Breeding birds

Changes in the status and distribution of Wisconsin's double-crested cormorant (DCCO) breeding population during the 20th century closely approximate a similar pattern throughout the Great Lakes and generally along the Atlantic coast: a gradual increase in popula- tion size from about 1921 until about 1950, followed by a population crash, and then a remarkable population resurgence beginning in the early

Animal welfare and conservation breeding have overlapping and compatible goals that are occasionally divergent. Efforts to improve enclosures, provide enriching experiences, and address behavioral and physical needs further the causes of animal welfare in all zoo settings. However, by mitigating stress, increasing behavioral competence, and enhancing reproduction, health, and survival, conservation breeding programs must also focus on preparing animals for release into the wild. Therefore, conservation breeding facilities must strike a balance of promoting high welfare, while minimizing the effects of captivity to increase population sustainability. As part of the Hawaii Endangered Bird Conservation Program, San Diego Zoo Global operates two captive breeding facilities that house a number of endangered Hawaiian bird species. At our facilities we aim to increase captive animal welfare through husbandry, nutrition, behavior-based enrichment, and integrated veterinary practices. These efforts help foster a captive environment that promotes the development of species-typical behaviors. By using the "Opportunities to Thrive" guiding principles, we outline an outcome-based welfare strategy, and detail some of the related management inputs, such as transitioning to parental rearing, and conducting veterinary exams remotely. Throughout we highlight our evidence-based approach for evaluating our practices, by monitoring welfare and the effectiveness of our inputs. Additionally we focus on some of the unique challenges associated with improving welfare in conservation breeding facilitates and outline concrete future steps for improving and evaluating welfare outcomes that also meet conservation goals.

On 25 April 2021, the author documented two Hooded Merganser ducklings (Lophodytes cucullatus) at Lenn Park associating with a family of Wood Ducks (Aix sponsa). No adult Hooded Mergansers were observed. The author monitored the pond through May. The two Hooded Merganser young were with the Wood Ducks from April 25 into early May. The last observation was of only one Hooded Merganser with the Wood Ducks on 10 May 2021. To the author's knowledge, this is the first breeding record for Hooded Mergansers in Culpeper County and a probable case of brood parasitism.

Church Administration and Responsibilities: A church administrator is responsible for the business aspects of running the church, including human resources, budget and financial administration, ensuring compliance with local regulations and laws, public liaison, and risk management. Ideally, the church administrator should not also serve as pastor.Someone has to be a steward of the interest of the church and its leadership. In growing churches, it often becomes important that someone other than the pastor be able to respond to the many issues that occur on a daily basis. This person ensures that the direction set by the pastor is implemented, and that there is accountability. The pastor certainly cannot do it all. This is where the role of church administrator becomes so important. He or she is the valuable liaison between the pastor, the staff and the membership. Administering Church Property Purchases Buying property for church expansion may not be in the immediate plans of your church. But if and when the opportunity comes, will you know what to do? This article addresses, from a church administrator's viewpoint, how to go about the process—from investigating property through closing. Committee Church committees make their participation effective and efficient. It do not govern by autocratic dictate, but it govern on the basis of broad-based participation and representation. it depend on groups of people who take part in the decision-making process. These groups of people that have been empowered by the church body to make appropriate decisions, we call committees.Church committe: Committees and Board of Church A number of points need to be made with reference to the role and responsibilities of those who serve on the various committees and boards of our church. The privilege of serving as a member of a group of people called to transact the business of the Lord.Committee members conducting the Lord's business should conduct themselves with appropriate Christian decorum, not making frivolous, irrelevant, unnecessary, time-consuming, or obstructionist speeches or motions. Generally, a person should speak to a particular issue only once in order to give adequate opportunity for as many as possible to speak to an issue or motion. However, the chairperson may give a person who has already spoken the opportunity to clarify previous remarks or answer a question.At the discretion of the chairperson, persons who do not normally have the right of attendance may attend and address the committee as invitees. However, these persons do not have the right of making or seconding motions, nor do they have the right to vote. The chair has the right to ask attendees who are not committee members to leave the committee after the item under discussion has been finalized.All remarks and discussion should be directed to or through the chairperson. This may appear somewhat ponderous at times. However, experience has shown that this wise practice helps defuse potentially difficult situations when people who are highly committed to differing positions begin to address their remarks to each other. Types and functions of committees:-The executive committees of the church at large are, of necessity, larger committees generally conducted in a more formal manner, following well-prescribed rules of order. The committees of the local church tend to be smaller and generally conducted with less formality. Nevertheless, if the principles that are discussed here are applied and used, especially in the local church, local church committees will work much better. A committee may be set up to study or investigate a matter. In this case the work of the committee includes bringing back to the body that established it a report of its findings and can be considered complete when it has fulfilled a specific assignment. A committee may be asked to investigate and make a recommendation with respect to an issue. This will be particularly so when more than one viable alternative exists. A nominating committee established to nominate or recommend persons for office in the local church represents this type of committee. No committee has the right to extend its functions beyond those that were determined when established. The body that establishes a committee should agree on terms of reference that describe in simple point form the aims, objectives, and functions of a committee General Body

