To all of us here at The Roost, we want to extend our best wishes to everybir
die for a very Merry Christmas and all the best for 2019!
May your birdie stockings be brimming with your favourite nom noms and your dreams filled with visions of new toys, tasty treats and many, and oodles of scritchies and hours of playtime with your parronts.
Have a wonderful Christmas everybirdie! Stay tuned for new articles and news from The Roost’s contributors in early January!
The
World Wildlife Fund recently released its Living Planet Report 2018, and the news is dire for the world’s wildlife. The following are a few of the sobering statistics highlighted in the report:
“OUR LIVING PLANET, AT A GLANCE
60% – Populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians have, on average, declined by 60% between 1970 and 2014, the most recent year with available data.
50% – The Earth is estimated to have lost about half of its shallow water corals in the past 30 years.
20% – A fifth of the Amazon has disappeared in just 50 years.
$125 trillion – Globally, nature provides services worth around $125 trillion a year, while also helping ensure the supply of fresh air, clean water, food, energy, medicines, and much more.”
We are not only destroying the natural world, we are also putting ourselves in peril. There’s not much time for humans to stand up for nature and develop concrete, sustainable plans to reduce and turn around the damage already done to wildlife and the planet.
Read the WWF’s Living Planet Report 2018 here.
Read our November Edition of News on the Wing here.
What could be more relaxing than enjoying a Sunday Siesta in a cushy armchair and catching up with The Roost’s crazy flock! Catch up with Morty, and then why not head over to get up to speed on how Bubbles and Zack are attempting to keep their mom on the straight, narrow- and sane path! Sunday chuckles are guaranteed on It’s A Birb Thing!
Grab that pencil and enjoy one of our games! Catch up on what’s been happening around social media on our News page.
So relax, catch up, and tell us what you think of The Roost! Have a great Sunday Everybirdie! October edition on the way soon!
Galápagos finches have been the subject of a plethora of evolutionary studies, but where did the first ones come from?
When the first of the Galápagos Islands arose from the ocean floor around 3m years ago, they were naked, angry, lava-spewing cones devoid of life. Now, millions of years later, they are alive with some of the world’s most iconic animals. Giant tortoises. Sea iguanas. Flightless cormorants. And those finches equipped with Swiss army knife beaks.
The Galápagos finches are probably one of the most well-known examples of evolution and will forever be tightly linked to Charles Darwin’s voyage and his theory of natural selection (although you may be surprised to learn that the Galápagos finches were not as central to Darwin’s theory as we like to think). With their diversity of bill sizes and shapes, each species has adapted to a specific type of food; the ground-finch (Geospiza) has a thick beak adapted to feeding on a variety of crunchy seeds and arthropods, whereas the warbler finch (Certhidea olivacea) developed a slender, pointy bill to catch tasty insects hiding between the foliage. The woodpecker finch(Camarhynchus pallidus) even uses twigs or cactus spines to pry arthropods out of treeholes
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Notes and photographs of my morning walks at Seagroves Farm Park in Apex, NC.
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