Welcome to Birding Online! Here you will find links to all the expanded online content for the February 2016 issue of Birding magazine. First things first: As an ABA member you have full access to the entire, expanded online version of this issue. Just click on this link:
aba.org/birding-magazine-february-2016
Not only that, you have access to the entire, expanded online content of ALL recent issues of Birding:
Click on any cover, and start reading. Just to be clear, this is ALL the content in ALL recent issues, PLUS all the expanded content.
Now let’s look at some of the specifics in the February 2016 Birding. For the first time in 22 years, the art of David Sibley graces a cover of Birding. Learn more about Sibley’s painting of the ABA 2016 Bird of the Year, the Chestnut-collared Longspur, at the ABA’s Bird of the Year homepage, or go straight into the magazine and read the interview with the artist. Also, do you want an extra copy of the Bird of the Year coloring page or Bird of the Year word search? Or 10 extra copies, or even 100? ABA members have access to all that content, and a great deal more.
News and Notes—expanded content. The print version of the February 2016 issue features Paul Hess’s readable summaries of recent research on Bell’s Vireo taxonomy and Marbled Murrelet migration. The online version contains those articles, along with extensive coverage of modern resources for learning about and appreciating avian hybrids. It’s all in the February 2016 online installment of “News and Notes.”
Peter Pyle on storm-petrel ID. If you see a white-rumped dark storm-petrel off the West Coast of the ABA Area, it is a Leach’s, right? In this major contribution to the ID literature, Peter Pyle alerts us to the possibility of Band-rumped Storm-Petrels off the West Coast. The expanded online version of this article runs to 16 pages, and features many photos of Leach’s and Band-rumped Storm petrels at sea and in the hand.
Book and Media Reviews. We’re all aware that art can importantly convey social meaning. In a review of two books on ornithology in early America, Frank Izaguirre assesses the claim that Catesby, Bartram, Audubon, and others coded information—intentionally and unintentionally so—in their writings and paintings. And in a review of an exhibition at a New York gallery, Sandra Paci wonders how austere, abstract paintings elicit in us visceral responses about the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Sex in the Sitta. In their article in the print version of the February Birding, Jim Cox and colleagues describe Brown-headed Nuthatch families as positively rambunctious. In this video of the nuthatches of Tall Timbers Research Station, you gain a fuller appreciation for the energetic lifestyles of these lively little birds.
The Malheur Occupation. In one of the stranger and more unfortunate episodes in recent birding history, armed militants occupied and vandalized Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Oregon, earlier this year. The siege has ended, but its ramifications are ongoing, and the ABA has set up a webpage with links to coverage of this still-developing story.