The Chatham petrel (Pterodroma axillaris) is an endangered species restricted to a single population on South East Island, Chatham Islands, New Zealand. The key threat to Chatham petrel breeding success is interference with chicks by broad-billed prions (Pachyptila vittata) prospecting for burrows for their oncoming breeding season. This burrow competition has resulted from alteration to breedi...

Populations of the Western Scrub-Jay (Aphelocoma californica) have bills specialized for feeding in their respective habitats. Populations in oak habitat have hooked bills, whereas those in pinyon habitat have pointed bills with a reduced maxillary overhang. Work on other bird species shows that the bill overhang is essential for efficient preening to control ectoparasites. Given the importance...

Observations of hummingbirds feeding at flowers longer or shorter than their bills seem to contradict the view that bill lengths of hummingbirds evolved in concert with the lengths of their flowers. Recent experiments, however, indicate that a hummingbird’s ability to feed at artificial flowers of different lengths depends on the widths of the flowers. We examined if the broad range of flower l...

233, Date 2/15/99, Session H, Podium , 4:15p Hearing in the red-billed firefinch (Lagonosticta senegala): An estrildid finch with narrowband vocalizations *B. Lohr, R.J. Dooling (University of Maryland) The red-billed firefinch (Lagonosticta senegala) is a small, non-territorial estrildid finch native to Africa. As in zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata), a member of the same family and a popula...

BACKGROUND Documentation of key times and events is required to obtain reimbursement for anesthesia services. The authors installed an information management system to improve record keeping and billing performance but found that a significant number of their records still could not be billed in a timely manner, and some records were never billed at all because they contained documentation erro...

H9N2 influenza A viruses have become endemic in different types of terrestrial poultry and wild birds in Asia, and are occasionally transmitted to humans and pigs. To evaluate the role of black-billed magpies (Pica pica) in the evolution of influenza A virus, we conducted two epidemic surveys on avian influenza viruses in wild black-billed magpies in Guangxi, China in 2005 and characterized thr...

PURPOSE The purposes of this study were to summarize recently published data on Medicare reimbursement to individual radiation oncologists and to identify the causes of variation in Medicare reimbursement in radiation oncology. METHODS AND MATERIALS The Medicare Provider Utilization and Payment Data: Physician and Other Supplier Public Use File (POSPUF), which details nearly all services prov...

Putative audio recordings of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) are presented along with discussions of the videos from which they were extracted and the observations that were made when these data were obtained. On two occasions, high-pitched calls were heard coming from the direction of a bird that was identified in the field as an Ivory-billed Woodpecker. These calls seem ...

In our seasonal world, animals face a variety of environmental conditions in the course of the year. To cope with such seasonality, animals may be phenotypically flexible, but some phenotypic traits are fixed. If fixed phenotypic traits are functionally linked to resource use, then animals should redistribute in response to seasonally changing resources, leading to a 'phenotype-limited' distrib...

The proposed rediscovery of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, while celebrated by some ornithologists, was debated by others. Central to the argument is the interpretation of a fuzzy video depicting a large black and white bird taking flight. This thesis describes the creation of a physiologically-accurate animation of a flying Ivory-Billed Woodpecker in hope...