Scott Haulton 🦇🐦🌳

Anti-science bills hit statehouses, attacking longstanding public health protections More than 420 anti-science bills attacking longstanding public health protections – vaccines, milk safety and fluoride – have been introduced in statehouses across the U.S. this year.

An AP investigation found that more than 420 anti-science bills attacking longstanding public health protections – vaccines, milk safety and fluoride – have been introduced in statehouses this year, part of a campaign to enshrine a conspiracy theory-driven agenda into law. https://to.pbs.org/43dxCkD

Photo of a little brown bat from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. Shows a bat with wings outspread, flying in front of a black background. Bat somehow looks determined.

Today we appreciate one of Illinois’ native bats, the little brown bat. They eat lots of insects. Sadly, due to the spread of white-nose syndrome the population has decreased by over 90% putting them at risk. Read about some cool research at Illinois to save these cuties. tinyurl.com/lilbrownbat

Graphic with a photo of a Henslow's Sparrow singing by Kenneth Cole Schneider and a cartoon showing a table of judges holding up signs showing low scores. Text on the graphic says: "Unsolicited Bird Fact: Henslow's Sparrow may be North America's most disparaged singer. Early ornithologists, & even some current ones have described their short, insect-like song like this: 3 2 "a feeble hiccup," "one of the poorest of vocal efforts of any bird," and "Il can't hear a Henslow's Sparrow sing] without a feeling of pity for a creature so constituted that he can be satisfied with such a performance." But Herkert et al, 2020 note that sonograms of the song reveal that it is quite complex but very fast- there's a lot packed into a very short song. Maybe our ears/brain are just too slow to appreciate the artistry."

Did you ask for a bird fact? No, but you're getting one whether you like it or not. 🪶

🗺️📍 For the first time, bird habitats across the U.S. & Canada are ranked by risk.
ABC’s Habitats WatchList shows which habitats are most threatened.
Explore the map:
bit.ly/4gQ7TEr
Special thanks to Nature Serve + Iain Campbell & Phil Chaon, authors of 'Habitats of North America.'

Hoary #bat “singing”

Volume up!
#hoarybat

7-Day Bird Migration Forecast

We’re entering the peak of fall migration across most of the U.S. Hundreds of millions of birds are on the move, with Thursday and Friday forecast to be the biggest nights of the season so far — over 400 million birds predicted to be taking flight.

Posting to #bioacoustics 🔈

Current frontiers in the passive acoustic monitoring of bats Passive acoustic monitoring of bats is used in a growing number of studies in applied and basic research, from local to global scales. Despite the publication of good-practice recommendations, sev...

New OA 🦇 research 📄

Current frontiers in the passive acoustic monitoring of bats

@methodsinecoevol.bsky.social @bat-cesco.bsky.social

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

whip-poor-will nestlings, small, fluffy baby birds with tan plumage, next to an egg shell

From the current WJO issue - Eastern Whip-poor-will (Antrostomus vociferus) nesting ecology: behavior of nesting adults and chick growth. #ornithology doi.org/10.1080/1559...

Not sure this [gestures everywhere] was such a great idea

Gnat to be overlooked, the Blue-gray Gnatcatcher is this week’s #BirdoftheWeek!
🎶 Nicknamed the “Springtime Sprite,” this songbird is heard before seen w/ their squeaky calls.
🕷️ Their ping-pong ball–sized nests are camouflaged w/ bark & spiderwebs.
More:
bit.ly/4gl8Owi

Home Depot Garden Center Offering 1.5 Cubic Feet Of Squirrels

Home Depot Garden Center Offering 1.5 Cubic Feet Of Squirrels

Anyway, here’s a Magnolia Warbler

Photo of a Pine Warbler eating sunflower seeds at the feeder by Anne Davis. Text on graphic says: Unsolicited Bird Fact- The Pine Warbler is the only wood warbler (Parulidae) to eat significant amounts of seeds. They are primarily insectivores, but during the winter their diet may consist of up to 50% seeds. They eat pine seeds (of course!), but they also visit bird feeders. Their digestive tract can adapt to the change in diet and develop a larger gizzard- the muscular part of the stomach where hard foods are ground up with small stones ingested by the bird- which helps in seed digestion.

