What kills cows, saves birds

Sick cows in Europe may help grassland birds in North America, a paper published today in the __Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences__ suggests.

Image: Steven Mileham, flickr

Poring over four decades' worth of data, researchers at Trent University in Ontario stumbled upon a sort of __butterfly effect__ in which mad cow disease outbreaks that periodically strike Europe's cattle result in an increase in the population of grassland birds in the US and Canada a few years later."This is an intriguing study," said linkurl:Peter Vickery,;http://www.umass.edu/forwild/faculty/vickery.html an avian ecologist from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was not involved in the study. "It's a great starting point for trying to get conservation biologists and others to look at bigger pictures and potential connections between international events that may not seem so obvious at first blush."The possibility of such an unlikely connection first occurred to linkurl:Joseph Nocera,;http://people.trentu.ca/joenocera/ a conservation biologist at...