Amazing birds

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Marathon efforts

A bird that weighs less than a pound has completed the longest migration on record, reports the Times of London. The Sooty Shearwater travels the Pacific Ocean in a figure-eight pattern each year, flying up to 74 000 km. The bird can cover up to 1094 km. a day, according to scientists. Tracking data also show the bird dive to a depth of 14 metres, on average, to catch fish, squid and krill and can dive as deep as 68.5 metres. The Artic Tern, no slouch at migrating, covers 35 400 km annually between the polar icecaps.

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Big-city songbirds are changing their tunes. European biologists recently found evidence that some species, such as Nightingale, where singing louder to be heard over traffic and other urban noises.
Now, a Dutch team has found that other city birds are singing faster, and at a higher pitch, than their country cousins

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Sensible birds
Birds in Chernobyl choose to nest in sites with lower levels of background radioactivity, a team of French and American scientists
have discovered. How the animals can tell this remains a mystery, says the New Scientist.

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Follow your beak
Birds may be able to fly vast distances without getting lost because sensors in their beaks, according to a German study. Scientists at the University of Frankfurt said they found tiny iron-oxide crystals in the skin lining of the upper beak of homing pigeons, laid out in three-dimensional pattern that may help the birds to read the Earth magnetic field. We expect that the pigeon-type receptor might turn out to be a universal feature of all birds, writes Gerta Fleissner and colleagues in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

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Gangsters
People have long wondered how Cowbirds can get away with leaving their eggs in the nests of other birds, writes Randolph Schmid of Associated Press.
Why wont the host just toss the strange eggs out? Now researchers seem to have the answer if the host birds reject the strange eggs, the Cowbirds come back and trash the place. Its the female Cowbird who is running the Mafia racket at our study site, says Jeffrey Hoover, of the Florida Museum of Natural History. Our study shows many of them returned and ransacked the nest when we removed the parasitic egg.
Scientists also found evidence of what they called farming behaviour, in which the Cowbird destroyed a nest to force the host bird to build another. The Cowbird then synchronized its egg-laying with the hosts renest attempt.

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Translators
Red-breasted Nuthatches respond to alarm calls of Black-capped Chickadees and they tailor their response to the thread level the Chickadees identify, reports The Christian Monitor. For instance the Chickadees give a less-worrisome warning about the presence of a lumbering Great Horned Owl than about the appearance of a smaller, agile Pygmy Owl. To test the Nuthatches language skills, Christopher Templeton of the University of Washington and colleagues placed speakers beneath trees with Nuthatches, but no Chickadees. The Nuthatches went ballistic when the team replayed Chickadee calls warning of small predators. But they were much less worked up over
the large predator warning. That one animal has cracked the code and extracted information from another species is pretty amazing, Mr. Templeton says. The result appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Always in the air
Amazingly, young Swifts may spend the first two or three years of their life entirely in the air, feeding on flying insects and scooping water from lakes or rivers, writes Jon Howard in BBC Focus Magazine. If a Swift lands on the ground it cannot take off because of its short legs. If you find an uninjured grounded Swift, take it to an upstairs window and hold it out on your palm of your hand.

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Its a living Dodo
A wetland bird that eluded scientists for nearly 130 years has been rediscovered at a wastewater treatment plant in Thailand. Little is known about the Large-billed Reed Warbler because it had not been seen since its discovery in 1867 in India. Because it was so rare, scientists had long debated whether it represented a true species or was an aberrant individual of a common species. That debate appears to be settled after Phillip Round of Bangkoks Mahidol University captured one of the birds in March of last year. One of the birds I caught that morning struck me as a very odd, something about it didnt quite add up, he told The Associated Press. Then, it dawned on me I was properly holding a Large-billed Reed Warbler. I was dumbstruck. It felt as if I was holding a living Dodo.

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Conservationists believe they may have discovered an avian aphrodisiac which could save the Kakapo, reports The New Zealand Herald. One of the worlds most endangered birds, the Kakapo number only 86. The Parrots are notoriously infrequent breeders, mating only once every three to five years. But Auckland University nutritional ecologist David Raubenheimer hopes the new bird seed he is developing will pep up the birds --- lives. The feed aims to more closely resemble the nutritional makeup of Rimu fruit. Professor Raubenheimer has observed that females breeding years tend to coincide with the years in which the trees fruit most heavily. The birds notoriously fussy eaters are taking to the new food pellets, despite their larger, harder-to-eat size.

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We are now living in what I like to call the suburban wilderness, writes Gary Boque in the Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.). In the suburban wilderness (the curious world around our houses), weather stations, porch lights, hanging plants etc., are just as useful as trees, as far as birds that live here are concerned. And thats where a lot of them now nests. Mourning Doves, Finches, and Hummingbirds like to build their nests as close as possible to our houses, because the human activity helps keep the predatory jays away.

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Birds in Britain are reportedly picking up discarded cigarette butts and using the smoke to fumigate their wings of parasites, says The Daily Telegraph. Rooks have been spotted swooping on the tracks at Exter St. Davids railway station in Devon and placing their wings over the smoke to collect the fumes underneath. Richard Archer, of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, in Archer, said it was the first time he had heard of the phenomenon. But he added that the birds may have adapted and learned that the cigarettes can be used to kill parasites. You have to be very careful atributing behaviour but it would seem fumigation is the most likely conclusion. Rooks are very intelligent.

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Parakeet Psyches
In what may be a legislative first for San Francisco, the citys board of supervisors have banned the feeding of wild Parakeets. A flock of Green-and-red Parakeets spend the evening in a downtown park, where locals and tourists assemble to feed the birds, sometime by hand, say The New York Time. That behaviour has upset some long time birdwatchers, who fear the Parakeets will become too domesticated to feed on their own. Aaron Peskin, the city board president, contended the feeders were threatening the physical and psychological health of the birds.

