birds

The idea is that birds are what they descended from and therefore are dinosaurs. So then dinosaurs too are whatever they descended from. Surprise ... birds are dinosaurs and dinosaurs are what? If we are clever and accurate to say that birds are dinosaurs then what should we say that dinosaurs...

A bird that is one of the most widespread in the UK, Western Europe and the Mediterranean has somehow ventured to the far north - the first Tyto alba seen in Finland since 1935, and only the eighth time it has been seen in there. The bird was found dead in a field in Vehma, and the University...

Not seeing another thread on this yet so I'll start one. With great fanfare, a new paper was published yesterday in Science estimating that overall abundance of North American birds is 3 billion fewer than in 1970. Here's a synopsis. NPR's reporting on the story here. Here's a companion...

The Night Parrot, which was widely presumed extinct (only 2 specimens have been found since the start of the 20th century, both already dead) is officially not extinct! A live parrot was caught, tagged, and released on the 4th of April...

As I first noticed in this story on the BBC, some researchers in the US state of Tennessee have just released a startling paper in Current Biology on the alleged behavior of songbirds to pre-emptively leave the path of oncoming tornadoes. Background: Golden-winged Warbler is a species of...

My daughter, Kate is on a gap year in Gauteng and sent me a description of the following birdie: Any South African birders want to take a stab at that? Bit of a long shot I guess.

The etchics of keeping birds: An homage to the "The etchics of keeping cats" thread First, a little history that has prompted me to post this thread. My wife and I work from home and since she's allergic to animal dander, when the subject of a pet came up a bird was considered the best middle...

although around these parts it's kind of grim and the light is terrible for photos: not much to really see around here. the canada geese have arrived. i had to talk my dog out of rushing after this fine specimen (don't think she would have liked the outcome!): canada goose (branta...

{Dates changed above for obvious reasons.} With much thanks to Kotatsu and EHocking for their amazing work with the forum birdwatching threads in 2008, 2009, and 2010, I would like to start a forum birdwatching thread for 2012. There was not a thread in 2011, though many appended their...

Holy moly. Well of course not.

Plenty of robots can fly -- but none can fly like a real bird. That is, until Markus Fischer and his team at Festo built SmartBird, a large, lightweight robot, modeled on a seagull, that flies by flapping its wings. Fg_JcKSHUtQ :cool::cool::cool:

Reading through randman's recent thread: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=215456 I've raised for myself questions that I've bumped into before and couldn't answer properly. I'm confused by the taxonomy of birds. Education by Wikipedia has failed me. I think the...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110428132236.htm

A thread (the third in a series) mainly for four things: A. A list of all observations of birds made by forum members during 2010, following a set of rules that will be detailed below; B. A place to display photos of birds (and other animals) taken by forum members during 2010; C. A place to...

You read that right; there are in fact animals that feed their young with bodily secretions that are not mammals. Some folks are real persnickety and won't call something "milk" unless it came from a mammal, but that's just prejudice. For some strange reason, Middle Age scholars believed that...

Following the success of last year's communal birdwatching thread, I hereby start the second one. The rules are as follow (but are subject to change, should the need arise): 1. Only birds observed by the poster may be recorded. The poster need not be the one to discover it or the one to have...

Attended a nice lecture by Ofer Tchernichovski in which he discussed the development of bird song in zebra finches. Not a new topic, but he gives it a new twist, as he ought to. The main reason I started this thread is to point you to this site that he used during his lecture - listen to the...

I saw this in another forum once, and thought I'd just post this to see if this forum would be interested in trying something similar: I myself am a birdwatcher, and also have the good fortune of getting to work with birds. As many birdwatchers do, I keep track of which birds I see every year...

I was wondering if anyone has ever heard of a "biologist" called Carl/Karl Edelstam. I am currently stationed at the Ottenby Bird Observatory, Sweden, collecting lice for my PhD, and at the moment Carl is here doing some research on bird migration. I would like to point out already now, that I...

Scientific American has an article about the intelligence of ravens in the April 2007 edition. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=5BBE6143-E7F2-99DF-333BD2110A8790EE They charge a fee to read it, but an avian science blogger has provided us with an excellent review...

I am teaching a Critical Thinking class, using Schick and Vaughn's great book "How to Think about Weird Things". There is a discussion about the so-called 100th monkey, and the gist of the discussion is that there never was a 100th monkey. The story sounded plausible, so no one checked up on the...

I remember a little while ago when this issue was still unresolved an ornithologist called Alan Feduccia was very much of the opinion that birds were not derived from dinosaurs. It was never very clear exactly what he thought they were from. His negative argument and lack of a properly...

Another palaeontological question... We now accept that birds descended directly from dinosaurs, but are birds actually dinosaurs? What I mean is that, with modern animated reconstructions, it is very easy to see dinosaurs as very birdlike, but if birds are not dinosaurs what are the taxonomic...

Why do birds move the way they do? Smaller birds like robins sparrows etc move with quick jerks, seemingly incapable of slow muscle movement while larger birds like owls can. What's the deal? Why do chickens and pigeons bob their heads when they walk?

A young Marsh Harrier is being tracked on its journey to Africa. The last couple of years have yielded some surprising results and real drama. http://www.roydennis.org/marsh%20harrier.htm

Link to Spectator Article

I mean flying around inside a space station. The sensation of free fall itself would not cause a bird to panic. But when it flapped its wings it would still be in free fall though moving around in the space station. This would disorient the bird. A bird moves in air by flapping its wings, but...

I'm in a new neighborhood and it happens that my next door neighbor owns a Parrot. It's outside a lot and likes to talk and make strange sounds, so I decided to do a little research on talking birds. Among my searchings, I found this site: Budgie Research This site features a bird that the...