I’ve been rereading Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee – humans. He spends a lot of time on various aspects of sex, one of which is extramarital sex. According to various human studies, somewhere between one and 30 percent of children are conceived as a result of extramarital sex, but the data are dubious because interviewees […]
A recent (June 16, 2023) article in the New York Times described the loss of trust in science, which is rather odd because during the pandemic the trust in science went up. What is science? It is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based
Birds have evolved a number of anatomical and physiological adaptations to reduce weight for flight – lightweight skeleton, fused bones, no teeth, no sweat glands, few scales, an aerodynamic body, and, in most cases, no urinary bladder. Mammals have a urinary bladder, used to eliminate the products of protein digestion. Water in the bladder dissolves
Uric Acid and the Cloaca Read More »
There was an article in the New York Times recently about the evolution of birds, a field of knowledge that still has lots of mysteries. There are thousands of bird fossils, many of which have still to be fully examined and classified. But we are learning. One of the more interesting is Caihong juji, an
The Rainbow Dinosaur Read More »
I discussed The Canary Bird earlier; here’s a bit more. Years ago, singing canaries were popular. A radio show in the 1940’s in the U.S. featured dozens of canaries singing along with classical records. There was also a canary song training record from Hartz Mountain you could use at home to teach your canary to
A recent article in the Washington Post, Why Birds and Their Songs are Good for our Mental Health, notes that “researchers found a significant positive association between seeing or hearing birds and improved mental well-being, even when accounting for other possible explanations such as education, occupation, or the presence of greenery and water, which have themselves
SOUNDS LIKE…… OK, what bird makes this call: honk, honk, tweeeeet, twitter twitter, buzzzzzz. Don’t know? That’s OK, neither do I. But I get questions like this on a regular basis from folks who want to know what bird they heard. Bird songs and calls may sound the same to different people but the descriptions
LGBTQ+ issues have been pretty common in the news lately, but humans are not the only animals that may fall into one of these categories. The Golden Fleece Award (1975–1988) was a tongue-in-cheek award given by Senator William Proxmire to public officials in the United States for squandering public money, its name taken from the actual
Sexual Preference in Birds Read More »
During each February the Great Backyard Bird Count occurs. Collectively, 7,538 species of birds – 2/3s of the known 10,960 species were found this year. More than 200 countries shared bird sightings. eBird is a global database of bird observations. It is an amazing tool for birders to keep track of their sightings, but it is also much more than
Quantitative Ornithology Read More »
An interesting bird name is “swallow.” In late Old English and Middle English it meant “gulf, abyss, hole in the earth, whirlpool,” also, in Middle English, “throat, gullet.” The name apparently stuck to the birds because of their dizzying, whirlpool-like flight, or their voracious eating habits. A In Ancient Greece, swallows were associated with Aphrodite.
Rough-winged Swallow Read More »