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WHO RULES THE ROOST
Ontario Place is all mobbed up with those gull-durn birds
Don't catch their eye. Don't look at them the wrong way. They're hungry - and they're not afraid to fight
ZACH FELDBERG
Special to The Globe and Mail
June 9, 2007
Ontario Place - known for its lush greenery, majestic views and family-friendly attractions - is controlled not by the government, but by an elite group of hostile birds.
Nearly 40 years after the park opened its gates on the man-made islands off Toronto's shore, warring factions battle for stewardship of its land, water and food scraps. Forget The Sopranos - this is the real deal, and it's happening right here.
The consortium is composed of a veritable Five Families of avian crime: the swans, the geese, the seagulls, the blackbirds and the herons. All are driven by survival and a love for the manicured beauty of the park - and they'll stop at nothing to protect what's theirs.
The Canada geese are the bullies; they travel in menacing gaggles. They love feeding on the delicious lawns and don't like their dinner disturbed. "Never engage them," warns former park supervisor and human intruder Kate Powers. "Nothing is scarier than staring into 20 pairs of beady little black eyes when there's no one around to save you. They will charge."
Black-winged blackbirds, meanwhile, maintain order by swooping down, sounding out a resounding konk-la-ree, and angrily pecking at perceived predators. Ms. Powers remembers answering panicked calls from her staff who were regularly attacked during morning checks of the mini-golf course. "I would show up with an umbrella," she says.
Ornithologist Bridget Stutchbury, author of Silence of the Songbirds, explains: "It's parental care. The herons would love to eat the blackbirds' eggs, so they are vicious with intruders. Keep your distance."
Luckily, hungry great blue herons tend to leave humans alone, but their imposing height and long beaks put them ahead of the pack when it comes to putting food on the table, spelling bad news for the little guys.
The ring-billed seagulls, famed for their ability to fly while carrying entire pizzas in their beaks, are juvenile players and so have made few friends among the locals - especially the blackbirds, whose eggs they also like to eat.
But it's the mute swans - whose ancestry can be traced back to a visit from the Queen in the 1970s, when Her Majesty donated a pair of them to the park - that are especially notorious. Stories of swan-on-goose violence abound at Ontario Place, and few birds would dare step on swan turf for fear of being made to sleep with the fishes. "They're so aggressive that native waterfowl can't use the same pond as them," Ms. Stutchbury says.
Joe Tavares, the park's director of maintenance, knows all about the complexities of these relationships and endeavours to keep guests out of harm's way. "If there's a swan nesting on the main thoroughfare, we have to protect people from going near," he says. "But otherwise we let them do their thing." As long as the birds are given amnesty, though, can there ever be harmony in this volatile kingdom? Probably not, Ms. Stutchbury says. "The aggressiveness must work often enough that they're rewarded for it."
On your next visit to the park, you might consider looking up and around before settling in, because it's official: Ontario Place is for the birds.

PS: Sorry for calling a gull a seagull

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June 29, 2007
Light on the past

Paleontologists have uncovered the fossilized remains of a giant tropical penguin in Peru. The extinct creature was at least 1.5 metres high, taller than even the emperor penguin, and had an 18 cm beak that was more than twice as long as its head. It would have swum in tropical waters 36 million years ago during one of the warmest periods on Earth since the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
"You can tell how nimble an animal is without even looking at its legs: Simply check the size of its inner ear," writes Marissa Cevallos of ScienceNow Daily News. "A new study shows that agile animals, such as tree-swinging gibbons or brown bats, have relatively larger ear canals than their lumbering counterparts the sloths or dugongs, a relative of the manatee. The finding may provide an innovative way to check how quick-footed extinct species were."

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LISAN JUTRAS
July 12, 2007
Gertrude Stein, in 1932, wrote a ditty that began, "Pigeons on the grass alas."
Two years later, James Thurber took her to task for this. "Pigeons," he wrote, "are definitely not alas. They have nothing to do with alas, and they have nothing to do with hooray."
This is not how Jose Jesus feels. Pigeons, for him, are most definitely hooray. They are also great goddamn, hell's bells, yee-haw and every shade in between.
"I don't love pigeons - I adore them," Mr. Jesus says ecstatically, standing in his coop in downtown Toronto. "I love them the same as I love my wife and kids!" (Wife, interjecting: "Oh, please.") "When I get up in the morning, before I talk to my wife, I come see my birds."
Mr. Jesus breeds giant runts, a Brobdingnagian version of what are known, in the world of fanciers, as "commons" - that is, street pigeons. (Mr. Jesus bred a bird that at one time held the record for largest pigeon in the world, weighing in at 2.5 kilos.)
But he loves commons just fine, too. In fact, pretty much any kind of pigeon can find a roost in Mr. Jesus's heart, and that's a lot of love to give, considering pigeons live on every continent except Antarctica.
Like the humble sky rat itself, fanciers too span the globe, at once ubiquitous and unnoticed. They populate both countryside and cities, secreting their booty in homemade coops where the bylaws permit it.
Every so often they descend in great numbers on an unsuspecting city. In December of 2006, 650 fanciers arrived in Des Moines, Iowa, for the Grand National Pigeon Show, accompanied by 7,400 birds.
A typical roster of pigeon breeds sounds like a lineup of unusually inspired indie band names: there are Bohemian pouters, modern Spanish thief pouters, Oriental rollers, flying baldheads, Chinese nasal tufteds and, for the existentialist fancier, Franconian toy selfs.
Some are bred for their looks. The pouter, for example, has an enormously swelling chest topped with an inconsequential head; its bottom half looks swishy in a late 1970s Cher number, with feathers cascading over its spindly shanks and onto its feet. The overall effect "may well," in the words of Charles Darwin, "excite astonishment and even laughter."
Rollers, meanwhile, are bred to execute tight, plummeting somersaults in mid-flight. "They fly for 20 minutes," says Jay Lucarreli, head of the Toronto Flying Roller Club, "and judges count the number of spins," awarding points accordingly. ("Sometimes," one fancier confessed, "they spin so deeply that they hit the ground.")
"If it's not a good bird," says Mr. Lucarreli pragmatically, "I give them to a friend of mine to eat."
Homing pigeons are not considered show birds, but these "thoroughbreds of the sky," as Nick Oud, president of the Canadian Racing Pigeon Union, puts it, inspire passion as well.
Not only can they find their way home from just about anywhere you leave them (no one really knows how), he says, "They're speed demons when the conditions are right."
Mr. Oud's homers average 70 kilometres an hour, but he's seen birds top 100 km/h. With speeds like this, it's clear why pigeons were for thousands of years crucial to human communication, especially in times of war.
As recently as 1991, the Iraqi army allegedly relied on pigeons when its electronic systems were jammed, and it wasn't until 2002 that the police department in Orissa, India, stopped using "P-mail."
But it seems that nowadays not only is the use of pigeons becoming obsolete but, in North America at least, their fans may also be in decline.
"There's not enough young blood coming into the hobby," Mr. Lucarelli laments.
Mr. Oud agrees. "The average age of the fancier is getting up there," he says. "I'm 60 and I'm one of the younger ones at the club, sad to say."
The day may yet come when all we have left is a few commons, alas, to remind us of the glory days.

Lisan Jutras is a Toronto-based writer and editor. She has two cats, a Boricua dog and many garments covered in pet hair.

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Rita Oenhauser, a German ornithologist who started a dating agency for parrots, has just brought her 2,000th pair together, reports Ananova News. "Unlike a regular dating agency my work is very satisfying, as parrots, like swans, will mate for life and remain faithful," she said. "I don't have to do much other than make the introductions. Some birds experience love at first sight, while others make a really careful choice before entering a relationship and need to be talked into it with a complicated courtship."

It's kind a like Birdingpal. What do you think??
Knud
Birdingpal.org
Find a birder to go birdwatching with anywhere in the world.

