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In with the Old, Out with the Mew

Keep your checklists handy because the 62nd Supplement to the American Ornithological Society’s Check-list of North American Birds, publishing today in Ornithology, includes numerous updates to the classification of the continent’s bird species. A few highlights from this year’s supplement, detailed below, include species splits for Mew Gull, Barred Owl, and Sedge Wren, among quite …

wood-thrush-dummy
To simulate the presence of Wood Thrush at unused forest sites in southern Indiana, we placed a hand-painted dummy on top of a speaker box that broadcast Wood Thrush songs in the pre-breeding and post-breeding periods. To our surprise, we found no evidence that these simulation treatments attracted settlers. Photo by Jonathon J. Valente.

Management of breeding birds using conspecific attraction requires better knowledge of when, where, and why it is likely to be effective

By Christa L. LeGrande-Rolls and Jonathon J. Valente Linked paper: Conspecific attraction for conservation and management of terrestrial breeding birds: Current knowledge and future research directions by Jonathon J. Valente, Christa L. LeGrande-Rolls, James W. Rivers, Anna M. Tucker, Richard A. Fischer, and Matthew G. Betts, Ornithological Applications In 2012, we were working on a …