You may have marveled at the spectacular and elegant control albatrosses have over their above ocean flights. You may be familiar with dynamic soaring, the method albatrosses use to remain aloft over the ocean for days, covering as much as 3000 miles a week, as measured by bird-borne video flight loggers. Feeding at sea, young …
Years ago, some well-meaning bird lover passed away and left a pretty decent bundle of money to our local Audubon Society, but she stipulated that the funds are only to be used to benefit songbirds, not hawks. Now I’m not quite sure how one does that. If you improve the habitat for songbirds, you inadvertently …
There has always been the presumption or assumption that tropical birds are generally more colorful than those further from the tropics. The closer the birds live to the equator, the more colorful they are, we have always thought. Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and Alfred Russell Wallace, well-known naturalists of the 19th century, all noted …
I previously wrote a post explaining why birds don’t fall out of trees while they are sleeping. Not falling out of a tree has to do with the arrangement of muscles and tendons on the lower legs, but this explanation mainly applies to those birds in the Order Passeriformes, the Perching Birds. But not to …
Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. An atheist, he is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularized the gene-centered view of evolution. He has written a …
I regularly hear that birds like eagles, hawks, vultures, swans, and puffins mate for life. There are documented cases of birds mating and maintaining a long -term pair bond that certainly fit the mate for life pattern. At the Wildfowl Trust in Slimbridge, England, swans studied for more than 50 years never showed a single …
Mammals, like us, have 23 pairs of chromosomes. One pair comprise the sex chromosomes, one designated X and one Y. An individual with two X chromosomes, XX, is a female, and one with an XY combination is a male. In birds it is reversed. The sex chromosomes in birds are designated Z and W, and …
In many parts of the world, once-forested areas have been broken up into patches, surrounded by farmland, roads, railroad tracks, and urban areas. There might be 60 acres of forest adjacent to a wheat field on one side and corn fields on the other three. This is especially true in the eastern U.S. but it …
Bird populations have been declining over the past half century. Perhaps 40 percent of North America’s birds have disappeared during that time – over 3.5 billion birds! According to the IUCN Red List, 23 percent of the world’s birds are threatened or near-threatened, and 44 percent have declining populations. On field trips I used to …
Research in ornithology is not just a willy-nilly collection of observations while walking through the woods. How does one start a research project? First, you have to develop a hypothesis – a question you would like to answer. Let’s suppose you are curious about the prevalence of partial albinism (leucistic plumage) in House Sparrows. What …
