Cassowaries are very large flightless birds native to the tropical forests of New Guinea and northeastern Australia.

The 2004 edition of the Guinness World Records lists the cassowary as the world’s most dangerous bird. Normally cassowaries are very shy but when disturbed can lash out dangerously with their powerful legs. During World War II American and Australian troops stationed in New Guinea were warned to steer clear of the birds. They are capable of inflicting fatal injuries to an adult human. Usually, attacks are the result of provocation. Wounded or cornered birds are particularly dangerous. Cassowaries, deftly using their surroundings to conceal their movements, have been known to out-flank organized groups of human predators. Cassowaries are considered to be one of the most dangerous animals to keep in zoos, based on the frequency and severity of injuries incurred by zookeepers.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Boju | via odditycentral }

In what experts described as the largest private sale of art ever, the heirs of the legendary dealer Ileana Sonnabend have parted with some $600 million worth of paintings and sculptures in two transactions to cover their estate taxes.

Ever since Ms. Sonnabend died in October at 92, the auction giants Sotheby’s and Christie’s have been vying with some of the world’s most powerful art dealers — Larry Gagosian, William Acquavella, Robert Mnuchin, the team of Giraud Pissarro Ségalot — to get at least a piece of the collection to sell.

Ms. Sonnabend’s art trove, which includes seminal works by artists like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, is valued at more than $1 billion. Taxes on the estate amount to more than half the value of the assets, experts said.

After months of deliberations Ms. Sonnabend’s son and daughter settled this week on the two private sales. “We did sell two blocks of works,” said Antonio Homem, Ms. Sonnabend’s son, who along with her daughter, Nina Sundell, inherited the collection.

Citing confidentiality agreements, Mr. Homem declined to identify the buyers. But experts close to the transactions who insisted on anonymity, also because of those agreements, said that the dealers Franck Giraud, Lionel Pissarro and Philippe Ségalot, who have offices in New York and Paris, bought $400 million worth of art on behalf of several clients, including some of the collection’s finest works. A second group of artworks, all Andy Warhols, was sold to the Gagosian Gallery for $200 million, the experts said.

Experts said the cache sold to GPS Partners included Jeff Koons’s 1986 sculpture “Rabbit”, which has been valued in excess of $80 million. (…)

The experts said they could not identify all the buyers to whom GPS Partners would in turn sell the works. But they said they had been told that several very wealthy collectors were involved, among them François Pinault, the French luxury goods magnate and owner of Christie’s; Sammy Ofer, the Israeli shipping magnate; and Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican telecommunications billionaire, whom Forbes listed last year as the world’s third-wealthiest man. Mr. Gagosian is said by the experts to be representing several American and Russian collectors in the deal. (…)

Known for a shrewd eye and sure taste, Ms. Sonnabend was among the world’s most powerful dealers in the 1960s and ’70s, as was her first husband, Leo Castelli. (…)

Perhaps the most famous painting she owned — Mr. Rauschenberg’s 1959 “Canyon” — will never leave the collection, Mr. Homem said. In its center is a stuffed bald eagle that cannot be sold because of a federal prohibition on trafficking in endangered species.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

artwork { Robert Rauschenberg, Canyon, 1959 | mixed mediums with taxidermy bald eagle and pillow }

related { Due to a recent court order, bald eagles in the Sonoran Desert of central Arizona are again protected as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.  }

Just seven years ago, climate change wasn’t listed as a potential hazard in Threatened Birds of the World. Now it gets its own heading in the annual book, and with good reason: a new study finds that climate change may trigger the extinction of 30 percent of land bird species by the year 2100. (…)

Using the elevation of species’ ranges, the newest suite of climate predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and a set of habitat-loss scenarios, the researchers calculated the extinction risk of more than 8400 species of land birds in the world. In the most likely outcome—a rise of 2.8 degrees Celsius by the turn of the century, according to the IPCC—400-550 birds could go extinct. If temperatures climb even more, that number would increase drastically.

This is due in part to what the researchers call the “escalator effect.” Climate change can cause range shifts as species are forced to leave their current locations when conditions become inhospitable. The most familiar of these shifts are poleward—things in the northern hemisphere move north, and things in the southern hemisphere head south. But on a climate escalator, species that live at higher altitudes may have nowhere to go but up. And up. And up some more, until they reach the highest point available to them. Once that’s topped, there’s often nowhere for them to go but extinct.

{ Conservation Magazine | Continue reading }

illustration { Charley Harper }

A city worker is in a flap for allegedly running down and killing five birds in Battery Park, NYC.

Park Enforcement Patrol Officer Martin Hightower, 45, was busted after parkgoers videotaped him deliberately picking off the three pigeons and two sea gulls with a city golf cart, police said.

Cops said they received several calls from horrified witnesses in the lower Manhattan park. (…)

The maximum sentence is a year in jail for each bird. The law is often difficult to prosecute as witnesses often don’t stick around to defend creatures like the city’s winged rats.