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Polly wants a home
That talking parrot may seem like a good idea at the store, but these high-maintenance pets are increasingly being abandoned
CINDA CHAVICH
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
July 31, 2007 at 9:08 AM EDT
COOMBS, B.C. ? Max sits in the corner crooning I Left My Heart in San Francisco.
Ginny rips out her iridescent green and orange feathers, self-mutilating like the addicts in the crack house where she was rescued.
Peaches lost a wing but seems to have the run of the special needs unit, toddling around on her pigeon toes and chatting up anyone within earshot.
Parrots (including ??, ??, macaws and other exotic psittacines) are the hottest new pet for busy urbanites. In the United States, the number of pet birds quadrupled in the 1990s, to more than 40 million by some industry estimates. And bird sales continue to grow by an estimated 5 per cent a year.
Enlarge Image
Like other stressed birds at the World Parrot Refuge, Merlin, a Moluccan ??, has plucked out some of his feathers. Being confined in a cage can lead parrots to self-mutilation and other abnormal behaviours. (Deddeda Stemler for The Globe and Mail)
But the dark side of the surge in popularity of pet parrots is an ever-growing population of abandoned birds.
"There has been an alarming increase in the number of displaced and unwanted birds in recent years," says Wendy Huntbatch, who runs the World Parrot Refuge in Coombs, B.C., on the east side of Vancouver Island, "because people have no idea how much time and energy it takes to care for these exotic wild animals."
Ms. Huntbatch provides homes for more than 500 abandoned and homeless birds at the refuge, the largest of its kind in the country, through her non-profit For the Love of Parrots Refuge Society.
With individual birds selling for up to $15,000, the trafficking of wild birds is on the rise, accounting for a significant part of the estimated $10-billion (U.S.) to $20-billion international exotic wildlife trade. According to the World Wildlife Fund, 94 of the world's 330 parrot species are threatened with extinction.
According to the Species Survival Network, a global coalition of wildlife conservation groups, the yellow-crested ?? of East Timor and Indonesia is close to extinction as a result of trapping and poaching for the pet trade, and the Spix's macaw of Brazil is already extinct in the wild. The popular African grey parrot is also a threatened species, and in Bolivia, the endangered red-fronted macaw is protected under a new conservation program.
Yet despite a European Union ban as of July 1 on the importation of wild-caught birds - a move triggered by fears of the spread of avian influenza - and a similar ban in the United States, Canada continues to allow wild parrots to be imported as pets.
"The U.S. has had legislation against the importation of wild-caught birds since 1992 - it's time for Canada to do the same," says Ms. Huntbatch, who is circulating a petition to stop the sale of wild parrots.
Few people understand the horrors of the wild bird trade, she says, or the long-term commitment of owning a parrot.
At the World Parrot Refuge, an educational facility open to tourists and school groups, the sad and graphic stories of more than 500 feathered residents - like Max, Ginny and Peaches - are told through interpretive panels and video presentations. The overriding message is this: Parrots are wild animals that deserve freedom, not caging as pets, and buying exotic birds threatens species in the wild.
Ms. Huntbatch thinks people continue to buy birds because of status, style and a misguided belief that a parrot is happy to live its life in a cage (making it a low-maintenance pet).
Parrots are actually social creatures and mate for life, so they can be extremely lonely without their flock. Birds need more than a perch and a cage - they need an aviary with room to fly. The stress of being confined in a cage can lead to excessive screaming, self-mutilation and other abnormal behaviours. And parrots, whether huge macaws or small budgies, need special diets of fresh tropical fruit, seeds, nuts, vegetables and protein, plus lots of toys to attack and shred.
Many bird owners discover too late that birds are naturally extremely noisy and demanding. And unless you have the space to give them a life that mimics their wild habitat and the time to devote to their care, parrots can become neurotic and destructive. They can even be dangerous and unpredictable, able to lop off fingers with their strong beaks.
Add to that the fact that most parrots will live between 40 and 90 years, and even the most committed caretakers eventually must part with their birds.
Many pet parrots end up on the resale merry-go-round, passed from owner to owner, often neglected and abused. Since most animal shelters are not designed to care for birds, unwanted parrots often end up with small volunteer rescue groups or in foster homes.
According to bird experts, the "parrot displacement problem" is reaching epidemic proportions, yet there are few places for unwanted parrots. Across Canada, two bird rescue organizations folded this year because of a lack of funds and volunteers - Chaotic Exotics in Calgary and Wings of Hope, an Ontario-based parrot rescue group that had been operating for 13 years.
Some of the birds from these defunct groups ended up at Ms. Huntbatch's doorstep, the last resort for sick, difficult and aging parrots. Ms. Huntbatch, too, constantly faces financial crisis - last year Revenue Canada threatened to close down the refuge for $13,000 (Canadian) owing in back taxes, and a recent massive storm ripped a section of the roof from the Macaw House.
An outpouring of donations from local businesses, animal lovers and a Vancouver casino paid the tax bill and helped rebuild the damaged aviary, but Ms. Huntbatch says the non-profit society continues to struggle, counting on donations to keep it afloat.
"It costs a quarter million dollars a year to operate this place even with all of our volunteers," she says. "Labour is the most expensive, but the food is also an issue. ... Every three weeks we buy 750 pounds of nuts."
Inside the refuge's huge metal-clad buildings, birds are separated by species into colourful flocks. With its large indoor aviaries, each 27 metres long and filled with wooden perches, the refuge gives these intelligent birds a place to live in groups, as they do in nature, along with space to fly, healthy food and the care of knowledgeable staff and volunteers.
"I love this job - it's one of a kind," says David Dawson, wiring chunks of red-barked arbutus wood with colourful children's toys to create perches for the parrots. "They love to shred bright stuffed toys - it keeps their beak sharp and strong."
Ms. Huntbatch coos to Ester, a talkative bird being treated for cancer, and balances a massive blue macaw on her outstretched arm, its tail feathers almost grazing the ground.
Even extremely stressed and abused birds, some plucked almost naked when they arrive, can recover and lead a "normal" life here amid the security of the flock with proper food and medical care, Ms. Huntbatch says.
While the majority of birds sold in pet stores are captive-bred, conservationists say breeding parrots contributes to poaching, smuggling and the homeless parrot problem by feeding consumer demand.
The goal of the refuge, Ms. Huntbatch says, is to educate the public about the problems facing wild and pet parrots. It costs about $500 a year to house one parrot; the group is always looking for new ways to keep the refuge operating, from food and used-toy drives to "virtual adoption" schemes.
For now, they're getting by on a wing and a prayer.
For more information on the World Parrot Refuge, visit http://www.worldparrotrefuge.org.

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A new hummingbird has been discovered in Colombia, reports Birder's World. The gorgeted puffleg is the 329th species in the Trochilidae family, one of the avian world's largest. The 10-centimetre-long bird, with a violet-blue-and-green throat patch and white tufts above its legs, is considered critically endangered.

