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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 […]

I read one time that there is almost one bird book a day published in the United States. That’s a lot. Some of these are very minor local books, some are just junk, some are terrific and a lot are inbetween. One review of the best books of 2018 can be had here. Or you

Swallows seemed to have captured people’s imaginations over the years. They are attractive, acrobatic, long distance migrants and one of the most aerial birds. Aristotle noticed them around 363 BC and stipulated (Aristotle didn’t always collect data or do proper or sufficient observations) that since swallows disappeared from Europe, specifically Greece, for the winter and

Birds are the only vertebrates that lay colored eggs. But in a new paper, Dinosaur egg colour had a single evolutionary origin, lead author Jasmina Wiemann of Yale University said that nonavian dinosaur ancestors had colored eggs as well. About a decade ago, Richard Prum of Yale University discovered that feathers were not just derivatives

“Plumage” comes from the Old French meaning feathers or appearance. Today the word is almost exclusively used for a bird’s set of feathers. Depending on the species, birds have various plumages throughout the year. Feathers wear out, are broken, or lost and they need to be replaced on a regular basis, and in the process

I have had this website, Ornithology.com for 20 years now. I started it just before my retirement from a university where I taught ornithology and ecology. Now, in my leisure years, I write this blog, give lectures, lead field trips, write articles and books, volunteer, garden, birdwatch, read, and so forth to keep my mind

Flycatchers, bee-eaters, swallows and swifts conjure up images of birds flitting through the air in quest of some sort of arthropod. We mostly don’t think about the tiny prey item that gets engulfed by the snapping avian jaws. So let’s give them some thought. Birds eat an estimated 500 million tons of insects each year.

The following is excerpted from my book, Beaks, Bones, and Bird Songs. Migration is dangerous but it must be advantageous for long term survival. Determining how the physical and physiological characteristics of organisms developed over geological time is difficult as the fossil record is incomplete and the fossils themselves often lend themselves to debatable interpretations.

Winter is approaching in the northern hemisphere. How do our seemingly fragile birds cope? We say that birds and mammals are warm-blooded, but that’s a misleading term. A desert iguana sitting on a rock in the sun can tolerate a body temperature of 1150 F (460C), but lizards are cold-blooded- their body temperature varies with

Excerpted from Beaks, Bones and Bird Songs: From the Old French fourrage, to forage, pillage, or plunder, foraging refers to the ways birds find food. Virtually every bird has its own style of seeking out and acquiring its sustenance with each beak shape allowing a range of behavior and diet. Since we are most familiar