The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Research in spectacled parrotlets, Forpus conspicillatus , has shown that each parrot has its own signature call -- a unique sound that ...

An as-yet-unextinguished marvel in a time of mass extinction : A songbird weighing just 25 grams makes a 14,500 km journey twice a year...

Here is a promotional video for a proposed documentary on the extermination of the passenger pigeon, and what can be learned from it (via Pe...

We stayed well away from the water, so toxic, it is fit only for industrial cooling. Yet, somehow, birds still survive, feed and breed her...

One of the remarkable features of birds is unidirectional breathing: fresh air enters the lungs both when they breathe in and when they brea...

Some months ago I added a quote from Margaret Atwood's Payback to the side bar on this blog in which she expressed some hope for albatr...

The bar-tailed godwit flies 6,800 miles each year from Alaska to New Zealand without food, water or rest...and the semipalmated sandpiper, s...

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 b...

Tim Dee and Simon Armitage choose ten . I like this by Basho: My eyes following until the bird was lost at sea found a small island

Manakins spend 80% of their daylight hours dancing . -- Nicky Clayton (added 11 Nov:) and at least one species makes music with its wings .

'From the Eye of the Albatrosses: A Bird-Borne Camera Shows an Association between Albatrosses and a Killer Whale in the Southern Ocean...

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 an...

An AP report begins: The tribes of the lower Klamath River have since ancient times decorated themselves with condor feathers when they per...

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 d...

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 ...

'So pick a bird,' the Water Genie commanded. 'Any bird.' This was puzzling. 'The only bird around here is a wooden peac...

The centre pages of today's Guardian newspaper feature a photograph of brightly coloured bits of plastic arranged neatly in rows and s...

A bird watcher named Bill Reed observed and photographed a kittiwake in Svalbard seeming to fly upside down (see photo). What, he asks , is...

Lear's Macaw, a "rare good news story", as 191 other bird species are added to the list of the world's most threatened sp...

A neat summary of recent findings about corvids here . P.S. Joshua Klein on the intelligence of crows .