Did you ask for a bird fact? No, but you're getting one whether you like it or not. 🪶

Social media undercuts public health and institutional trust

A new study finds causal evidence that morally charged attacks generate anger and social media engagement which exacerbates the political polarization of public health
www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

The Humanities Aren't Dead Yet | The Local Enrollment in the liberal arts has been in freefall for years. But despite apocalyptic declarations about the end of the humanities, in my own classroom I see signs of life.

“Maybe, in an era when seemingly everything—including thought itself—is mechanized, people will feel compelled to fight for the humanistic tradition because they can more clearly see its value.” thelocal.to/humanities-i...

Lots of different ways to assess forest degradation, from biodiversity loss to changes in forest soils. Submission deadline is 14 November! #forest 🧪🌍🪴

🦇 New research helps explain why some bats are at greater risk from wind energy facilities.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author...

@floridamuseum.bsky.social @ufresearch.bsky.social

New paper: 3rd chapter of Anne Graser's PhD thesis now published: How #forest disturbance, post-disturbance management and wild #ungulates affect #moth communities: besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
@jappliedecology.bsky.social

Postdoc advertisement!

Hi all, I'm looking to hire a Postdoc in BIOACOUSTICS for work on Owls. Your job would be to collect & analyze bioacoustics data, and write papers. 🦉🦉🦅🐦🦜🦉🦉

Ugh. Horrible news! Makes this Stumpy extremely sad.

SUNY profs union says cuts to ESF would dismantle school SYRACUSE, N.Y. (WSYR-TV) — The SUNY professors’ union scrutinized SUNY Chancellor John King’s apparent austerity plan against SUNY ESF. The school, which is the university system&…

www.localsyr.com/education/su...

Please help me share this!

SUNY is trying to do a 20% reduction in our workforce while increasing enrollment by 20%. They are also effectively dismantling our graduate program by severely cutting TA line.

Abdulkader Sinno: Why I left IU, Indiana and the United States Selfish politicians, irresponsible trustees and unethical administrators are destroying a once great university.

"IU was a gem in Indiana. The state legislature and the IU Board of Trustees appear to have hired Whitten to fulfill an ultraconservative and Christian nationalist agenda... Sadly, they are destroying all that made IU great in the process."

Scathing but spot-on.

www.idsnews.com/article/2025...

📣 New research, including @savebutterflies.bsky.social #citizenscience data, shows winners & losers across >1200 insect species in Britain since 1990. Urbanisation identified as major driver of decline for moths, ladybirds & hoverflies www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌍 🦋🐞🦗🪲🐝

Your Ignorance Doesn't Make You An Expert Let's go chasing waterfalls.

I wrote about the humility of expertise and the arrogance of ignorance, the profound laziness that attends believing that you can find knowledge by ignoring the accumulation of inherited human knowledge, and the ways lazy arrogance fuels narratives of fascism. www.the-reframe.com/your-ignoran...

Hummingbird Feels Like Fucking Idiot After Seeing Other Bird Gliding

Hummingbird Feels Like Fucking Idiot After Seeing Other Bird Gliding https://theonion.com/hummingbird-feels-like-fucking-idiot-after-seeing-other-bird-gliding/

America Tips Into Fascism Today is different than before.

The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/america-ti...

Philosophers must reckon with the meaning of thermodynamics | Aeon Essays Everything eats and is eaten. Everything destroys and is destroyed. It is our moral duty to strike back at the Universe

"Just as the full metaphysical implications of the Copernican revolution took centuries to unfold, we have yet to fully grasp the philosophical and existential consequences of entropic decay." aeon.co/essays/philo...

photo of a cat in weird perspective. tongue is very prominent

my phone’s view of me liking a post

Fig. 5 from the article: The different identified landscape mechanisms affecting bird communities and their illustrations.

Fig. 3 from the article: (a) Identified scale of effect in a subset of 13 studies using multiple landscape scales; point show the most relevant scale of significant relationship between a pair of landscape and biodiversity metric for ‘All' and ‘Forest species'. Dashed lines show average scale of effect. (b) Count of the non-significant and significant relationship for the different tested scales including all single-scale articles, for the alpha- and gamma-scale of biodiversity measurement.

NEW PAPER: review of 45 studies shows that forest bird γ-diversity rises with landscape heterogeneity, habitat amount boosts their related communities, but forest composition effects are weak and scale of effect remains unclear.

➡️ vist.ly/43g6g

#ornithology #birds #diversity #landscape 🪶🧪