daily doses up to 100 times greater -and fish and marine algae to doses several thousand times greater-than are considered generally safe.
However, the dose rates were still high enough to reduce the reproductive success of birds rodents and trees-in particular pine and spruce.
over how radiation affects the fitness of birds and invertebrates. A recent study2 that reports reduced survival in barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, where dose rates are now barely above natural values,
has met with sharp criticism3. Some researchers are reporting-possibly biased results downright contrary to established paradigms of radioecology, says Hinton.
finds that bird species with orange feathers living in the fallout zone seem to be more susceptible to radiation than their drabber gray and black fellows1.
and that this molecular trade-off is shaping bird populations around the former nuclear power plant.
One of the team, Anders M ¸ller from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, donned a radiation-protection suit to make four bird-watching trips between 2006 and 2009 to the Red
In a 2007 analysis of the data from the first bird counts made in spring 2006,
Mousseau and M ¸ller found that birds whose feathers were coloured with bright yellow and red carotenoid-based pigments showed a decline in abundance as radiation levels increased,
though there was no comparable correlation for bird species with melanin-based colouring, such as brown, black and reddish-brown2.
what gives redheads their hair colour and Red Forest birds such as the hoopoe (Upupa epops) their distinctive palette of light browns and their orange crown feathers.
or help the birds blend in to their environment, but they have a chemical cost. Making phaeomelanin consumes large amounts of a tripeptide called glutathione (GSH) which is an antioxidant molecule that can also protect tissues from radiation damage by mopping up free radicals.
or phaeomelanin pigments on the distribution and abundance of bird species in the Red Forest.
would use up a bird's stocks of GSH, making it more susceptible to radiation. The researchers reanalysed the survey data on 97 bird species in search of differences between orange-brown birds, assigned a phaeomelanin score from 0 to 5 depending on the intensity and extent of the colours,
and grey or black birds, to which they assigned a eumelanin score. Eumelanin levels, it turned out, had no correlation with bird abundance in relation to background radiation,
but birds with relatively high levels of phaeomelanin became rarer as radiation levels increased. Biologist Kevin Mcgraw of Arizona State university in Tempe says that pigments are good ecological tools:
these colours are real-life indicators of population viability and individual health. If we can amass long-term data sets before these disasters we can get a sense of the changes that occur due to humans.
Nevertheless, he and other biologists have argued for years that scoring bird pigments by eye is not as persuasive as a chemical analysis,
but that the size of the study makes that difficult: It'd be real tough to ask them to do intense pigment sampling for 97 species. But Galv ¡
Janet Woodcock, the FDA's top drug-approval official, says that the difference extends to all categories of drug.
But the biodiversity of farmland birds declined by 43%between 1970 and 1998. Continued population growth and climate change in the country will probably put more pressure on ecosystems in the future, further reducing benefits and services.
One author of the report, Tekalign Mamo, Ethiopia's minister of state for agriculture and rural development, told Nature that policy-makers at Durban should take examples of good agricultural practice
As well as Beddington and Mamo, they include Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research in S £o Paulo,
allow health organizations to monitor birds and other animals for the mutations that would provide an early warning of a pandemic
found that just five mutations allowed avian H5n1 to spread easily among ferrets, which are a good proxy for how flu behaves in other mammals,
and avian viruses, creating opportunities for genetic reassortment in co-infected animals. Fouchier argues that many countries collect more and more-timely,
In animals not listed in the FDA order, such as ducks or rabbits, vets will have more discretion to use the drugs.
Andrew Weaver and Neil Swart, both climate scientists at the University of Victoria in British columbia, listened to the rhetoric and decided to run some calculations.
Weaver says.""And frankly, these numbers aren t as big as I thought they would be.
Weaver and Swart tried to answer this question in a recent commentary in Nature Climate Change1.
However, such a life-cycle comparison is included not in Weaver and Swart s analysis, owing to the complexity of assessing future technological changes for this and other fuels.
lack of data, says Ian Brown, head of avian virology and mammalian influenza at the Animal health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency lab in Weybridge, UK.
Nature analysed the records of nonidentical sequences from all subtypes of avian and pig flu deposited in the US National Center for Biotechnology Information s Influenza Virus Sequence Database between 2003 and 2011.
