It’s lasers vs. pigeons at the state Capitol. The birds are winning.
Birds
Change in Grasslands – Pasture in Albany County from 2001 to 2019
Multiple, often contradictory things can happen to land cover over two decades, as you can see with this map.
Suburban sprawl in the area around the city reduced the amount of grasslands over the 18 year period, while in more outlaying areas the decline of dairy meant less silage and corn was planted but more grass was grown/grazed for beef.
Here is the R code: https://github.com/AndyArthur/r_maps_and_graphs/blob/main/Albany County NLCD Decline in Grasslands.R
How a Native Tree Became a Threat to Nebraska’s Grasslands | All About Birds All About Birds
Sarah Sortum has a photo of her grandparents receiving a conser?vation award in 1973 for planting trees across their ranch in the eastern Nebraska Sandhills.
“In my grandparents’ generation they were really encouraged by conser?vation programs to plant trees,” says Sortum, who now helps run that same family-owned acreage, known as the Switzer Ranch. “Remember, this is the Arbor Day state. That’s a way of life in Nebraska, planting trees.”
The trees, primarily native eastern redcedar, offer shade and visual relief from the unrelenting horizon of prairie. Their dense branches and evergreen needles provide a windbreak and natu?ral snow fence to protect the homestead, and a virtual “outdoor barn,” in Sortum’s words, for calves in spring.
“Now we have these beautiful, mature cedar windbreaks, and they are valuable to us,” she says. “But now we have all this seed source.” subscribe to Living Bird magazine
Research from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln shows that that seed source—the fully grown redcedars burst?ing with tiny cones at the ends of their evergreen branches—can propagate a wave of cedar seedlings that spread out a couple hundred yards away from the parent tree. Two generations after her grandparents planted them, those redcedars are spreading out from the homestead and windbreaks, creating an ungovernable front of woodland. And it’s not just the Switzer Ranch. The same thing is happening throughout the Sandhills—and across much of the central Great Plains.
Eastern Bluebird Life History, All About Birds, Cornell Lab of Ornithology
NPR
American Robin’s
Apparently the proper term isn’t boring ol Robin.
How do birds keep cool in the summer? | U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
o you ever wonder how birds stay cool on hot summer days? We at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service want to share some insights! Like people, birds can withstand changes in the weather and maintain their body temperature whether it’s hot or cold outside, but there are limits. When summer temperatures are on the rise, birds depend on adaptations to keep from overheating.
Many adaptations are different variations of thermoregulation, the mechanism that warm-blooded animals use to balance their body temperature with their surroundings. Thermoregulation is a process where warmer blood cools and then circulates throughout the body, lowering the animal’s overall body temperature. It can take many forms and is a window into understanding how our physical world works. To understand how birds have adapted these cooling techniques, we need a quick overview of how thermal energy - or heat - moves from one thing to another. Simply put, heat moves in one direction, from hot toward cold. The movement of heat happens on a molecular level in all matter, whether it’s solid, liquid or gas. It’s within this principle that birds are able to transfer their body temperature to cooler air and water around them.