Word: laysan
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...study's authors, Nathan Bailey and Marlene Zuk of UC Riverside's biology department, report some exceptions, like the laysan albatross. Last year, researchers studying a Hawaiian colony of albatrosses found that nearly a third of all the couples involved two females who courted and then shared parenting responsibilities. (Albatrosses don't have U-Hauls, so no lesbian jokes, please.) Male chinstrap penguins also form long-term relationships, at least in captivity. And some male bighorn sheep will mount females only after the females adopt male-like behaviors. (Watch a gay marriage wedding video...
...lonely center of the North Pacific Ocean, farther from just about everything than just about anywhere, lies Midway Atoll. I've come with Canadian writer Nancy Baron to the world's largest Laysan albatross colony--400,000 exquisite masters of the air--a feathered nation convened to breed, cramming an isle a mile...
Biologist Stewart Fefer and three colleagues from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had eagerly anticipated their assignment: a trip to Laysan, a 960-acre island about 1,000 miles northwest of Honolulu. They were to study some of the 14 million seabirds that nest there, and they looked forward to their stay on what they assumed would be an island paradise with pristine beaches. What they discovered came as a shock. The sands of Laysan were strewed with an unbelievable variety of plastic trash. While doing his bird-watching chores, Fefer cataloged thousands of pellets as well...
...debris that despoiled Laysan's beaches had been washed ashore by the waters of the Pacific, which like other oceans is becoming increasingly fouled by plastic flotsam. But while the floating and beached plastic is unquestionably an eyesore, the problem goes far beyond aesthetics. At the Sixth International Ocean Disposal Symposium in Pacific Grove, Calif., last month, scientists reported that plastic trash is causing injury and death to countless marine animals that feast on it or become ensnared in it. Says Ecologist David Laist, of the Marine Mammal Commission: "Plastics may be as ! great a source of mortality among marine...
...BIRDS. Hawaiian dark-rumped petrel, California least tern, the Aleutian Canada and Tule white-fronted goose, Laysan and Mexican duck, California condor, Florida Everglade kite, Southern bald eagle, masked bobwhite, whooping crane, Yuma and light-footed clapper rails, Eskimo curlew, Puerto Rican parrot, American ivory-billed woodpecker and Northern and Southern red-cock-aded woodpeckers, Laysan and Nihoa finches, Bachman's and Kirtland's warblers, dusky seaside and Cape Sable sparrows, and Hawaii's duck, goose, hawk, stilt, crow, gallinule and coot...