#Chimps Are Naturally Violent, Study Suggests For years anthropologists have watched wild chimpanzees go ape and attack each other in coordinated assaults.
To kill fecal contamination on chicken flesh factories typically drench bird carcasses in chlorine. It is a practice so unappetizing that the nation's trading partners like Russia
To understand why U s. poultry companies would rather risk export markets than stop dipping birds in chlorine it's helpful to understand how bad the fecal contamination is.
When producers bring a new flock of birds into a shed standard practice is to leave the manure-laden litter from past flocks on the ground.
So every couple months new birds are living on top of prior generations'waste. To make matters worse just in time for grilling season the U s. Department of agriculture (USDA) was proposing rules that could have increased further contamination.
At those slaughter plants workers often haphazardly shackle live birds on already fast-moving lines.
It's such an imprecise process that nearly a million birds are stunned inadequately and slaughtered every year according to the USDA.
As a first order of business in those tanks the birds let loose all their waste. It's the same water that countless other birds will then be put through spreading feces from bird to bird like a wildfire on a dry day.
So faster moving lines could mean even more birds will enter the scalding tanks while conscious resulting in more fecal contamination and as the Washington post described more potential for animal suffering and food safety problems at chicken slaughter plants.
The USDA is now seemingly backing off its poultry line speed acceleration proposal but is still aiming to cut 800 government inspectors at poultry plants allowing further self-regulation in the chicken industry.
which bird and fish populations don't fare well it's not necessarily indicative of a long-term decline Black said
since the bird and fish populations usually bounce back within a couple years after a bad season.
Food Turns Feathers Pink Flamingos are large birds that are identifiable by their long necks sticklike legs and pink or reddish feathers.
Though it is believed that flamingos are tropical birds they can also live and thrive in cold environments
which are closely related to birds. The dinosaur is also part of an oviraptorosaur subgroup called the caenagnathids
and stealth to take down deer peccary monkeys birds frogs fish alligators and small rodents. If wild food is scarce these large cats will also hunt domestic livestock.
Often they eat birds small mammals lizards eggs carrion and other snakes They slither through the wilderness silently following their prey until they are ready to attack.
and birds though there have been reports of mambas found with whole parrots or full-grown cobras in their stomachs.
Though the amount of water reaching the estuary habitat where river mixes with sea will likely be said small Zamora it could help the hundreds of bird species who nest in the Gulf
and bird eggs when they get the chance. To eat they hold their food in their front paws
but they shouldn't. Like all other birds they lack sweet-taste receptors on their palates
At some point in their evolution the birds transformed a taste receptor that's typically used to detect savory
Beautiful Hummingbirds of the World The small birds eat the occasional insect but they largely subsist on nectar from flowers
which is not a typical source of food for most other birds. As a result hummingbirds have been able to carve out a distinct environmental niche.
The birds can now be found throughout North and South america in habitats ranging from high-altitude mountains in the Andes to tropical rainforests
But after the chicken genome was sequenced in 2004 researchers noticed the birds lacked the gene that encodes T1r2 a crucial component of the sweet-taste receptor.
This same pattern was seen in other bird genomes. If a species is missing one of those two parts then the species can't taste sweet at all said Maude Baldwin a doctoral student of evolutionary biology at Harvard university and one of the researchers on the study.
But in bird genomes scientists never even found a trace of a pseudogene for a sweet tooth Baldwin told Live Science.
It's still not clear why birds lost their sweet receptor in the first place
Birds are the descendants of carnivorous dinosaurs so maybe this gene was lost early on because of the diet of their ancestors Baldwin said.
which includes more than 350 bird species including parakeets macaws cockatiels and cockatoos according to the Integrated Taxonomic Information system (ITIS).
For example to be classified as a parrot the bird must have curved a beak and its feet must be zygodactyl
For example a popular bird in the pet trade the monk parakeet a native of subtropical South america now resides in the United states after some of them escaped
Most parrots are social birds that live in groups called flocks. African grey parrots live in flocks with as many as 20 to 30 birds.