Griffon vultures in the French Pyrenees have reportedly begun attacking and killing livestock - including animals as large as cattle. The oddly behaving birds, labelled "mutant vultures" by Le Nouvel Observateur, are thought to be driven to their aggression by a European Union ban on leaving Spanish animal carcasses out in fields to rot, depriving the birds of 8,000 kilograms of dead meat a day. Vultures have been reported circling the body of a French pensioner who died while hiking, and landing next to a village fountain where a mother was sitting with her children.

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An Australian study has found that walking dogs in natural areas dramatically reduces the number and variety of birdlife, says The Australian. "Dog walking and conservation areas really don't mix," contends University of New South Wales ecologist Peter Banks, a specialist in prey and predator behaviour. Writing in the journal Biology Letters, he and research student Jessica Bryant report that dog walking in woodlands leads to a 35 per cent reduction in the diversity of bird species and a 41 per cent drop in the abundance of birds. Until now, adds the newspaper, there was no hard data about the ecological impact dog walking had - or didn't have - on wildlife.

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Source: The Hartford (Conn.) Courant
Cherchez les chicks
"When I heard a flock of chickadees making a commotion in a woodlot ... I immediately veered in their direction," birdwatcher Bob Marcotte writes in the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle. "[T]hat's where you're also likely to find migrating songbirds that might otherwise go completely undetected. ... my theory is that, over time, migrating songbirds have evolved the tactic of tagging along with chickadees precisely because they are permanent residents in the woodlots, and thus are more likely to know where the best places are for finding insects and other food on any given day."

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Migration is without question a difficult business, demanding that a bird put on massive fat stores to power its long nights of flight, writes Natalie Angier in The New York Times. Before departing from New England for South America, for example, a Blackpoll warbler, which normally weighs about 11 grams (the equivalent of a half-dollar coin) will in a matter of days at least double its body mass. If you were to take one of these fluffy tublets and blow on its feathers, says Dr. Irby Lovette, associate professor of evolutionary biology at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., you would see bumps of white fat barely held in check by its skin.

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Many penguin species cross the beach in groups of five to 10 birds to protect themselves from predators, reports Asian News International. Australian researchers studying Little penguins (the smallest species), have found that individuals tend to form a team with the same fishing partners as they go off to hunt, perhaps because it helps to buddy up with penguins that share knowledge of particular feeding sites. However, the scientists also found that only middle-aged penguins do so, and then only when food is abundant and a large number of chicks have fledged that year. In years when food is scarce, the birds are less choosy, perhaps because they're fishing alone to avoid sharing scarce resources. Older and younger penguins, both of which are likely to be poorer fishers, are never picked to be part of a team.

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by WARREN CLEMENTS
Oh, how the language can mislead. There was a recent sighting of a bird called the northern wheatear near Ontario's Rondeau Provincial Park, on Lake Erie. This was unusual, since in Canada the wheatears tend to breed on Baffin Island and migrate through Greenland and Iceland and Europe to Africa.
But more unusual is its name, which might suggest ears of wheat, as in George Meredith's 1878 poem Love in the Valley: "Slain are the poppies that shot their random scarlet/ Quick amid the wheatears." Indeed, in The History of the Worthies of England in 1662, English author Thomas Fuller wrote that "wheatears" (he used the plural for the singular) is a bird peculiar to ---, and "is so called because [it's] fattest when wheat is ripe, whereon it feeds."
Well, the bird may have favoured ---, and it may well have acquired that spelling because people associated it with wheat, but its name originated as whiteeres - whit meaning white, and eeres meaning arse, since the bird has a white rump. Its belly is white as well, though those who named it chose the more embarrassing angle. It's a wonder the bird's face isn't bright scarlet.

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A sleeping father and son in Muncie, Ind., were awakened by their Amazon parrot, Peanut, imitating a fire alarm. "He was really screaming his head off," said Shannon Conwell, 33. The house was on fire and all of them got out.
Marine iguanas in the Galapagos Islands sun themselves on rocks and thus have problems spotting the hungry hawks that swoop down on them several times a day. Although the reptiles do not communicate vocally, their ears can tell the difference between standard mockingbird songs and the alarm sounds the birds chirp when a hawk approaches. The iguanas tend to perk up, look around and take evasive action.
Sources: The Associated Press, The Washington Post

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Behind the trill of the dawn chorus lies a murky world of easy ---, multiple partners and male domination, reports The Independent. According to new research on wrens, early-morning birdsong is about male competition and older males wooing already partnered females. One type of song - the chatter - keeps other males in their place, while a second - the trill - is a sign of male fitness, and is homed in on by females. Because many species sing at the same time, the dawn chorus has been attributed to better acoustics at that time of day or reduced risk of predators.

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As Albert Einstein did for physicists, Charles Darwin provided biologists with a surfeit of observations and hypotheses to try to confirm or reject.
One of Darwin's more controversial notions was that new species could emerge in the same place without physical barriers such as mountains to trigger diverging evolutionary lines.
The fancy name for this is sympatric speciation, and it's been demonstrated in a few rare cases for plants, insects and fishes. Now an international research project led by Queen's University professor Vicki Friesen has discovered a striking example in birds, the most complex creatures yet.
An expert in seabirds, Friesen looked at the band-rumped storm-petrel (Oceanodroma castro) on five tropical islands where it nests, all the way from the Azores to the Galapagos. Her interest was aroused at a conference a decade ago when another researcher said the storm-petrels appeared to "time-share" the burrows, which serve as nests.
One wave of storm-petrels arrives on the island, lays eggs, raises the chicks, and departs. Later in the year, a second wave arrives and does the same. DNA investigation showed that this separate breeding season was enough to produce populations of storm-petrels that differ genetically.
In the Galapagos, where the process began roughly 1,000 years ago, these differences are minor. In the Azores, however, the researchers estimate the differentiation has been going on for 180,000 years.
As a result, the two storm-petrel populations have evolved different calls; one has a fork in its tail. Avid birders are no doubt flocking to be the first to record a new species.
"This means we can get species in more than one way, which is really exciting," says Friesen, lead author of a report in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
She intends to look for similar breeding-season speciation in five other species of storm-petrels Leach's, Ashy, Polynesian, Tristram's and Matsudaira's while others may investigate birds of prey, such as kestrels.

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Yet another reason to dislike the European starlings that occupy North American cities: They're good at carrying the bird virus.
Infectious-disease expert Robert Webster at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis decided to test the virus transmission in starlings because common songbirds in Hong Kong "have been dropping dead out of the sky."
Captured starlings infected with four different strains of avian influenza breathed and defecated large amounts of virus, Webster and colleagues report in this month's Emerging Infectious Diseases.
They also found that the infected starlings transmitted the bug to an uninfected cage mate.
These results show that starlings could serve as a reservoir for the deadly H5N1 avian flu virus if it ever spreads to North America. Millions of ducks and chickens have been slaughtered after outbreaks in Asia, Europe and Africa, and more than 200 people have died from avian influenza over the past 10 years.
The good news is that the same lab tests showed that house sparrows and pigeons didn't spread the virus among themselves and would be poor reservoirs for bird flu.

