British Columbia Birds – New location

British Columbia Birds now has its own web site: bcbirds.bcfo.ca. It is also accessible from the Publications menu on the BCFO web site.

All past journal articles, with the exception of the current issue and In press articles—available to BCFO members only—are now accessible to everyone as open access articles in PDF format. Articles from all journal issues are also searchable by author, species, or other keywords.

Special thanks to Les Gyug, who added the title, abstract, authors, and keywords to the properties of the PDF file for every article since publication began in 1991, and to Art and Sue Martell, who prepared abstracts and keywords for journal articles from the first four issues of the journal where those attributes were lacking.

These additions should improve the relevance of the British Columbia Birds web site to search engines and thus improve the accessibility of the articles to web searches.

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British Columbia Birds – In press article

The following In press papers from British Columbia Birds are now available on the BCFO Member’s area of the web site:

Gyug, L.W. and J.T. Weir. 2017. American Avocet and Black­-necked Stilt breeding status and population trends at Kelowna, British Columbia, 1997­–2015.

Gyug, L.W. and J.T. Weir. 2017. American Avocet breeding habitat, behaviour and use of nesting platforms at Kelowna, British Columbia.

 

The Origin and Diversification of Birds

Some BCFO members may find this Open Access Review of interest. Here’s the summary:

Birds are one of the most recognizable and diverse groups of modern vertebrates. Over the past two decades, a wealth of new fossil discoveries and phylogenetic and macroevolutionary studies has transformed our understanding of how birds originated and became so successful. Birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs during the Jurassic (around 165–150 million years ago) and their classic small, lightweight, feathered, and winged body plan was pieced together gradually over tens of millions of years of evolution rather than in one burst of innovation. Early birds diversified throughout the Jurassic and Cretaceous, becoming capable fliers with supercharged growth rates, but were decimated at the end-Cretaceous extinction alongside their close dinosaurian relatives. After the mass extinction, modern birds (members of the avian crown group) explosively diversified, culminating in more than 10,000 species distributed worldwide today.

A PDF of The Origin and Diversification of Birds can be found here: http://is.gd/FtPGWD

British Columbia Birds – In Press article

The following In press papers from British Columbia Birds are now available on the BCFO Member’s area of the web site:

Sealy, S.G. 2016. The Reverend John H. Keen’s observations of birds and unpublished list from the Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii), British Columbia, 1890–1899.

Sealy, S.G. 2016. Significance of the bird specimens collected by the Reverend John H. Keen on the Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii) and at Metlakatla, British Columbia, 1890–1914.