Pollinator Week was June 21-27, 2021. Birds are key global pollinators of wildflowers and ornithophily (bird pollination) occurs in more than 60 flower families. Bird pollinators include the orioles and hummingbirds of the New World, honeycreepers of Hawaii and central and South America, sunbirds of Africa, and the lorikeets and honeyeaters of the Australasian realm. …
According to a recent study*, there are about 50 billion living birds in the world, six times as many as there are people. It was not easy to come up with that figure but the diagram below gives a graphic representation of how the researchers did it. It’s not easy to understand, but basically, using …
A little anatomy today. In Chicago when I was a kid of about 10, I was sitting on my home’s front porch when a parakeet landed on my head, obviously an escapee. A tame and lovely blue bird, I kept him for several years. I used to watch him warble (or whatever the semi-musical sound …
I am reading the The First Frontier by Scott Weidensaul, prolific nature writer and eminent ornithologist. A synopsis of the book reads: “Frontier: the word carries the inevitable scent of the West. But before Lewis and Clark, … it was the East that marked the frontier—the boundary between Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans- …
