Displaying items by tag: natural history

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey documented a family of peregrine falcons on the Bayonne Bridge. Port Authority

What city birds around the world have in common

This story was originally published by The Revelator.

Why do some bird species seem to flourish alongside humans, eating our crumbs and nesting in our backyards, while others prefer to live as far as possible from dense human populations?

Monte Neate-Clegg began to ponder the question while attending the American Ornithological Society’s 2019 conference in Anchorage, Alaska. “I was staying at an AirBnB and two of the birds I wanted to see in Anchorage, white-winged crossbills and boreal chickadees, were just in the yard,” said Neate-Clegg, at the time a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah. Although new and beautiful to him, the species are common in Anchorage and so omnipresent they’re typically ignored by residents.

“I started thinking, what is it that makes these ‘trash birds’ here, and not elsewhere?”

Neate-Clegg sounds sheepish about using the pejorative-sounding term “trash bird,” but it’s a phrase commonly used by birdwatchers to refer to species ubiquitous to a given location they cease to become interesting and can become irritating. Classic examples include pigeons in city centers and snack-stealing gulls on beaches.

One man’s trash bird is another’s research query. Neate-Clegg wondered if specific traits make certain species more able to thrive in cities around the world. After joining ornithologist Morgan Tingley at his lab at UCLA as a postdoctoral researcher in 2021, he proposed a lab-wide project in an attempt to answer the question.

The research drew on data providing clues which may eventually reveal a roadmap making our cities more bird friendly. 

Hellbender Press (Est. 1998) is ready to fight

We’ve got our sea legs after a maiden year-long digital voyage. Thanks to those who saw us through and made our latest digital endeavor a success.

Hellbender Press has a long way to go, and we hope y’all help push us along. Expect more news and features and an enhanced website moving forward.

The Environmental Journal of Southern Appalachia plans a main news dump every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but will update the site daily as possible, and when breaking news requires it.

Also stay tuned for regional environmental news on our social media at Facebook and Twitter.

We are working on an RSS/newsletter feature so you can digest the newest news bits at your leisure.

Big plans, but we need your help. Donations and grants to Hellbender Press are tax-deductible via Foundation for Global Sustainability, and we would love to feature your science, environment or natural history journalism, from the Cumberland Plateau to Chilhowee Mountain and Cataloochee. Hit us up via email at Hellbender Press if you want a platform for your work to advance science, truth, social justice and environmental conservation and preservation. Also hit us up with story ideas or news tips.

Please consider riding for the Hellbender brand as best you can.

Meanwhile...

Thanks to all who graciously shared their talents to get us under way, including everybody on the editorial board.

Here are the most-viewed stories since we went live in February 2021. It’s just a raw numbers rundown. It’s not weighted for social media vagaries, and many of the stories likely had more views than recorded.

It’s still a solid approximation of what you liked best. We appreciate you.

Dr. Brian MIller

MTSU researchers document hellbender’s accelerating decline in Middle Tennessee

(Author’s note: I was aware of the hellbender before interviewing Brian Miller, but did not know the giant salamanders were present on the Highland Rim of Tennessee. Subsequent reading and interviews with other researchers, including Dr. Bill Sutton at Tennessee State University, Nashville, confirm Miller’s statements that hellbenders are vanishing from large portions of Tennessee, and Missouri. The healthy populations in portions of the Great Smoky Mountains and Cherokee National Forest may be an exception to a general trend toward extirpation and, ultimately, extinction).

Brian Miller has been researching hellbenders for decades. He serves on the faculty of Middle Tennessee State University where he teaches in the biology department and mentors younger researchers, many of whom publish their research.

He has even developed a digital “Guide to the Reptiles and Amphibians of Middle Tennessee.” The guide began more than 30 years ago as a dichotomous key for students in his vertebrate zoology class and now includes hundreds of photographs and exceeds 400 pages.

Dr. Miller researches the hellbenders of the Highland Rim, the upland that surrounds Nashville and the Great Basin. Populations of hellbenders in streams of this region are perhaps Tennessee’s most endangered.

QUESTION: I noticed that you specialize in herpetofauna. Most of the research listed on your faculty page is focused on amphibians, but with some papers on snakes. Can you comment about your research?

ANSWER: You are correct that amphibians are my primary research interest, particularly salamanders. However, I also have strong interests in reptiles, and my students and I have conducted research on various species of snakes and turtles.

When did you become interested in hellbenders?

Hellbenders have been of interest to me since I first encountered them while enrolled in a course on herpetology at the University of Missouri in 1977. I was fortunate that the professor of that course, Dean Metter, was involved with research on hellbenders and I began to assist with his research in 1978, in collaboration with Robert Wilkinson at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri.

Chris Petersen was working on his master’s degree with Dr. Wilkinson at that time and he matriculated to the University of Missouri a couple of years later to start on his Ph.D, which was also with hellbenders. Chris and I spent time in the field gathering data for his Ph.D. project until I moved to Washington State to work on my Ph.D.

I was hired into the biology department at Middle Tennessee State University in 1989 and began working with hellbenders in this state in 1990. At that time, I was able to locate populations in several rivers in Middle Tennessee, including a large population in the Collins River. I decided to concentrate my efforts on this population and one in the Buffalo River.

Of note, the population I worked with in the Collins River was dominated by large adults, whereas the population in the Buffalo River consisted of many age classes, including young individuals.

The Collins River situation was like what I was familiar with in Missouri and Arkansas populations. Unfortunately, by the early 2000s the population I was working with in the Collins River was gone; however, populations remain in the Buffalo River. My research with hellbenders during the past decade has been concentrated in streams in the Western Highland Rim.

Do you work with both subspecies, the Ozark, and the Eastern hellbender?

I worked with both subspecies while a student at the University of Missouri when assisting with projects in the Metter lab, but since I moved to Tennessee, I have worked only with Tennessee populations.

What do you perceive as the greatest threats to hellbender populations?

I am not certain why most populations of hellbenders are in decline rangewide, but suspect that habitat alteration, including sedimentation, and disease are involved in many if not all areas where declines are occurring. Lack of recruitment of young is a common theme of populations that decline.