birds
grrlscientist | September 11, 2007tags: birds, American Robin, Turdus migratorius, Image of the Day
American Robin, Turdus migratorius, with hungry nestlings in NYC's Central Park.
Image: Bob Levy, author of Club George. [wallpaper size].
More below the fold regarding how this image was captured.
The photographer writes: This picture is from my almost-too-cute-for-words file. It may be another one of those ho-hum-here-go-again photos of nestlings but how I got this shot will always stay with me.
I was standing on a sloping boulder on the far northwest edge of the Ramble in Central Park when I heard the nestlings yelling…
grrlscientist | September 10, 2007tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Clark's Grebe, Aechmorphus clarkii, in the foreground with a Western Grebe, Aechmorphus occidentalis, behind. Both were photographed on the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge (north end of the Great Salt Lake) in the spring of 2005. Similar birds, but the field marks are straw-yellow bill (Clark's) cf. greenish-yellow bill (Western); white feathering around the eye (Clark's) cf black (Western), and whiter flanks on the Clark's Grebe. This pair of birds was hanging out together, and that was not unusual, making one wonder…
sheril | September 10, 2007Before Sheril dissected a sea cucumber, briefed a senator, or picked up a mic, she found me - Sparticus Maximus The Great. She's my human. As the superior of species (hey, did you descend from dinosaurs? I thought not!), I keep her in line when necessary. You can imagine with her unusual preoccupation with books -- which ought to be eaten not read! -- this particular homo sapien can be a handful...err beakful. Of course, I try to be patient, recognizing she's less evolved since humans didn't spring into existence until sometime in the Cenozoic Era.
Anyway, when we all learned of Friday…
clock | September 9, 2007Today on Quotes of the Day:
Harland David Sanders was born at Henryville, Indiana on this day in 1890. His father's death six years later led to Harland doing all the cooking for the family. He left school early and led a varied career including street-car conductor, a soldier in China at sixteen, a railroad fireman, justice of the peace (after a correspondence course in law), he operated an Ohio River ferry line, sold insurance, and operated a service station. At the service station, he fed hungry travelers in his quarters above the station. When the food proved more popular than auto…
grrlscientist | September 7, 2007The 57th edition of I and the Bird blog carnival is now available for you to enjoy. Be sure to drop in and give them support by following their links.
grrlscientist | September 6, 2007tags: Pale Male, NYC red=tailed hawk, Image of the Day
The photographer writes: I caught the world famous celebrity Red-tailed Hawk Pale Male in a patriotic mood on one of his favorite perches atop the flagpole at the Castle in Central Park. No doubt he was getting into the spirit of this holiday weekend. Let him be an inspiration to us all. Viva Labor Day. It appears to me the city could find the budget to buy a new flag. This one's a bit worn around the edges but then some of us feel the same way.
Image: Bob Levy, author of Club George. [larger].
retrospectacle | September 6, 2007A few months back, the folks from the blog City Parrots shared these beautiful photos with me of a wild parrot population (red-masked parakeets and Amazon parrots) in Ocean Beach, far from their native home in Mexico and South America. One of them (under the fold to preserve the mirage of decency on this blog) caught two amorous birds in the act of mating. So, if you ever wondered how parrots "did it," now you say can you know.
Two red-masked parakeets in Ocean Beach, California
The story of the wild Amazon parrots of Ocean Beach is quite interesting, as two separate species were discovered…
revere | September 5, 2007What seemed pretty obvious at first, that wild birds could be and were long distance carriers of H5N1 is, like the birds themselves, still up in the air. The problem is that existing data on migrating wild birds has failed to show convincing evidence they are infected:
FAO officials last year voiced concerns that bird migration patterns might have spread disease Asia and Europe to Africa. But as elsewhere in the world, very few cases have been found among wild birds in Africa.
The Wildlife Conservation Society Field Veterinary Program Director William Karesh is among those attending the…
grrlscientist | September 3, 2007tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Among the animals Darwin spotted on the Galapagos Islands were the blue-footed boobies, Sula nebouxii excisa. The males show off their blue feet to potential mates with high-stepping dances.
Image: Stephen C. Quinn, AMNH. [larger].
Birds in Science
A new study published in the leading ornithological journal Ibis has uncovered that for the vast majority of bird species, there are more males than females. The discovery suggests that populations of many of the world's threatened birds could therefore be overestimated,…
grrlscientist | August 31, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, splendid fairy-wren, Malurus splendens,sexual dichromatism, evolution, behavior, promiscuity, social monogamy
Male splendid fairy-wren, Malurus splendens.