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What nourishes you might also kill you, especially when it comes to fish slime. However, it appears that the almost 50 bald eagles that landed on a truck full of fish waste and started to guzzle were too hungry to remember such wise words. Unfortunately, at least 19 of them died after gorging themselves on the truck full of fish slime, while the others are currently recovering after they have been rescued by Alaskas Kodiak National Wildlife Refuges officials.
The Friday incident seems to have happened because the hungry bald eagles had been attracted by the fish waste from the truck. They swarmed into the back of vehicle and eventually reached the truck and started to gobble the delicious fish waste. In the end the birds became too soiled to fly or to clean themselves; some of them started to succumb to the cold, while others began to simply sink into the fish slime and were crushed. Thus, more than 19 birds died in the first place.
As for the others, the rescue mission included the trucks contents being dumped onto the floor of the Ocean Beauty Seafoods plant so that the birds could be retrieved. Then the eagles that survived the incident were washed with dish soap and warm water and taken to a heated fish and wildlife warehouse to recover.
The dead eagles are to be shipped to a United States Department of Interior clearinghouse, where Native American groups could request their bodies or their feathers for ceremonial purposes.

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The mystery of how vast flocks of starlings fly in strict formation has been investigated by European scientists, who believe smaller groups within the larger whole explain the distinctive phenomenon. Italy's National Institute for the Physics of Matter conducted research into the awesome spectacle of starling flocks and discovered that each bird tracks seven fellow birds, enabling them to synchronize. The study is part of a piece of research called Starlings in Flight, which is being carried out by scientists in five European countries. The researchers hope their work might help us to understand how large groups affect human behaviour, including in the spheres of fashion and economics.

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The Blue Tits inhabiting the sycamore and beech woodlands of County Down two winters ago must have thought they'd discovered avian heaven in Northern Ireland. Mesh feeders brimming with peanuts were everywhere.
Alas, it was all merely a clever experiment. The easy pickings stopped in early March. By next winter the feeders had vanished.
Comparisons between the feast or famine treatment in consecutive years allowed British researchers to conclude that such feeding not only helps birds survive the winter as was already known but also benefits spring breeding and survivability of the young, even when feeding stops six weeks before the first eggs appear.
The Blue Tits with the free peanut passes laid eggs 2 1/2 days earlier, on average, than those that had to forage, suggesting that the females were in better body condition, the researchers report in the current Biology Letters from the Royal Society.
The males were also in better shape, meaning the parents had more energy resources to care for demanding chicks. Even though the blue tits laid and hatched the same average number of eggs in both years, the winter-fed birds raised an average of one more per nest to the fledgling stage.
Experts say these same findings almost certainly apply to over-wintering birds anywhere else. Stock up those backyard feeders, and enjoy more winged songsters next summer.

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Staff at a British nature reserve have been using a cellphone to encourage two South American birds to mate, The London Observer reports. The Washington Wetland Centre is home to a pair of crested screamers, which use distinctive calls to mark their territory and attract a mate. However, the centre's birds have shown no interest in mating. A recording of a screamer's call has been downloaded from the Internet and played to them. Warden Owen Joiner said: "They're a prehistoric species and this is reflected in the way that they move - everything happens at an incredibly slow pace. ... They are starting to react to the recording, which is very exciting."

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In the Seabird Sanctuary at Indian Shores, the boobies wear makeshift booties. These particular members of the booby family are northern gannets, large marine birds that breed off Canada's east coast and winter from North Carolina to the Falkland Islands.
In the wild, the birds spend much of their life in the air, so their feet aren't sand-toughened. To protect the creatures' delicate feet, sanctuary staff has outfitted recuperating gannets with booties.
These gannets are the survivors from 40 birds that fell on the Gulf beaches near here in the fall after eating fish laden with the toxic algae found in "red tides."
Nursed back to health, 18 of the birds will be released in time to fly north to nesting colonies in places such as Bonaventure Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence or Funk Island off the northeast coast of Newfoundland.
There they run a good chance of falling under the eye of Professor Bill Montevecchi and his Memorial University researchers, who have pioneered the use of miniaturized tracking devices to discover where gannets roam.
Their most surprising result: Not all gannets from Funk Island migrate south along the Atlantic coast. Instead, two of the tracker-equipped birds headed east, crossing the ocean in just four days and winding up at rich fishing grounds off the coast of Senegal in West Africa.
In the spring, the gannets then returned to almost the exact same spot on Funk Island, allowing graduate student Dave Fifield to retrieve the devices, which record temperature and the length of daylight. That information allowed the researchers to reconstruct the transatlantic journey.
But why did the gannets cross the ocean? Montevecchi speculates that the North American birds may have originated in Europe and that some are following a primordial signal to return to their ancestral wintering grounds.
"Yet of the 60,000 gannets that have been banded in European colonies, not one has ever turned up on this side of the ocean," says Montevecchi.

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On spring mornings, the male western song sparrow (Melospiza melodia morphna) hardly stops singing in the mixed forests of southern Ontario.
To other males, he's staking a claim to a patch of trees. To non-singing females, he's proclaiming his virtues as a potential mate.
Scientists already knew that female song sparrows go for the males who sing the local tunes. Now, Canadian research published in the current issue of Biology Letters from the Royal Society in Britain has provided the first clues about why.
For her Ph.D., researcher Kathryn Stewart recorded and analyzed several hundred songs from more than two dozen male song sparrows at the forest biological station maintained by Queen's University, north of Kingston.
Overall, the songs contained more than 130 "syllables" or repeated combinations of sounds. Individual males produced anywhere from 19 to 28 syllables.
Stewart's investigation showed that even when the male sparrows were similar genetically, the females still preferred the ones whose songs had the highest proportion of local content. The males who sang the local songs also proved to be in better condition than non-local songsters, with fewer parasites and evidence of more testosterone.
"If you fit in better with the acoustical environment, then when you sing, it will be a more effective territorial signal," says University of Western Ontario biology professor Elizabeth MacDougall-Shackleton, who supervised Stewart's Ph.D.

