During an era when trade in birds and feathers threatened many species, the landmark act -- one of the world's oldest wildlife conservation statutes -- sealed a deal between the United States and Great Britain to protect birds migrating between the United States and Canada.
This week, national and international experts from government, industry and environmental organizations are gathering at Lewis & Clark Law School to talk about how the act might be made more effective in a world where birds face challenges never envisioned in 1918: run-ins with skyscrapers, power lines, wind turbines, pesticide poisoning, oil spills and vast, rapid habitat loss.
Today's agenda includes a talk by Jesse Grantham, national California condor recovery coordinator with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, plus a panel discussion about the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.
Sessions Friday and Saturday focus on how the Migratory Bird Treaty Act works and how it might be improved. Saturday, those attending will examine bird conservation efforts by U.S. treaty partners, including Canada, Mexico, Great Britain and Japan.
Though it's law-centric, organizers say the conference is appropriate for a general audience and it's open to the public. Cost: $70. Find more information online.University of Washington researcher has.
Jonathan Armstrong, an aquatic and fishery sciences doctoral student, found that salmon and other predatory fish have guts that can adapt to feast or famine. They can take in two to three times the amount of food they regularly encounter, indicating that they sometimes binge so they can survive when food is scarce.
The survival tactic, Armstrong notes in a letter published recently in the journal Nature, might apply to other top predators, such as wolves, lions and bears.
Some birds share similar characteristics, with digestive organs that expand so they can load up on food before they migrate, followed by a period of atrophy, when, freed of heavy guts, the birds take off.
"Unlike some other animals," Armstrong says in a UW news release, "fish can't just hoard their food behind a rock in the stream and eat it later. They need to binge during the good times so that they can grow and build energy reserves to survive the bad times."
The fish-gut research may help with ecological models used in conservation and management. "Ecosystem models typically assume relatively constant interactions between predator and prey," Armstrong says, "but our results suggest such interactions are extremely patchy. We're excited to see if including this ecological realism might improve the predictions of these models."
Naturalists will be on hand from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday to talk about the salmon life cycle and behavior. They'll have special glasses available to make seeing the fish easier. The salmon viewing programs are free with a $5 per vehicle park entry fee.
Scientists studying a group of the small mammals living in South Africa's Kalahari Desert played a bit of a trick on them. According to the science news website physorg.com, researchers set up two audio speakers and played the calls meerkats make when foraging.
From one speaker, they broadcast one meerkat's call -- a staccato sound believed to encourage the foraging group to stick together. Within seconds, they broadcast the same animal's call from a speaker on the other side of their foraging area.
The meerkats stopped what they were doing, researchers reported, as if they knew something was wrong. They seemed to know there was no way the same voice could come from two different spots.
The study, led by University of Zurich's Simon Townsend, is the first to demonstrate vocal recognition in a non-primate animal species, physorg.com reports. Researchers noted that the ability may be more widespread among animals that live in social groups than was previously thought.
The study was published recently in the journal Biology Letters.