If you happen to find a nestling or hatchling, you will always need to intervene. These birds are helpless. They have less feathering than a fledgling, usually have very fuzzy heads, and are not able to move around too much. These birds must be placed back into their original nests.
Apps that use artificial intelligence to allow users to ID unknown specimens are making science more accessible to everyone.
A decade ago, Guy McCaskie would stand on the shore of the Salton Sea and marvel at the vast masses of birds that congregated on the water and flew overhead. Nowadays he looks out over the lake and is saddened by how few birds he sees.
Biologists have confirmed what many Bay Area bird-lovers have suspected: This spring has sprung a bumper crop of breeding bald eagles, restoring populations of our powerful national symbol.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/16/bald-eagle-numbers-fully-restored-in-central-california/
In support of the Snapshot Cal Coast initiative, local shutterbugs are invited to join in a grassroots, smartphone-powered bioblitz to catalogue every living species from the sandy beach to the shallows of the Pillar Point tidepools.
The bioblitz is scheduled for various spots around the Coastside beginning Saturday, June 24. For information, visit California Academy of Sciences’ website and search for bioblitz.
https://www.calacademy.org/citizen-science/snapshot-cal-coast
Now, new, lightweight tracking tags are making small animal tracking feasible. During field testing at the NRS’s Hastings Natural History Reservation, it’s given scientists a whole new perspective on the acorn woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus) they’ve watched for decades. The birds turn out to be a lot more sly and strategic than researchers had long believed.
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/solar-tracking-helps-scientists-follow-small-animals
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife estimates as many as 573,000 birds nationwide die every year from wind turbines. One of the deadliest areas for birds is Altamont Pass. More than 60 eagles have been reported killed by turbines since 2004.
http://www.abc10.com/mb/news/investigations/trump-windmills-dead-birds-and-the-solution/451437475
A beautiful bond between animals is the kind of story that reflects nature's enchanting magnificence.
Living tens, hundreds, even thousands of miles offshore, pelagic seabirds are some of the least understood and most threatened avian species in the world.
In the mid-1980s, when the Ventana Wildlife Society began reintroducing bald eagles to the Central Coast, the last known bald eagle nest in the region dated back to 1933, near the top of a redwood tree along Torre Creek on the Big Sur coast.
But since the reintroduction campaign by VWS – a conservation nonprofit – which released 66 bald eagles in Big Sur from 1986 to 1994, the iconic birds have made a spectacular recovery: Scientists believe there are now 30 breeding pairs of bald eagles from Marin to Santa Barbara counties.