Image: Pete Morris (Surfbirds.com). [screensaver size]
Everyone is familiar with sexual dichromatism in birds; you know, the gorgeous, colorful male who is paired with the drab female or two. It has been observed in birds that, when males and females differ dramatically in appearance, the females are preferentially mating with a few "pretty boys"; those that have elaborate plumage colors or ornamentation. As…
revere | August 14, 2007We write so much here about influenza A virus that you might get the idea it is an especially clever virus, always changing genetically in ways that allow it to perform new and nastier tricks. But other viruses are capable of doing the same thing, and one of them West Nile Virus (WNV), is currently becoming a a more persistent and serious public health hazard, all because of a clever little genetic trick it learned in the last decade or so.
WNV has been around longer than that, although we didn't have a problem with it in North America until 1999, when this mosquito-borne disease showed up,…
retrospectacle | August 2, 2007 Rebecca O'Connor, graduate student at the University of California- Riverside, knows why parrots screech and bite and it has a lot more to do with human behavior than the bird's. She's written a book incorporating animal-training techniques, detailing how to improve the manners of an ill-mannered bird by rewarding good behavior while keeping a handle on your own emotions.
Part of an emerging group of behaviorists who reject old ideas of punishing and dominating birds, O'Connor is gaining national attention with her book, "A Parrot for Life: Raising and Training the Perfect Parrot Companion…
clock | August 1, 2007The textbook example of commensalism was always the interaction between trees and the birds who make nests in those trees - it was always assumed that the birds gain from this relationships, while the trees are not in any way affected by it.
Now, a new study came out, demonstrating (for the first time, as far as I know - is that correct?), that the relationship between at least some trees and some birds is actually mutualism, i.e., both partners profit from the relationship:
Chickadees, nuthatches and warblers foraging their way through forests have been shown to spur the growth of pine…
grrlscientist | August 1, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, white-crowned sparrow, Zonotrichia leucophrys, steroids, brain growth
White-crowned sparrow, Zonotrichia leucophrys [song and other information].
Image: Birds of Oklahoma.
The first thing that most people think of when they hear the word "steroids" is baseball players who rely on these chemicals to increase their muscle mass and thereby improve their athletic performance. But recently, a small songbird that I studied for my dissertation work, Gambel's white-crowned sparrow, Zonotrichia leucophrys gambelii, has shown scientists that steroids trigger the growth…
clock | July 21, 2007I also saw some seagull chicks, learning to fly, but only took a picture of this cormorant at the Pier 39:
grrlscientist | July 18, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, flight speed, birds, ornithology, aerodynamics, evolution
Not Bad, But Not Perfect
A peregrine falcon keeps a close eye as she circles her nest in St. Louis.
A new survey of 138 species of birds finds that closely-related birds fly at roughly the same speeds and that no birds are perfect flying specimens.
Image: Tom Gannam (AP) [larger]
When it comes to flight speeds, human-made contraptions, such as airplanes, conform to basic aerodynamic scaling rules, which generate predictions based on how much an object weighs and how large its wings are. However, those…
clock | July 17, 2007A very interesting new paper was published today in PLoS Biology:
Flight Speeds among Bird Species: Allometric and Phylogenetic Effects by Thomas Alerstam, Mikael Rosen, Johan Backman, Per G. P. Ericson and Olof Hellgren:
Analysing the variation in flight speed among bird species is important in understanding flight. We tested if the cruising speed of different migrating bird species in flapping flight scales with body mass and wing loading according to predictions from aerodynamic theory and to what extent phylogeny provides an additional explanation for variation in speed. Flight speeds…
grrlscientist | June 20, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, superb starling, Spreo superbus, Lamprotornis superbus, birds, behavior, infidelity
Superb starling, Lamprotornis (Spreo) superbus.
These small birds are commonly found in open woodlands and savannahs throughout Northeast Africa.
Image: Hogle Zoo, Utah.
While it is widely known that males of many species seek out extra-pair copulations in order to produce as many offspring as possible, the reasons for female "infidelity" are much more complex. For example, a study was recently published that showed how a bird species uses sexual politics to ensure maximal…
clock | June 15, 2007
Explanation
Actually, the picture (author is Antun Zuljevic, a birder extraordinnaire) is from the village of Svilojevo in northern Serbia (Vojvodina, near the town of Apatin on the Danube) where the Locust Trees have been cut, and nobody is building large haystacks any more, so the storks are forced to build nests in crazy places. This pair of White Storks was not successful in nesting on this factory chimney last year, but they had better luck this time around. Yup, storks prefer nesting on chimneys only in fairy tales. In reality, that is the site of last resort.
Source: Google group…
grrlscientist | June 15, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, global warming, climate change, ornithology, birds, avian biodiversity, habitat destruction
White-crested hornbill, Tropicranus albocristatus, also confined to African rainforests, may see more than half of its geographic range lost by 2100.
Image: Walter Jetz, UCSD. [larger]
Thanks to the combined effects of global warming and habitat destruction, bird populations will experience significant declines and extinctions over the next century, according to a study conducted by ecologists at the University of California, San Diego and Princeton University. This…