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The avifauna fossils represent at least 45 taxa, and include species reported as fossils for the first time in North America (e.g., the curlew Numenius madagascariensis or Numenius arquata). This chapter examines avian fossils found in the Porcupine Cave. Nearly 200 avian fossils were recovered from the deposits. The new records from Porcupine Cave add considerably to the diversity of birds known from the region and provide important information on the composition of avian communities in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

We reconsider the birds of the islands of Vanuatu and the Galápagos. The former have few pairs of species belonging to the same genus—and it is within such pairs that we are most likely to find checkerboard patterns of mutual exclusion. We do not find them. In the Galápagos, there are many congeneric species sets. These patterns of co-occurrence are striking once one considers the bill sizes of the species involved. The unusually few co-occurrences are between species with the most similar bills. Moreover, where similar species do co-occur, they show character displacement. The bills of the smaller of the pairs are smaller, and the bills of the larger of the pairs are larger, than where the species do not overlap.

We return to the Bismarck and Solomon islands, the locations that generated Diamond’s ideas on assembly rules. The null models generate a list of species pairs where the number of observed co-occurrences is unusual, meaning that thisoccurs in fewer than 5% of the null models. As Diamond’s critics had argued, interspecific competition is unlikely to generate some of these unusual pairs—they are ecologically and taxonomically very dissimilar. We show, however, that such unusual pairs are disproportionately common in pairs that belong to the same genus—exactly the pattern one would predict.

This chapter focuses on the Costa Rican dry-forest avifauna. It discusses the origin, distribution, habitat use, migration behavior, reproduction, and the adaptation of dry-forest birds to seasonal changes in food abundance. It also presents recommendations for their protection and conservation.

This chapter describes biology, including ornithology, through the hierarchies of Carl Von Linne (Linnaeus), and in relation to African vernacular traditions. Linnaeus' classificatory science moved across the globe in the nineteenth century with explorers and empires; by the late nineteenth century, ornithology had become a specialized scientific field. It spread across Africa in the wake of European political and economic expansion. With the help of vernacular birders, ornithologists harvested the avifauna of Africa, and with the help of laborers skilled at preparing specimens, they launched facts about bird species into the network of science. Ornithologists distinguished themselves from others through formal specialist knowledge that was not applied to the challenges of daily life. Their work privileged the visual, and for a long time the specimens of dead birds were more important objects of study than were living birds.

This chapter discusses the Mesozoic flying reptiles—the pterosaurus and the birds. Pterosaur fossils have been found in marine sedimentary rocks, floodplain deposits, and some far from the shore, showing a diversity of living habits or migrations of some species to inland areas. The remains of three pterosaurs have been found in California, two in Butte County and one from Shasta County. Birds evolved from small meat-eating dinosaurs and are the only close relatives of dinosaurs to have survived the mass extinctions at the end of the Mesozoic. Fossils of Mesozoic birds have been found in Alta and Baja California and these remains probably represent only a small fraction of the avifauna that existed in California during the Cretaceous.

This chapter examines the avifaunal assemblage from archaeological excavations at Nuʻalolo Kai. The use of evolutionary ecological models to archaeological data (that is, animal bone) is a well-established method for understanding change over time, human interaction with the environment, and the process of resource depression and intensification in prehistory. While a variety of studies utilizing evolutionary ecology have focused on Pacific ichthyofauna, very few have focused on avifauna. This chapter first provides a description of the avifaunal assemblage from Nuʻalolo Kai before analyzing the bird species identified from the assemblage, including brown noddy, black-crowned night heron, and wedge-tailed shearwater. It also considers both human and nonhuman modification of bird bone, various hunting methods that were recorded ethnographically for catching seabirds, temporal changes in resource utilization of seabirds and in seabird exploitation, and temporal change in bird bone tools. The chapter concludes with a discussion of modified vs. unmodified bird bone.

This chapter discusses the usefulness of applied zooarchaeology to conservation biology and habitat management by present examples drawn from the shellfish and avian assemblages of Nuʻalolo Kai. It first considers a model of applied zooarchaeological research presented by Butler and Delacorte (2004) from the southern Owens Valley, California before analyzing shellfish use and avifauna at Nuʻalolo Kai. The chapter focuses on four species of the genus Cellana, known as the black-foot ʻopihi, yellow-foot ʻopihi, giant ʻopihi, and green-foot ʻopihi. The findings have implications for the general biota of the Hawaiian archipelago and suggest that traditional Hawaiian harvesting practices may have managed stocks well and maintained populations at abundant and healthy levels, even as recoveries in population size and the individual size of adult specimens are also apparent.

This chapter provides an account of a trip to Florida made by Thomas Sandler Roberts in 1914. Roberts was on medical duty during the trip guarding his patient James Stroud Bell, the chief executive of Washburn-Crosby Company. Bell was in ill health and decided to go to Florida for recuperation, but he was reluctant to go without his personal physician, Roberts, who took advantage of the three-month trip to enjoy the avifauna of the Everglades. The chapter also describes how the period after the trip proved to be a good time to make a leap to full-time ornithology. Roberts would eventually take the giant step to leave his medical career behind when Bell succumbed to illness in May of next year. In August of 1915, Roberts had already secured a new work address in Millard Hall at the University of Minnesota, where he would start his new career.