ed landscape with relatively few native birds. Its original host remains unknown, but unlike many islands, New Zealand had endemic mosquitoes, which could have coevolved with viruses. Another signifi cant disease because of its pandemic potential is avian infl uenza. The normal hosts are waterfowl, shorebirds, and seabirds. Sampling for infl uenza antibodies in Australian seabirds shows variati...

Free-living wild birds worldwide act as reservoir for Chlamydia psittaci, but the risk of transmission to humans through contact with wild birds has not been widely documented. From 12 January to April 9 2013, a total of 25 cases of psittacosis were detected in southern Sweden, about a threefold increase compared with the mean of the previous 10 years. A matched case-control study investigating...

A major conservation challenge in mosaic landscapes is to understand how trait-specific responses to habitat edges affect bird communities, including potential cascading effects on bird functions providing ecosystem services to forests, such as pest control. Here, we examined how bird species richness, abundance and community composition varied from interior forest habitats and their edges into...

Maryland's Green Infrastructure (GI) is a network of large, intact natural areas (hubs), interconnected by linear swaths of riparian or upland vegetation (corridors). The GI serves significant ecological functions and provides the bulk of the state's natural support system. This study examined whether the GI as mapped does, in fact, identify Maryland's most ecologically valuable forested lands,...

Food availability is a primary driver of avian population regulation. However, few studies have considered the effects of what is essentially a massive supplementary feeding experiment: the practice of wild bird feeding. Bird feeding has been posited as an important factor influencing the structure of bird communities, especially in urban areas, although experimental evidence to support this is...

Emissions rates for particulate matter less than 10 m (PM10) and ammonia (NH3) from commercial tunnel–ventilated broiler houses in central Texas were analyzed using linear regressions to develop emission rates as a function of bird weight for broilers on litter. Interior ambient temperature and relative humidity were not found to be significant factors affecting emissions. From the regression e...

A long term investigation was made on the importance of thyroxine and prolactin in the reproduction of a tropical wild bird, spotted munia, Lonchura punctulata. Different doses of thyroxine i.m. (0.5, 1.0 and 2.0 microg; 0.56, 1.12 and 2.24 n mol Sodium salt, Sigma) per day/bird were administered in 0.1 ml of 0.9% alkaline NaCl per day per bird. Similarly various doses of prolactin (1.0, 2.0,. ...

The present functional magnetic resonance imaging study provides direct evidence on visual object-category formation in the human brain. Although brain imaging has demonstrated object-category specific representations in the occipitotemporal cortex, the crucial question of how the brain acquires this knowledge has remained unresolved. We designed a stimulus set consisting of six highly similar ...

The recent report on “fungi in bird excreta” is very interesting. MENDES et al. found many contaminated fungi in the samples, and mentioned for the requirement for public health concern preventive measures, such as “proper cleaning of cages”. In fact, the concern of fungi contamination in bird excreta should be raised. It is usually forgotten. In uncaged bird, the contamination might be more pr...