Category: North America

Prey Handling in Yellow-crowned Night Herons

Yellow-crowned Night Heron (Nyctanassa violacea) Science Article 1 abstract Although an extensive literature exists on the foraging ecology of wading birds (reviewed by Kushlan 1978), detailed studies of the Yellow-crowned Night Heron (Nyctanassa violacea) are lacking.The yellowcrown is unique among the ardeids in that it specializeson crustacean prey (Palmer 1962, Hancock and Elliott 1978) and […]

Red-winged and Yellow-headed Blackbird Nesting Habitat in a Wisconsin Marsh

Yellow-headed Blackbird (Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus) Science Article 1 abstract Competitive interactions between Red-winged (Agelaius phoeniceus) and Yellow-headedblackbirds (Xanthocephalus xathocephalus) have been reported by a number of workers(e.g., Orians and Willson 1964, Willson 1966, Miller 1968). Most studies concerned withboth species occurring together have been conductedin western regions of North America;however, see Weller and Spatcher (1965), Burt […]

Nestling Diets of Red-Winged and Yellow-Headed Blackbirds on Playa Lakes of West Texas

Yellow-headed Blackbird (Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus) Science Article 3 abstract Red-winged blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) and yellow-headed blackbirds (Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus) are abundant breeding birds on the playa lakes of the Panhandle of Texas. Earlier studies have described the foods of nestling icterids in areas supporting wetlands undisturbed by agriculture (Willson 1966, Robertson 1973, Orians and Hom 1969), but […]

Yellow-billed Cuckoo’s egg in Mourning Dove’s nest

Yellow-billed Cuckoo (Coccyzus americanus) Science Article 2 abstract On June 10, 1952, I found one egg of the Yellow-billed Cuckoo (Coccyzus americanus) in the nest of a Mourning Dove (Zenaidura rnacrou~a) . The location of this nest was on the Cranbrook Estate in Bloomfield Township, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. WALTER P. NICKELL, Wilson bull. Vol. 66, […]

Distribution and Status of the Yellow-billed Cuckoo(Coccyzus americanus) in Wyoming

Yellow-billed Cuckoo (Coccyzus americanus) Science Article 4 abstract The future federal status of the Yellow-billed Cuckoo (Coccyzus americanus) in NorthAmerica remains unclear. A petition was filed in 1986 to list the western subspecies (C. a.occidentalis) under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service(USFWS) published a 12-month finding in 1998 stating that […]

EXTERNAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN NEWLY HATCHED CUCKOOS (COCCYZUS AMERICANUS AND C. ERYTHROPTHALMUS)

Yellow-billed Cuckoo (Coccyzus americanus) Science Article 1 abstract This paper describes characters by which nestling Yellow-billed and Black-billed Cuckoos can be distinguished. It is based on a small collection that I made at Bloomington, Indiana, before I discovered Herrick’s paper. The nests from which I took the birds presented no anomalies. VAL NOLAN, JR., Condor(77)3:341 […]

Phylogeny of the cuckoo genus Coccyzus(Aves: Cuculidae): a test of monophyly

Yellow-billed Cuckoo (Coccyzus americanus) Science Article 3 abstract Coccyzus comprises nine species of New World cuckoos (Aves: Cuculidae)that breed from southern Canada to central South America. The phylogeny of thisgenus was reconstructed using 2490 base pairs of the mitochondrial genes cytochromeoxidase II and III, and cytochrome b. Maximum likelihood, maximum parsimony,and Bayesian inference approaches produced […]