Last summer, Pentangelo said, people called to complain about a man who drove his car into a pack of pigeons at a Staten Island mall. When police arrived, they found dead birds, but no witnesses.

{ NY Daily News | Continue reading }

Moa were flightless birds native to New Zealand. They were unique in having no wings, not even small ones, which all other ratites (ostrich, kiwi, emu…) have.

Moa are thought to have become extinct about 1500, although some reports speculate that a few stragglers of Megalapteryx didinus may have persisted in remote corners of New Zealand until the 18th and even 19th centuries.

The giant moa seem to have had pronounced sexual dimorphism, with females being much larger than males; so much bigger that they were formerly classified as separate species.

Though most scientists contend there is no reasonable doubt that moa are extinct, there has been occasional speculation — since at least the late 1800s and recently as 2008 — that some Moas may still exist, particularly in deepest south Westland, a rugged wilderness in the South Island of New Zealand.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

As many as a dozen moa could be fossicking in remote bush in northernmost Hawke’s Bay, according to Australian “hidden animal” hunters.

The hopes are held by New South Wales cryptozoologist Rex Gilroy, who says hard-track evidence he and wife Heather found in the Urewera Ranges in November is a sign of the existence of the presumed-extinct anomalopteryx didiformis, otherwise known as the little scrub moa.

The evidence of a track comes six years after the couple found about 35 ground prints they believe to have come from a colony of up to 12 of the moa.

{ HB Today | Continue reading }

photos { Sir Richard Owen with moa skeleton. | The Moa Hunter period — the large flightless bird, along with flightless goose, adzebill, swans and pelicans were hunted to extinction within 100 years. }

Pigeons are guilty of transmitting fungal and bacterial diseases, primarily via their droppings, which pose the greatest risk to those with weakened immune systems. But cast against the recent spread of infectious zoonotic diseases—such as H5N1 bird flu, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)—experts question the degree of concern over the disease-bearing potential of the birds that have colonized cities the world over.

In principle, any animal can carry a disease that humans could catch. But Marm Kilpatrick, an ecologist at the Consortium for Conservation Medicine in New York City, which studies human-induced environmental change, species health and biodiversity, wrote in an e-mail: “In reality, the vast majority [about 99.999 percent] of pathogens that are carried by animals won’t infect people.”

Even so, zoonotic diseases represent a growing proportion of emerging infectious diseases; two British studies calculated that about 75 percent of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic. (By comparison, about 60 percent of all human pathogens can infect animals.)

Real rats (the ground-hugging kind) aren’t innocent by any means: Research links them with the reemergence of bubonic plague and typhus. But bats (of whom “winged rats” is more apropos) may be giving the unpopular rodents a run for their infamous reputation. Long associated with rabies, bats gained new notoriety in the 1990s after outbreaks of the Hendra and Nipah viruses killed both humans and livestock in Australia and Southeast Asia, respectively. A few years later SARS terrified the world by taking flight on commercial airlines. The virus left a trail leading back to the live animal markets in China, first to civet cats and subsequently to bats, the latter vector now believed to be the true starting point for the virus.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

related { So now we have bird flu in Iran and the virus is marching relentlessly across India }

photo { The New York Animal Import Center in Newburgh, New York, detains all imported birds for a mandatory 30-day quarantine before testing them for bird flu and other diseases | Taryn Simon, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar | Wired }

{ 1. Turkey, 2. Goose, 3. Barbary duck, 4. Guinea fowl, 5. Mallard, 6. Poussin, 7. Quail, 8. Partridge, 9. Pigeon squab, 10. Pheasant, 11. Chicken, 12. Aylesbury duck }

{ It takes eight hours to cook and is stuffed with 12 different birds | full story }

Nearly 8,000 birds were spotted yesterday during the annual Christmas Bird Count in Central Park, the highest number in four years. That’s a good sign, according to Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe. “It means conditions are stable,” he said. “Birds are doing better in the city than they did 25 or 30 years ago.” He also noted that increase development in the suburbs has lead to greater bird populations in the five boroughs.

The annual bird count in Central Park dates to 1900, when a group of birders organized an alternative to the traditional Christmas Day “side hunt,” in which teams of hunters would go out and compete over who could bring in the most hunt.

{ AM New York | Continue reading }

illustration { Matte Stephens }

{ Fashion is a stepchild, in photography no less than in other areas of the culture. The reach of the imagery it produces influences everything from trash television to presidential campaigns. Yet the slick work cranked out by the fashion machine is rarely taken seriously. | Read more | Photo: Elaine Constantine }

To find north, humans look to a compass. But birds may just need to open their eyes, a new study says.

Scientists already suspected birds’ eyes contain molecules that are thought to sense Earth’s magnetic field. In a new study, German researchers found that these molecules are linked to an area of the brain known to process visual information.

In that sense, “birds may see the magnetic field,” said study lead author Dominik Heyers, a biologist at the University of Oldenburg.

{ National Geographic | Continue reading }

LP cover { Katastrofala Omslag }

… and a Porsche.