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When they're not flying over the white cliffs of Dover or bringing happiness, bluebirds are often heralding the arrival of spring. One fan of the bluebird, Dick Purvis, 80, of Anaheim, Calif., has been building and watching over nesting boxes for more than two decades. "Bluebirds are friendly birds and remember who you are," the retired engineer says. "I was sitting on a park bench and a pair were chittering and chittering at me. Finally, I decided to check their box. Sure enough, the bees had taken it over. So I hung a new box for them and they immediately flew in." Sometimes a pair of bluebirds will start chittering at Mr. Purvis before he parks his car.
Source: The Orange County
(Calif.) Register

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It's hard for outsiders to know what really goes on in a relationship. Fortunately, scientists are nosy types. Some of their reports:
Eastern bluebird: "The male ... does a 'nest demonstration display' at the nest cavity to attract the female. He brings nest material to the hole, goes in and out, and waves his wings while perched above it. That is pretty much his contribution to nest building."
Western bluebird: "Genetic studies showed that 45 per cent of nests had young that were not fathered by the defending male, and that 19 per cent of all the young were fathered outside the pair bond."
Mountain bluebird: "Only the female builds the nest. The male sometimes acts as if he is helping, but he either brings no nest material or he drops it on the way."
Source: Cornell Lab of
Ornithology

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"Doting grandparents are surprisingly rare," Smithsonian magazine says, "known mainly among baboons, lions, pilot whales and people. Now there's a bird: the Seychelles warbler. In a 24-year study, scientists in the Seychelles Islands found that when a female warbler loses her territory to a daughter, she may help feed her grandchicks."

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A turkey's rival?
A mob of ----crazed wild turkeys in Madison, Wis., has been stalking and attacking U.S. postal workers, Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass writes. Three mail carriers have been attacked by mating turkeys. The birds, some as large as 40 pounds, have sharp, pointed beaks and have been jumping on the backs of postal workers' legs, gobbling like maniacs, biting and scratching. "And we have no idea why," said Eric Lobner, an official with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. "The turkeys are --- agitated, or active, because this is the breeding season. They might see the mail carriers as threats to their access to females."

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Every spring, five billion North American birds of all kinds migrate northward, according to the U.S. National Audubon Society. The society urges homeowners to take measures to create bird-friendly stopovers, including steps to prevent window collisions. Many birds strike windows after being startled off a feeder and seeing an escape route mirrored in reflective glass. Some tips:
Reduce a window's reflectivity with light-coloured shades, blinds or drapes.
Place netting or a screen in front of the window, or stick closely spaced decals to the outside of it.
Place bird feeders within one metre or more than 10 metres from the window.

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SWANS' LAKE
A lake in downtown Orlando will soon be home to every kind of swan, the Miami Herald reports. Lake Eola Park has long been home to mute and black swans. Now city leaders and a non-profit group that provides veterinary care for the birds plan to import representatives of all swan species. They're bringing in whooper swans first and, by the fall, will have added black-neck swans from South America, coscoroba swans, trumpeter swans, the tundra swan from the Arctic and Bewick's swan. The birds' wings will be clipped. Park officials hope the swans will attract more bird watchers to the city.

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"What's black and white and warm all over? A penguin in a wetsuit, naturally," Michelle Locke writes for Associated Press. "Sounds like a joke, but it's quite serious for biologists at the California Academy of Sciences, who had a wetsuit created for an African penguin to help him get back in the swim of things. Pierre, a venerable 25 years old, was going bald, which left him with an embarrassingly exposed, pale pink behind. Unlike marine mammals, which have a layer of blubber to keep them warm, penguins rely on their waterproof feathers."

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In the first analysis of proteins extracted from dinosaur bones, scientists say they have established more firmly than ever that the closest living relatives of the mighty predator Tyrannosaurus rex are modern birds. Their research is published in the journal Science. The scientists said that, in fact, T. rex shared more of its genetic makeup with ostriches and chickens than with living reptiles such as alligators.

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SONGBIRDS DO BATTLE
Male songbirds can have repertoires of up to 1,000 songs and they regularly engage in singing duels. One bird will sing and its neighbour will belt the same tune back, perhaps with a longer trill at the end.
In an article in The American Naturalist, David Logue, a biologist at the University of Lethbridge, says this counter-
singing is aimed at impressing the ladies, but some birds opt out. If they know their voice won't win them love, he says, they warble a different tune, one they hope their neighbour doesn't know. This makes it harder for a female to compare the two singers and gives the less talented vocalist a better shot at impressing her.
"He is making the best of a bad job," Dr. Logue says.

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This year has seen an alarming rise of attacks on livestock by ravens in Britain, mainly in Scotland and Wales. The birds go for calves, lambs and sheep, pecking them to death. (dailymail.co.uk)

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The sight of seabirds plummeting like miniature jets into the ocean in pursuit of food is riveting.
Telescope observed Northern Gannets, caught at the Cape St. Mary's ecological reserve at the southwest tip of the Avalon Peninsula.
Below them were water spouts showing where a bird smacked into the surface at 60 kph.
This ancient diving behaviour teems with new scientific mysteries.
Some seabirds hunt most at twilight, others in mid-day; some dives follow U-shaped curves under water, while others are more like a W; some birds seem to favour the caplin, a smelt-like fish, while others seek out shrimp.
What accounts for this varied behaviour?
A research group centred at the biology department of Memorial University of Newfoundland has provided answers and highlighted questions for further research in an article in the Canadian Journal of Zoology.
Rosana Paredes, Ian Jones and Martin Renner attached tiny time-depth recorders to dozens of two closely related seabirds: thick-billed murres and razorbills.
They racked up data on almost 4,500 separate dives and also watched the nesting birds for 18 hours a day at one of the Gannet islands off the Labrador Coast.
The biologists discovered that the females in the two different species were closer to one another in diving behaviour than to the males of their own species: Shallow W-shaped dives took place more often at twilight for females versus daylight U-shaped dives by the males.
Why? In both species, the males are more aggressive and have bigger bills. The feeding pattern leaves the males free to guard their chicks from marauding glaucous gulls during the most dangerous times.
More mysteries remain. Are the same feeding patterns found elsewhere for these species? How are these patterns established?

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A red-breasted bird discovered by accident in the forests of Gabon is a new species, U.S. scientists say. They have named the little bird the olive-backed forest robin, but say they know little about it yet. A team from the Smithsonian Institution found the bird while visiting the forest on a biodiversity project. The males have a fiery orange throat and breast, yellow belly, olive back and black feathers on the head. Females are similar, but less vibrant.
Magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror, German scientists have found - the first time self-recognition has been observed in a non-mammal. In one test, researchers from Goethe University in Frankfurt placed yellow and red stickers on five magpies, in positions where they could only be seen in a mirror. On seeing their reflections, the birds tried to remove the stickers with their claws and beaks.

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For male zebra finches, their song is their pick-up line, a signature melody they perform again and again in an effort to attract females.
Now, McGill University researcher Neeltje Boogert has found they are also a sign of bird brain power. Smarter birds sing longer, more complex tunes with a wider variety of notes. More dim-witted finches trill simpler melodies.
It is the first study to link bird songs to intelligence. For her experiments, Ms. Boogert, a doctoral student, used a home-made bird puzzle. She drilled holes in a wooden board and filled them with millet.
In a lab at the Universit? de Quebec in Montreal, she put the birds through four trials of increasing difficulty. First they had to find the millet in the holes, and by the end they had to pry lids off the wells to get their tasty snack.
The birds with more complex songs learned faster in all four trials, says Ms. Boogert. Now she wants to find out if female finches prefer males with more complex songs. She presented her results at a conference this summer; they are to be published in the journal Animal Behaviour.

