Research in spectacled parrotlets, Forpus conspicillatus, has shown that each parrot has its own signature call -- a unique sound that is used only for recognising that particular individual. Basically, each parrot has its own name. Interestingly, similar to human culture, members of each parrot family have names that sound more like each other than like those for other parrot families.-- Grrl scientist
A songbird weighing just 25 grams makes a 14,500 km journey twice a year. Northern wheatears fly from Alaska, across Asia to sub-Saharan Africa -- one of the longest migrations on record.-report, paper.
We stayed well away from the water, so toxic, it is fit only for industrial cooling.-- from India's exotic birds find unexpected nesting places by Anu Anand
Yet, somehow, birds still survive, feed and breed here.
Nikhil says the river, even in its poisoned state, guides species as they migrate down from the mighty Himalayan mountains, or up from the Deccan Plateau.
It is an avian compass, directing some species east, away from the harsh winters of Central Asia and others west towards Africa.
In the United States, power lines kill 130 to 174 million birds a year – many of them raptors such as hawks, or waterfowl, whose large wingspans can touch two hot wires at a time, resulting in electrocution, or who smash into the thin power lines without seeing them (think piano wire). Cars and trucks collide with and kill between 60 and 80 million annually in the US, and tall buildings – especially those that leave their lights on all night – are a major hazard for migrating birds, leading to between a hundred million and a billion bird deaths annually. Add in lighted communication towers, which also kill large numbers of bats, and can account for as many as 30,000 bird deaths each on a bad night – thus 40 to 50 million deaths a year, and due to double as more towers are built. Agricultural pesticides directly kill 67 million birds per year, with many more deaths resulting from accumulated toxins that converge at the top of the food chain, and from starvation as the usual food of insectivores disappears. Cats polish off approximately 39 million birds in the state of Wisconsin alone; multiply that by the number of states in America, and then do the calculations for the rest of the world: the numbers are astronomical. Then there are the factory effluents, the oil spills and oil sands, the unknown chemical compounds we're pouring into the mix. Nature is prolific, but at such high kill rates it's not keeping up, and bird species – even formerly common ones – are plummeting all over the world.
The bar-tailed godwit flies 6,800 miles each year from Alaska to New Zealand without food, water or rest...and the semipalmated sandpiper, small enough to fit into a teacup, migrates between South America and the Arctic, “through gales and hurricanes, over mountains and ocean.”-- Theodore Cross's Waterbirds
The hercinia is a bird that is born in the Hercynian forest in Germany, from which it takes its name. It serves as a beacon for travellers because its feathers glow so brightly in the dark that they light up the path.-- 'Bestiaria Latina'
My eyes following
until the bird was lost at sea
found a small island
Manakins spend 80% of their daylight hours dancing.-- Nicky Clayton
The images from our albatross-borne camera show at least four albatrosses (including the camera-mounted bird) actively following a killer whale while it was breaking the sea surface. Only a few previous studies have documented the association between albatrosses and killer whales, and these were mostly in shallow waters...doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007322
Although it is still difficult to quantify how often black-browed albatrosses associate with killer whales in the open ocean, our results, together with ship-based observations..., suggest that these associations may occur more frequently than previously anticipated and may be a part of foraging repertoire of albatrosses.
A Japanese study of urban crows found that the birds dropped hard-shelled nuts in the road at traffic intersections for cars to roll over and crack. When the traffic was heavy, the crows waited for the walk signal before grabbing their snacks from the street. How can you not admire that?-- from a review by of Deborah Blum of Crow Planet by Lyanda Lynn Haupt.
The crow's ability to adapt to man-made environments - in contrast to the struggles of more fragile species - has made it one of the planet's most successful bird species. But this achievement is the source of Haupt's ambivalence: it's everyone's loss, she reminds us, if we create an environment that accommodates only tough survivor species like the crow.
The tribes of the lower Klamath River have since ancient times decorated themselves with condor feathers when they performed the dances designed to heal a world gone wrong."It can soar the highest, so we figured that was the one to get our prayers to heaven when we were asking for the world to be in balance," said Richard Myers, a member of the Yurok Tribal Council and a leader in the revival of the tribe's world renewal ceremonies.
Now the Yurok Tribe is using modern science in hopes of restoring condors, which have not soared above the northern coast of California since 1914...
A small excerpt from a draft chapter of my book which looks into the history of flight goes as follows:
So many California condors got zapped on power lines during the twentieth century that by the mid 1980s less than two dozen remained out of what had once been thousands. By some accounts, though, native peoples were already killing the bird in pre-industrial times in order to use the feathers in ceremonial headdresses. Certainly, the condor had mythic power, for good or bad. The Wiyot say that Condor recreated mankind after Old Man wiped out humanity with a flood. The Mono believe that Condor seized humans, cut off their heads and drained their blood in order to flood the home of Ground Squirrel. The Yokut say Condor ate the moon, causing the lunar cycle, and made eclipses with his wings.
Since the 1986 the bird has made a comeback thanks to a captive breeding programme. Chicks born at the Los Angeles and San Diego Zoos receive early lessons in life skills such as power line avoidance from Condor adults that are actually glove-puppets. The puppeteers must remain carefully hidden because if the chicks see a human they imprint upon them and never become wild birds.
Nowadays, we've had so many startling findings that the rooks just don't surprise me that much any more. You almost expect them to do the cleverest thing.-- Nathan Emery quoted in BBC report (see also Ed Yong)
the changes in the muscle cells probably evolved over a long period of time, perhaps as the Himalayas, one of the Earth’s youngest mountain chains, grew and the birds would have had to fly higher and higher.- from report about a paper by Graham R. Scott et al on how bar-headed geese fly at 9,000m or 30,000 feet over Himalaya.
'So pick a bird,' the Water Genie commanded. 'Any bird.' This was puzzling. 'The only bird around here is a wooden peacock,' Haroun pointed out, reasonably enough. Iff gave a snort of disgust. 'A person may choose what he cannot see,' he said, as if explaining something very obvious to a very foolish individual. 'A person may mention a bird's name even if the creature is not present and correct: cow, quail, hummingbird, bulbul, mynah, parrot, kite. A person may even select a flying creature of his own invention, for example winged horse, flying turtle, airborne whale, space serpent, aeromouse. To give a thing name, a label, a handle; to rescue it from anonymity, to pluck it out of the place of Namelessness, in short to identify it -- well that's a way of bringing the said thing into being. Or, in this case the said bird or Imaginary Flying Organism.-- from Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie.
For some time we had been tormented by doubts as to who was a monster and who wasn't, but that too could be considered long settled: all of us who existed were non-monsters, while the monsters were all those who could exist and didn't...-- from The Origin of Birds by Italo Calvino
But if we were going to begin again with strange animals, if the Reptiles, antiquated as they were, started to pull out limbs and teguments they had never felt any need for previously, in other words if a creature impossible by definition such as a bird was instead possible (what's more if it could be a handsome bird like this one, pleasing to sight when he poised on the fern leaves, and to the hearing when he released his warbling), then the barrier between monsters and non-monsters was exploded and everything was possible again.
in Iqualit, a village north of Hudson Bay, locals have seen ravens hanging upside down, swinging and somersaulting over powerlines, hanging from them with their bills, and sliding down roofs...On another occasion, two ravens played a form of 'rodeo' on two loosely strung, wind-whipped overhead power lines. They too turns trying to grasp the second wire in the bill and hand on as long as possible.
...Raven authority Bernd Heinrich has watched Houdi, one of the birds he raised from a chick, sliding and rolling on her back repeatedly down a two foot high snow mound.