This is an update to the "Status, distribution and population of breeding birds in Sardinia (Italy) to 1995" published at the end of the last century by the same author. This work examines the species that have been breeding in Sardinia since the nineteenth century (or just before) up to 2016. For each species it highlights status, size of population and map of distribution in the most recent period (about the last 5-10 years). It also analyzes:
a) the possible breeding species;
b) the supposedly extinct species;
c) the species considered for a long time as more or less regular breeding in the island, but which lack recent evidence and therefore can be regarded as "likely extinct";
d) the dynamics of the population and the variation of the distribution of each species in the most recent period (trend).
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On the Italian island of Sardinia at the beginning of the 20th century there was still an established population of the Bearded Vulture (about 35 pairs), Black Vulture (about 150 pairs) and the Griffon Vulture was “very common”. However, in the early decades of the 20th century there was a rapid and catastrophic reduction of the vulture populations on Sardinia, with the extinction of Bearded Vulture (1968-69) and the Black Vulture (1961), and the contraction of the population of Griffon Vulture (1000-1400 birds in 1945 to 100-140 birds in 1975 and 12 breeding pairs in 2007). The collection of skins and eggs, followed by hunting, poaching, killing and the use of poisoned baits for pest control were the main causes of the decline of the vultures on Sardinia. These causes were accompanied by an increase of disturbance at the breeding sites, and by a gradual decrease of pastoralism, which has led to a reduction in food availability. More recently, there have been unsuccessful attempts to reintroduce Bearded Vultures and Black Vultures, whereas after various restocking and greater protection projects, the Griffon Vulture population has increased (to 57 pairs and 230-250 birds in 2019). The Egyptian Vulture bred in Sardinia for the first time in 2019. Currently, collection and killing of vultures, and the legal use of poisoned baits have all been removed in Sardinia and the environmental situation now seems appropriate for new attempts to reintroduce the two extinct species.

Hemeroby is an indicator widely used in plant ecology that indicates the level of disturbance of the optimal habitat for a species. Hemeroby is scaled on a range of ten or five point scores, higher scores of hemeroby meaning higher level of disturbance. In this paper, we introduced two metrics of hemeroby: the species hemeroby score (HS), as a proxy for the suitability to specific disturbed habitats, and hemerobiotic diversity (H’H), as a proxy for species generalism, this last synthesizing the numbers and frequency of habitats of different hemeroby where a species occurs. We related HS and H’H of 75 common breeding bird species to their regional range of occupancy in Latium (central Italy). H’H is positively correlated with regional range of occupancy. Grouping data in categories, we observed a significant trend in regional range of occupancy, increasing from species with low H’H (i.e. specialized) to species with progressively higher H’H (i.e. generalists). nevertheless, only the ...