Many species are monogamous and spend their lives with only one mate. The mates work together to raise their young.
Parrots are like most other birds and lay eggs in a nest. Some species though lay their eggs in tree holesground tunnels rock cavities and termite mounds.
The kakapo is one of the world's longest-living birds; they can live more than 90 years.
Our zoo is small enough that keepers get to work with a wide range of animals from bison and mountain lions to tropical birds Andean bears and Roosevelt elk.
and recycled nutrients created habitat variability that benefited grassland birds insects and small mammals and provided abundant food resources for grizzly bears wolves and humans.
Archaeologists found residues of fish scales bird feathers and starchy plants at a Neanderthal cave in the Rhone Valley in France.
><p>Archaeologists in Israel have uncovered intricate mosaics on the floor of a 1500-year-old Byzantine church including one that bears a Christogram surrounded by birds.</
In the four decades that he has worked on the aerial survey of Virginia's Chesapeake bay drainage basin Byrd has witnessed the U s. national bird's recovery from around 30 nesting pairs to a population that may be nearing a saturation point.
and Byrd began logging the bird's comeback in the region in 1977. Since that time biologists have learned a lot about eagles.
We've been able to deploy nest cameras to watch the birds'chick-raising habits and their family life.
To do so we fit solar-powered transmitters on the birds'backs. Since the bald eagle comeback has proven such a success In virginia's stretch of the Chesapeake we've been able to study these birds as a population not just as individuals.
Though individual eagles hold a great deal of interest they are even more fascinating when you consider the raptors as a community.
Our studies document instances of deadbeat dads and cheating wives among the populations of the United states'national bird.
We've also witnessed threats to the domestic tranquility of these birds. Raccoons are pretty bad they can eat eagle eggs
In the 1980s a pair of early birds that we called the Christmas Eagles nested on Jamestown Island.
This year we found birds raising chicks that came from eggs laid in November a time
We don't know why birds here breed so early or why the early birds seem to concentrate in this one short stretch of the James river.
Frankly there's a lot we don't know about the national bird and that's why it's so important to continue the research especially these annual census flights.
No one complains about the increased workload especially not Byrd. Still fresh are the memories of undertaking long heartbreaking flights without finding a single nest.
#Feed the Birds? Not Popcorn and Crumbled Bread (Op-Ed) Deborah Robbins Millman is the director of Cape Wildlife Center one of New england's largest wildlife rehabilitation centers
For many feeding birds at ponds and parks is cherished a childhood memory; one they lovingly recreate for their children and grandchildren.
Yet tragically thousands of birds die annually due to a condition overwhelmingly caused by people who don't know this beloved activity can be deadly.
or both wings to unnaturally twist outward rather than lie flat against a bird's body.
Birds with angel wing are stripped of their ability to fly and therefore their main method of defense.
Since the affected birds are unable to escape predators they are maimed often or killed by them.
The birds most likely to contract angel wing are those residing in parks on ponds
Because birds grow much more rapidly than humans each day's nutrition has a direct effect on development.
or winter when affected birds have grown enough for the condition to be fully and painfully apparent.
and repositioning the affected wing while feeding the birds a proper diet for optimal growth.
For rehabilitators it can be emotionally taxing to see birds denied the chance for a full and productive life
Angel wing can be reduced drastically by not feeding birds people food including white bread popcorn or crackers.
The risk of birds developing this disease doesn't mean the enjoyable and bonding activity of feeding birds must be eliminated you just have to identify areas where feeding waterfowl is supported.
Typically places that do not support feeding have posted signs or are located on private property and offer the birds the right food to sustain their health.
Feeding wild birds a proper diet preserves a treasured family tradition while teaching children the importance of making choices that strengthen rather than undercut the human-animal bond.
In this way we will rear generations of people recognizing the necessity for responsible stewardship and celebrate the value of compassionate co-existence with wildlife.
Some monkeys also eat meat in the form of bird's eggs small lizards insects and spiders.