The 2007 peak in avian viral sampling was largely the result of surveys of more than 100,000 wild birds to monitor for the arrival of H5n1 in the Americas1,
The Influenza Genome Sequencing Project is also helping by generating vast quantities of sequences it now accounts for half of all avian
The size of a country s poultry population is no predictor of how many samples that country will generate (see Many birds, few samples.
which are often close to wild ducks and other flu reservoirs.""Proper geographic representation is lacking, says van der Werf,
The 19 Â June report, chaired by sociologist Janet Finch at the University of Manchester,
Like that responsible for the 2009 pandemic, the new strain, known as Sw/1204, is a'triple-reassortant'virus that is, one with genes from avian, swine and human flu.
wild birds and other species are also important targets for surveillance, and endemic countries have limited resources."
'Tree of life'constructed for all living bird speciesscientists have mapped the evolutionary relationships among all 9,
993 of the world's known living bird species. The study, published today in Nature1,
is an ambitious project that uses DNA-sequence data to create a phylogenetic tree a branching map of evolutionary relationships among species that also links global bird speciation rates across space and time."
to divide bird species into 158 clades, well-established groups believed to have evolved from a common ancestor2.
Erica Olsen/FLPATHERE are known nearly 10,000 species of birds. Species diversify over time, but it's difficult to account for a species past movements without complete fossil evidence.
"This is certainly not the last word on phylogeny of birds. We hope it will trigger additional efforts to continue improving our understanding of the avian tree of life
Bid to curb fried-food chemical goes coldthe rich, roasted aroma of coffee or the golden-brown colour of crispy French fries are enough to set most mouths watering.
Waldrappteamiconic ibis shot A bird that had been reared hand by researchers as part of a project to save a rare species of ibis was killed by poachers in Italy on 13 october.
Goja (pictured), a northern bald ibis (Geronticus eremita), had been trained to migrate from a breeding area in Germany to wintering grounds in Italy
and was the first bird in the project to fly back unaided to Germany in summer 2011.
The bird has been extinct in the wild in Europe for nearly 400 years. See go. nature. com/4buekb for more.
its Falcon 9 rocket was designed to handle such a problem. see go. nature. com/rvdn4f for more.
Face-to-face with the earliest ancestor of all placental mammalsafter an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs save for those that evolved into today's birds a small,
confirms that the placentals diversified a few hundred thousand years after the (non-avian) dinosaurs went extinct,
and killed nearly every single Stephens Island wren just as they were discovered by science in 1900.
Their first target is the passenger pigeon, which once was so abundant it darkened the skies of eastern North america.
This ark maintained at a steady-197 degrees Celsius, holds the cells of 503 mammals, 170 birds, 70 reptiles and 12 amphibians and fish out of an estimated 10 million animal
Birds at live markets have been suspected as one source, but tens of thousands of tests in poultry and other animals elsewhere have failed so far to turn up significant levels of the virus. It is far from easy to devise effective ways to sample birds and animals for testing in a country with some 6 billion domestic birds
and 0. 5 billion pigs not to mention a vast population of wild birds, including many migratory species
. Although the risk factors for the spread of H7n9 are known not, voluminous research on its cousin,
the numbers of birds being transported, the distribution of live-bird markets and their supply routes, waterfowl numbers, land use and human population densities.
density in 2010), pigs (B), chickens (C) and ducks (D) in China and Asia in general.
T. P. V. B. and M. G.,Universitã Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels.)The H7n9 virus has mutations that mean that it spreads from birds to humans more easily than does H5n1.
Proximity between bird and mammal populations could also give the virus opportunities for further adaptation to mammals,
An international team of researchers compiled maps for Nature showing the population densities of chickens, pigs, ducks and humans in many parts of China and throughout Asia.
47 million domestic ducks and 22 million pigs live within a 50-kilometre radius of each of the 60 H7n9 human cases that had occurred up to 16 april.
We never saw this number of presumed avian/animal to human transmissions in such a short space of time.
and other birds has been reinforced by the new cases in Beijing and Henan province. These appeared out of the blue.
But with H7n9, it is only the appearance of new human cases that shows where the silent spread in birds
Chinese authorities have identified already H7n9 in birds in live bird markets in Shanghai and other cities.
But despite intensive surveillance of poultry, wild birds, pigs and other animals, the animal reservoirs remain largely unknown.
and home to some 6 billion poultry as well as many migratory and other wild birds that may have a role in spreading the virus. On Wednesday,
Despite the difficulties of detecting H7n9 in poultry and birds, Martin remains optimistic that so long as the virus does not start to spread among humans the potential number of human cases can be curtailed by taking urgent tough measures such as keeping poultry flocks away from wild birds
and people and restructuring its live bird markets. Â It's too soon to say how big a threat H7n9 poses
because we don't know how many animals of which species have it, how genetically diverse it is,
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