Establishing grasslands has important implications for wildlife, especially in areas his- torically rich in grasslands that have since been converted to row crop agriculture. Most grasslands established under farm conservation programs have replaced annual crops with perennial cover that provides year-round resources for wildlife. This change in land use has had a huge influence on grassland bird populations; little is

We used an ordination approach to identify factors important to the organization of breeding bird communities in three floodplains: Cache River, Arkansas (AR), Iatt Creek, Louisiana (LA), and the Coosawhatchie River, South Carolina (SC), USA. We used 5-min point counts to sample birds in each study area each spring from 1995 to 1998, and measured ground-surface elevations and a suite of other habitat variables to investigate bird distributions and community characteristics in relation to important environmental gradients. In both AR and SC, the average number of Neotropical migrant species detected was lowest in semipermanently flooded Nyssa aquatica Linnaeus habitats and greatest in the highest elevation floodplain zone. Melanerpes carolinus Linnaeus, Protonotaria citrea Boddaert, Quiscalus quiscula Linnaeus, and other species were more abundant in N. aquatica habitats, whereas Wilsonia citrina Boddaert, Oporornis formosus Wilson, Vireo griseus Boddaert, and others were more abundant in drier floodplain zones. In LA, there were no significant differences in community metrics or bird species abundances among forest types. Canonical correspondence analyses revealed that structural development of understory vegetation was the most important factor affecting bird distributions in all three study areas; however, potential causes of these structural gradients differed. In AR and SC, differences in habitat structure were related to the hydrologic gradient, as indexed by ground-surface elevation. In LA, structural variations were related mainly to the frequency of canopy gaps. Thus, bird communities in all three areas appeared to be organized primarily in response to repeated localized disturbance. Our results suggest that regular disturbance due to flooding plays an important role in structuring breeding bird communities in floodplains subject to prolonged inundation, whereas other agents of disturbance (e.g., canopy gaps) may be more important in headwater systems subject to only short-duration flooding. Management for avian community integrity in these systems should strive to maintain forest zonation and natural disturbance regimes.

As ground nesting homeotherms, alpine and arctic birds must meet similar physiological requirements for breeding as other birds, but must do so in more extreme conditions. Annual spring snowfall and timing of snow melt can vary by up to 1 month and daily temperatures near the ground surface vary from below freezing to over 45°C in alpine and arctic habitats. Species breeding in these environments have various behavioral, physiological, and morphological adaptations to cope with energetically demanding conditions. We review the ways birds cope with harsh and variable weather, and present data from long term field studies of ptarmigan to examine effects of spring weather on reproduction. In variable but normal spring conditions, timing of breeding was not influenced by snow melt, snow depth or daily temperatures in the alpine, as breeding did not commence until conditions were generally favorable. Arctic ptarmigan tended to vary breeding onset in response to spring conditions. General...

The purpose of this study was to find out whether a set of habitat characteristics, derived from the National Corine Land Cover (CLC) database of habitat types, could indicate the occurrence of white stork nests in a settlement. The analyses were performed for the settlements closer than 35 km from the Drava River (northern Croatia). Sixteen habitat characteristics were determined around 257 settlements occupied with white stork nests and 152 control sites without white stork nests within the same geographic region. We performed multivariate inspection of the data and a non-metric multidimensional preference analysis. The best variables for stork habitat selection were: distance to the nearest grassland habitat (P < 0.0001), distance to three nearest grassland habitats (P < 0.0001), altitude of the settlements above the sea level (P < 0.001), sum of distances to the three nearest agricultural mosaic habitats (P < 0.005) and standardized area proportion of forests (P < 0.05). The explanatory capacity of the model was 81.1%. We conclude that it is possible to define a small number of habitat characteristics derived from CLC database which can indicate the occurrence of white stork nests.

Off-road vehicle (ORV) use provides a fann of outdoor recreation that is increasingly popular. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of these machines on creosote shrub habitat and associated wildlife in the western California Desert. Comparisons at eight paired sites (Control and ORV use) demonstrate that ORV-use areas have significantly fewer species ofveriebrates, greatly reduced abundance