#loons

#loons

"It's the way they walk. That's what the main attraction is," said self-described amateur birder Sheeba Garg, who traveled to Bryant Park specifically to see the American woodcock during its migration.

Video showed officers Michael Russo and Patrick Memi along with Sargeant Michael Amello and Detective Nicholas Martin in their boat pulling up to the eagle on the river. The bird was screeching in distress as the officers used a pole to keep the ice chunk near their boat and worked to catch the animal. "His claw's bleeding, too," one of the officers said as they grabbed a catch pole and carefully put it over the bird's body.

On a quiet Montreal street of low-rise brick apartment buildings on one side and cement barrier wall on the other, a crowd has gathered, binoculars around their necks and cameras at the ready. A European robin has taken up residence in the neighbourhood, which is sandwiched between two industrial areas with warehouses and railway lines and, a few blocks away, port facilities on the St Lawrence River.

Nearly half of the 261 species studied showed big enough losses in numbers to be statistically significant and more than half of those declining are seeing their losses accelerate since 1987, according to Thursday's journal Science. The study is the first to look at more than the total bird population by examining the trends in their decrease, where they are shrinking the most and what the declines are connected to.

The wolves arrived in May of last year, just days after Paul Roen had driven his cattle back up to their summer pasture in Northern California's Sierra Valley. He started finding the bleeding bodies of calves-some still alive, so badly paralyzed that they'd need to be shot. After weeks of this, Roen finally saw a kill himself. "One wolf grabbed a cow and spun her around, while another grabbed a calf," he told me. "He tore it into three pieces in 30 seconds."