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 […]
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The egg, certainly. The first animals on earth, probably the sponges, reproduced both sexually and asexually. They simply grew a bud that became a new individual or they produced eggs and sperm. So perhaps as far back as 500 million years or more, there were eggs. Chickens didn’t arrive on the scene until about 58,000
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I have received several emails lately from folks asking why the birds have disappeared from their feeder. Well, I could be a wise guy and say “How am I supposed to know?” because I often don’t know where they live, where the bird feeder is located, what kind of seeds they were feeding or any
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I was on an ocean cruise several years ago in the Indian Ocean. As we approached the island chain of the Seychelles I looked over the horizon and saw a very prehistoric-looking bird, nothing I recognized. As the distance between the ship and the “bird” closed, I discovered it was a giant fruit-eating bat. It
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The word kleptomania is from the Greek words κλέπτω (klepto) “to steal” and μανία (mania) “mad desire, compulsion”, meaning a compulsion to steal. In birdy news lately is the term kleptotrichia, referring to the behavior of birds stealing hair from mammals to line their avian nests. But some birds steal feathers from other birds in
Models of environmental conditions demonstrate that long term drought can affect the species diversity of birds. The lack of water and the temperature that goes along with it stresses the birds, although different species may respond differently.I can see the effects in my own backyard in northern California. The winter of 2019-2020 saw a reasonable
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News Nation Now reported via YouTube a story about birds invading homes in southern California in April by flying down chimneys. One pair of homeowners estimated the flock at 800 birds – which they called starlings and blackbirds. Public comments on the video referred to Eurasian Starlings as invasive pests, as indeed they are, but
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I have often mentioned that bird fossils are hard to come by, as compared to other vertebrates and hard-shelled invertebrates. It’s mainly because they are lightweight and thin-skinned. The earliest birds or birdlike creatures were reptile-like and were heavier boned than later bird forms and they left a decent fossil record, but later versions, as
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.
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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
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