Flight Paths
My Summary
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Such a fascinating read about the people behind the science of bird migration. I enjoyed the spin of tech which helped track birds such as radar and gps, and also learning about the innovative techniques used in pursuit of knowledge about our feathered friends.
Highly recommend this to any bird lovers out there.
Highlights
Dubbed the Pfeilstorch (German for “arrow stork”), — location: 64
Banding birds can help scientists figure out how long birds live, how large their populations are, how they behave when defending a territory and raising young, and much more. Banding also has a special role in the management of waterfowl populations, because it helps wildlife authorities set harvesting limits for ducks and geese; there are even special “reward bands” that hunters receive a small cash reward for reporting, to help calculate the chances that someone who shoots a banded bird will report — location: 192
Jack Miner, or “Wild Goose Jack.” After establishing a waterfowl sanctuary on his property in Ontario — location: 317
“phenotypic plasticity,” the flexibility that lets an individual organism adjust its behavior — location: 423
“Radar” stands for radio detection and ranging, — location: 901
But we do know that as many as a billion birds die in building collisions like this one every year in the United States alone. — location: 1031
seven thousand miles, the longest nonstop migratory flight ever recorded. — location: 1513
Bartailed godwit
Birds aren’t just feathery mammals; their physiology is very different from ours. Like us, birds have lungs that exchange carbon dioxide in the blood for oxygen, but the similarities in how we breathe stop there. Bird lungs don’t expand and contract; instead, air is pumped through them in a single direction by a system of air sacs. This is a much more efficient system than ours, and it helps explain how bar-headed geese can manage sustained flight through the thin air at the roof of the world. — location: 1787
Movebank, the free online database where Icarus data is archived, — location: 1855
one thing is clear: in miles traveled per ounce of weight, the blackpoll warbler is one of the world’s greatest travelers. — location: 2029
Lynn led an ethics review to help the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decide whether to cull barred owls to protect endangered spotted owls in the Pacific Northwest. He thinks about this stuff for a living. — location: 2198
“latitudinal gradient.” — location: 2283
Darién Gap — location: 2470
However, in recent years many organizations have been moving away from this term due to the political connotations related to the concept of who is and is not a “citizen” of a particular place. I will be using the modern phrase “community science” throughout this chapter.) — location: 2870
The longest-running community science project in the world, however, is the venerable Christmas Bird Count (or CBC), — location: 2880
Laysan albatross named Wisdom. Originally banded on Midway Atoll in 1956, she has (as far as we know) continued to return to the island to lay an egg each December for at least seventy years, making her the oldest confirmed wild bird in the world. — location: 3025
Created by Niall Bell (niall@niallbell.com)