Birds

In a modern retelling of one of Aesop's fables, British researchers have shown that members of the crow family can use tools to retrieve a worm that they wouldn't otherwise be able to reach. In "The Crow and the Pitcher," Aesop wrote of a thirsty bird confronted with a half-full pitcher of water. When the bird discovered that the water level was too low to reach, he dropped stones in to raise the level until it was high enough to quench his thirst. Aptly named zoologist Christopher David Bird of University of Cambridge showed that rooks, members of the crow family, could perform the same task, dropping stones in a tall glass beaker to retrieve a floating wax worm.

More than a third of native California bird species could vanish from a wide swath of their current range by the end of the 21st century because of global warming, according to a new study by Audubon California.

Commercial and private pilots report thousands of incidents a year where birds hit their aircraft, but the vast majority of the potentially dangerous encounters do not result in substantial damage or serious crashes. Birds are being investigated as the possible cause of Thursday's US Airways incident. Authorities said the pilot of the Airbus A320 reported a "double bird strike" during takeoff, forcing the crew to make an emergency landing in the Hudson River as both engines lost power.

Teams of biologists fanned out across the vast playa of Owens Lake on Saturday to take a full accounting of one of environmentalism's unintended successes: tens of thousands of migrating waterfowl and shorebirds roosting on a dust-control project. The 100-square-mile lake just east of Sequoia National Park was transformed into dusty salt flats after 1913, when its cargo of snowmelt and spring water was diverted into the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

Hundreds of gulls were killed or maimed in Cleveland after what investigators believe was cooking oil spewed from a sewer pipe into the Cuyahoga River. Investigators said Friday that several hundred gallons of the substance killed or disabled hundreds of gulls near the Kingsbury Run tributary. Most of the birds are just downstream from the site where environmentalists last week celebrated the Cuyahoga River's comeback since floating oil and debris caught fire on June 22, 1969.

A mysterious die-off of hundreds of crows throughout New York state has been linked to the avian reovirus, a pathogen that has threatened the poultry industry in the past, relentlessly sweeping through flocks, state wildlife officials said Thursday. The virus is not likely to jump the species barrier to infect humans. However, state health officials are taking no chances, and scientists at Wadsworth Center, a division of the state Health Department, were studying the virus.

Most members of the Dorsey High School Global Warriors had never heard of the California least tern when it nested last spring on a breezy beach near Marina del Rey. Yet like seasoned conservation biologists, the Warriors reeled off facts Saturday as they wrestled invading Cakile maritima from the sands where the rare seabird is due to return in April. "We haven't seen them personally.

. -- The fate of basic industries across the Intermountain West -- grazing, mining, energy -- soon could be at least partially tied to that of a bird about the size of a chicken. The federal government is under a judge's order to reconsider a decision against listing the sage grouse as endangered, and wildlife biologists are scouring the species' customary mating grounds to see how many are left.

California's peregrine falcons, once driven to the edge of extinction by the pesticide DDT, now are contaminated with record-high levels of other toxic chemicals that may threaten them again. State scientists have found that peregrines in Long Beach, Los Angeles and San Francisco contain the highest levels of flame retardants found in any living organism worldwide.

When a falcon swoops from the sky to seize its prey, no one would mistake the predator for a gaudy parrot. Yet the secret kinship of falcons and parrots is one of many surprises in a landmark genetic study of 169 bird species published by Field Museum researchers. One likely consequence of the study in Friday's edition of the journal Science is a reordering of the field guides that many of America's 80 million bird-watchers use.