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Crows can carry a grudge. Researchers in the Seattle area, where rapid urban growth has attracted a thriving crow population, have found that the birds can recognize individual human faces, The New York Times reports. The preliminary findings of the team led by John Marzluff, a wildlife biologist at the University of Washington, confirm the suspicions of many other scientists. For instance, Kevin McGowan, an ornithologist at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, who has trapped and banded crows in upstate New York for 20 years, said he was regularly followed by birds who have benefited from his handouts of peanuts - and harassed by others he has trapped in the past.

It's not just people that commiserate with each other when their team loses a contest - birds will also draw comfort from friends if they are beaten, The Times of London reports. Green Wood-Hoopoes, an African species, have been shown to bolster morale with group preening after rival gangs defeat them in singing contests. Andrew Radford of the University of Bristol, England, who carried out the study, said it was the first time that animals other than humans had been shown to intensify bonding after a loss. He has reported his findings in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society. Dr. Radford compared the birds' behaviour to that of football fans who try to out sing their rivals before retiring to the pub to celebrate or commiserate.

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In China, a mynah bird in a Nanjing shop has learned to deal with his noisy neighbours - two talkative parrots in the cage next door, the Yangtze Evening Post reports. Annoyed by the yakking newcomers, the mynah jumped and fretted until it noticed the parrots were shutting up when a neighbouring cat meowed. The mynah learned to imitate the cat, and now silences the parrots many times a day.

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If a pet bird pecks its own feathers out, hurls itself against a cage wall or attacks the family guinea pig, its behaviour may be a product of --- frustration, and you, the doting owner, may be the one unwittingly leading it on.
The troubling news comes from experts on WebVet, an online resource for pet owners. An article titled "Living with --- Frustration in your Pet Bird" explains that birds often displace their desires onto their owners. When those needs go unfulfilled, birds get mad.
The symptoms can include
self-mutilation, "excessive" screaming, laying infertile eggs, regurgitating food before a
favourite human or toy ("allofeeding"), and masturbation.
Evan Mavromatis, a veterinarian at the Links Road Animal and Bird Clinic in Toronto, sees it often.
"A lot of people who have birds want what I tend to call a 'feathered cat,' something they could pop in their lap and pet while they're watching TV. That's not what a bird does in the wild,"
he says.
Dr. Mavromatis says that by stroking their heads and sides and scratching under their wings, humans are unknowingly arousing their birds. The vet says a better way of interacting with birds is through play: Give them toys and activities that mimic what they do most in nature: foraging for food.

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A small beige bird that lives high in the mountains of Europe and Asia has testes that weigh more than its brain. During mating season, the alpine accentor's sperm-production equipment accounts for 8 per cent of its total body weight. Why so big? The females copulate with as many males as possible, so to have any chance of fathering offspring, the guys need to swamp the competition. This is one of hundreds of strange avian facts in the new book Extreme Birds, by Dominic Couzens (Firefly Books Ltd).

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Mark Twain said it's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog. For female American goldfinches, it turns out, the size of the fight is signalled by the brightness of the bill.
Biology researcher Troy Murphy says the birds with the brighter bills are effectively shouting at other female goldfinches, "Get away from this thistle patch. It's mine!"
The postdoctoral fellow at Queen's University confirmed this behaviour using two bird feeders, each adorned with a taxidermically stuffed female goldfinch.
One dead bird's bill was dulled down from the normal range, while the other was brightened. Real female goldfinches at the Queen's aviary opted to snatch thistle seeds from the feeder with the duller- billed guard, Murphy found.
Bill colour in birds comes from pigments in their foods called carotenoids. These are vital as anti-oxidants for their immune systems. Only those with robust immune systems can afford to switch more carotenoids into beak colour, which can vary within days.
The unpublished research shows that vivid colours in birds are about more than attracting better mates. They can also advertise the size of the fight in the bird.
Next year Murphy intends to repeat the experiment with male goldfinches. Stay tuned.

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"Ornithologists Nathalie Seddon and Joe Tobias of the University of Oxford have been studying the songs of the Peruvian warbling antbird," U.S. National Public Radio reports. "In their latest research, published in Current Biology, they report that an antbird couple will sing a harmonious duet when confronted by an intruding rival pair. But if an unattached female enters the scene, the antbird 'wife' starts jamming her mate's song. She interrupts her spouse with her own music, to his great frustration."

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TINY, FAST - AND THEY SING TOO
Songbirds fitted with tiny backpacks reveal how quickly they can fly south and back
For decades, the closest scientists came to studying the migration patterns of songbirds was to stalk them for a few days at a time in a small aircraft.
Today, thanks to the efforts of a Canadian biologist and a bird-sized, data-gathering "backpack," researchers have for the first time an accurate measurement of how quickly purple martins and wood thrushes travel south for the winter and back north to breed.
Turns out it's ridiculously quickly.
Data gathered by York University biologist Bridget Stutchbury show that some songbirds make the trip from the Amazon basin to their northern U.S. breeding grounds in just two weeks - based on the best available data, scientists had previously guessed the trip would take about a month. The study marks the first time anyone has mapped songbird migration routes to the tropics and back.
"It's completely changed the way we look at these little birds," Prof. Stutchbury said.
In a paper to be published in Science magazine, Prof. Stutchbury describes a new technique that allowed her to monitor two species of songbirds continuously. Researchers captured birds in their northern U.S. breeding grounds in late summer and attached tiny geolocator "backpacks." The devices, which weigh about as much as a dime, are attached to the birds' legs using Teflon straps so they don't interfere with wing movement.
The geolocators record sunrise and sunset times. When the birds are recaptured after their return from the south in spring, the information is downloaded and compared with listings of sunrise and sunset times across the region, allowing scientists to map out the journey.
Before the use of geolocators, researchers relied on radio transmitters to track bird migrations. Prof. Stutchbury said the best previous data she had came from a researcher who followed the birds in a plane for about four days - in 1973.
"Based on other studies, we had little glimpses of what these birds can do," Prof. Stutchbury said. "We expected [the birds' travel time would be] about a month."
But only the slowest bird recaptured - a wood thrush that eschewed a perilous 12-hour non-stop flight across open water for a safer route - took a month to get back. Some of the other birds took half as long, beating by a wide margin researcher estimates of about 150 kilometres a day.
Prof. Stutchbury chose the two species because of their vastly different migration habits. Wood thrushes tend to travel to Central America and fly at night, whereas purple martins travel farther south, and fly during the day.
For songbirds, there are significant advantages to arriving back north as early as possible, including claiming the best breeding spots.
Prof. Stutchbury said information she collects could prove vital to the conservation of songbirds, whose numbers have plummeted.

