Nearly every day I read something that makes me slap my forehead. I think: What will they think of next? How can people believe that? You have to be kidding me. But novel ideas are everywhere, and many of them are not true. To paraphrase Mark Twain, it ain’t what people don’t know, it’s what …
Ok, now I have heard it all. Fantasy birdwatching or Fantasy Birding. It’s a thing. I’m certainly behind that curve as I know nothing about fantasy football. Oh, I have a vague notion that one picks various football players from different teams and puts them together in some sort of all-star team. But that’s as …
Researchers have been tracking bird migration for many years but the biggest changes have come in the last fifty or so. According to the Science Daily, birds in Canada and Europe are moving northward a bit earlier each year. Birds that breed on the early end are hurrying up their passage while those that breed …
We can go back all the way to Aristotle in 300 or so B.C. who classified about 125 different birds on the basis of their habitat. This was a common way of classification for many years. Throughout the middle ages and the renaissance there were various schemes for classifying birds – habitat, beak, color, legs, …
A few years ago I traveled to South Vietnam. One day, walking along a backcountry road looking for birds, which are fairly rare because the populace of rural villages eats pretty much any wild animal, a woman stooped over in front of me and snatched a big spider off the road for a quick snack. …
Ever wonder why your neighborhood has certain kinds of birds and your uncle, who lives across the country, has a different set of birds? And why aren’t there hundreds of kinds of birds in your backyard rather than just a few dozen? Well, it all comes down to succession – the development of communities. As …
Have you ever noticed that there are pairs of birds that look a lot alike but are different sizes? How about Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers? Or Lesser and Greater Yellowlegs. Long-billed and Short-billed Dowitchers. And Cooper’s and Sharp-shinned Hawks. These pairs are called “sibling species” and are presumed to have been one former species in …
There is a Northern Cardinal visiting a backyard feeder in Erie, Pennsylvania that looks like a male on its left side (red plumage) but resembles a female cardinal on its right side (gray plumage). The bird is called a gynandromorph– an organism that contains both male and female characteristics. The term gynandromorph, from Greek γυνή (gynē) female, …
Hummingbirds fight; that’s obvious to anyone who has watched them at a hummingbird feeder. And their bills are made for fighting as well as feeding. The bills are long and sharp and can be use to thrust, parry, and pluck the feathers of an opponent. They are also made for sucking up nectar. Fighting is …
We’ve all watched birds pecking at trees working their way around the trunk and sticking their bills under the bark. These are the insectivore probers, looking to extract an invertebrate morsel. The penduline-tits of Eurasia, so named because of their pendulum-shaped nests, have conical, sharply pointed bills which they use to open the stems of …