THE PURPLE MARTIN
Purple martins are North America's largest swallow, measuring about 20 centimetres in length. Unlike wood thrushes, purple martins tend to travel farther south to the Amazon basin for the winter. The birds tend to travel in large flocks. Purple martins are known for their aerial acrobatics, and tend to feed on insects in open areas. The bird's call is a distinctive, loud noise. The combination of its unique sound and dazzling flight have made the purple martin a favourite of bird lovers.

THE WOOD THRUSH
The wood thrush is renowned for having one of the most beautiful songs of any North American bird. Tending to winter in Mexico and other parts of Central America, their flight path sometimes includes a perilous, 14-hour, non-stop flight over the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico, which results in certain death for birds that can't make the trip in one go. Wood thrushes tend to stick to forested areas, and fly at night. They are considered a less urgent conservation challenge, compared to other species.

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This week, police in Shelton, Conn., seized approximately 150 birds and arrested 19 people in an investigation of alleged finch and canary fighting, CNN.com reports. The 19 people, all originally from Brazil, are being charged with animal cruelty and illegal gambling, police Sgt. Robert Kozlowsky said. This is new to us, he said. Finches are much easier to keep under the radar than roosters because they make less noise and they wouldn't arouse suspicions if someone had a lot of them.

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Bare-faced Bulbul: A New Species Discovered in Laos
http://birdsredesign.wordpress.com/2009 ... d-in-laos/

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Man-eating bird?

A Maori legend about a giant, man-eating bird has been confirmed by scientists, The New Zealand Herald reports. Te Hokioi was a huge black-and-white predator with a red crest and yellow-green tinged wingtips. Scientists now think the stories handed down by word of mouth and depicted in rock drawings refer to Haast's eagle, a raptor that became extinct just 500 years ago, shows their study in The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. With a wingspan of up to three metres and weighing 18 kilograms, the female was twice as big as the largest living eagle. It was certainly capable of swooping down and taking a child, said Paul Scofield, a curator at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch. They had the ability to not only strike with their talons, but to close the talons and put them through quite solid objects such as a pelvis. It was designed as a killing machine.

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My neighbour said I should take down all my feeders or birds will become dependent on them and miss migration. Is that true? a reader asks Val Cunningham of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. She replies: Absolutely not. This is one myth that never seems to die. Birds are not dependent on our feeders. In fact, experts estimate that wild birds get less than 25 per cent of their food from feeders. Besides, their urge to migrate is very strong and wouldn't be overridden by the availability of feeder food. Migrating birds probably appreciate an easy meal after a full night of flying. Far from harming birds, you're doing them a favour by keeping your feeders stocked and your birdbaths full in fall.

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For four years, Dr. Dean Ransom of Texas A&M University has ranged throughout the U.S. southwest, using radio telemetry and studying more than 50 nests to track the elusive, rarely studied roadrunner, Matt Palmquist writes for Miller-McCune.com. The facts you want to know, should you try to, say, catch one: Roadrunners tend to live near substantial tracts of woods for cover not, ahem, in the wide-open desert. They can fly when pressured. (It's not graceful,' Ransom reports, but it works.') And it's difficult to tempt them with feminine wiles; they are monogamous and likely mate for life. Your best bet to snare a roadrunner? Take advantage of its aggression. The roadrunner tenaciously defends its territory against intruders; to hear Ransom tell it, perhaps a wee bit of Acme whisky would do the trick. We witnessed a five-bird brawl that lasted about 90 minutes in 2006,' he says. Ultimately, the resident pair was triumphant.'

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A Few of Our Favorites
Pure footage and sounds of birds, from eagles and eiders to swallows and robins.
http://www.allaboutbirds.org/NetCommuni ... x?pid=1132

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I got this link to a website from Fred Holt a long time Birdingpal in Costa Rica
Check out the video. Just amazing
Knud

http://www.stripersonline.com/surftalk/ ... p?t=708602

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In a scientific breakthrough that opens a window to now-extinct animals from the prehistoric past, researchers have just successfully recovered DNA from several fossilized eggshells collected from Australia, New Zealand and Madagascar, Discovery News reports. They have collected DNA for the largest bird that ever lived the elephant bird Aepyornis that stood around three metres tall and weighed about 400 kilograms. Charlotte Oskam, lead author of the new study published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B, believes that reviving an extinct animal is unethical, so cloning of now-extinct birds is unlikely.

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All-Black Penguin Is One-in-a-Zillion
Mutated Bird Spotted During National Geographic Journey to Antarctica
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/ ... 5145.shtml

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NATURE | Behind the Scenes of "Hummingbirds" | PBS
http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=hjnc1 ... r_embedded

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More amazing birds
http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=T2Bsu4z9Y3k

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It was first noticed last year, Bird Watchers Digest reports, and it has continued since: Rock pigeons in the Brisbane, Australia, central business districts Post Office Square have figured out how to access a human water source. After waiting until the unit is clear of human use, one pigeon jumps on the lever of a water fountain, another seemingly keeps watch and a third takes a cool drink or bathes. When the first sips and bathing are over, its time to change places. Passersby marvel at the birds ingenuity.

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Small songbirds do not like organic seeds.
Birdseed grown the conventional way provides more energy.

Birds such as Tits and Blackbirds prefer conventional birdseed instead of organic seeds.
British scientist Alisa McKenzie, who is leading a Newcastle University research team has completed a study of bird feeding and discovered the following.
Birdseed grown with conventional methods holds about 10 percent more protein than ecological grown, and thereby gives the birds a better chance to get through the winter.
Feeders were monitored and the experiment, as described in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, was conducted in 30 gardens in northern England.
Feeding stations with both types of grain and bird eating habits was observed over several weeks in winter.
As an extra security feeding stations was reversed after half the research time had passed.
The reason for the higher protein content in 'Conventional' birdseed is that they are fertilized much more than organic seeds.

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Reinforce acceptable word usage with food treats or toys, advises The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Life. Hold a cookie while you teach the parrot to say cookie, or cover its cage while you say good night. While it is impossible to unteach the bird, eventually it will use only those words that it hears frequently. Never keep a parrot in your bedroom.

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Only "Seagulls" in Scotland could do this
http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/seagull.asp

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Birds show greater solidarity when preparing for conflict with rival groups, research by the University of Bristol in England shows, The Independent reports. A study suggests birds may be capable of anticipation and future planning a trait that was until recently considered to be the preserve of humans and other primates. Dr. Andy Radford, from the universitys school of biological sciences, studied a population of green wood hoopoes, common forest-dwelling birds in southern Africa, for the research. Green wood hoopoes, which live in groups of up to 12 individuals, frequently preen each other to promote social cohesion within the group. The new research, published on Wednesday in Biology Letters, found dominant group members increase their preening of subordinate members when moving into areas where clashes with other groups are likely. Its a case of scratching your back if you cover mine, Dr. Radford said.

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No fear nor loathing for this budgie
http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/art ... his-budgie