The Torah provides a list of forbidden birds but does not specify why these particular flying creatures are outlawed.
Permitted birds include chicken geese ducks and turkeys. Even foods that are allowed must be prepared in a particular way to be considered kosher.
Unlike birds and butterflies the drab millimeter-long gloomy scale has invited not enthusiastic long-term monitoring.
Even though I was experienced an professional trapper my trap victims included non-target species such as bald eagles and golden eagles a variety of hawks and other birds rabbits sage grouse pet dogs deer
Yet with the exception of serious birders attracted to its rare and abundant bird life most people have heard never of it.
#A Centenary for the Last Passenger pigeon (Op-Ed) Steve Zack is coordinator of Bird Conservation for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS.
because we know that the very last bird (Martha after Martha Washington) died in the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1 1914.
No other bird has darkened so impressively the skies and stirred wonder and awe in the immensity of its flocks as did the passenger pigeon.
The bird was witnessed by John James Audubon John Muir Thomas Jefferson George washington and countless of their peers in early America.
The number of these birds#was far beyond the power of human calculation wrote Virginia historian Philip Bruce in the 17th century.
The passenger pigeon was likely the most abundant bird on earth in the 18th century numbering three to five billion individuals.
The passenger pigeon was a bird of eastern North america that moved in search of mast. Mast is a botanical term for the hard nut fruits produced by trees like beeches and acorns.
and its behavior (the massive flights of these birds across the country until such mast was found).
I side with Argentine scientist Enrique Bucher's interpretation of how the felling of the forests led to disruption of the copious masting phenomenon and the cascading decline of that once hyper-abundant bird.
The market hunting of mere millions of birds paled in comparison to the loss of billions that once darkened the skies in search of mast.
and acts upon endangered species. When common birds become uncommon However people are less zealous about protecting species when abundant or even common.
Old world vultures were once abundant highly social and mobile birds. But poisons intended to kill game
Millions of these birds have now been lost to the pet trade putting the species at risk.
and birds, such as the Galapagos rail (Laterallus spilonotus) have returned as well. The project is among the most spectacular of a new wave of very ambitious island eradications.
possibly because large birds that act as seed dispersers have gone extinct in the area. And most of the regrown areas surveyed by her team are within 100 metres to two kilometres of primary forest,
presented wild chicks with model birds bearing spots and measured how much they pecked at the model.
and found that Tinbergen's intuition had been correct after all the birds tended to peck more often at red spots.
who studies bird behaviour at the University of Cambridge in the UK and was involved not in the new study.
whether you're looking at bird behaviour or particle physics, says Harry Collins, a sociologist of science at Cardiff University.
Whereas flu surveillance has improved over the past six years in poultry and wild birds, pigs have been below the radar,
H2 and H3 bird viruses, meaning that they would have no immunity. This shows that the world needs a comprehensive surveillance system of all influenza subtypes
and their colleagues compiled the available data on known bird, swine and human flu viruses and created family trees based on DNA sequence information.
The results run counter to previous hypotheses that the human 1918 flu strain had evolved directly from a bird flu virus2.
Nature Newsa study of sexually scrambled chickens suggests that sex in birds is determined in a radically different way from that in mammals.
Researchers were alerted first to the chickens by an employee in the poultry industry who spotted the unusual birds while visiting farms.
The'cockerel'side of these birds has white feathers, large wattles and breast muscles, whereas the smaller'hen'side has characteristic dark colouring.
One gynandromorph was named Sam, for Samantha on the right and Samuel on the left. Like the other gynandromorphs, Sam was infertile and a bit confused.
We assumed that sex determination in birds would follow the mammal pattern, Clinton says. Accordingly, the researchers thought that one side of the gynandromorphs would be a normal female
The hen half was made, for the most part up of normal female cells with female chromosomes, whereas the cockerel side contained mostly normal male cells with male chromosomes.
He suspects that the same rules apply to other species of bird, although gynandromorphs probably go unnoticed much of the time
this study strongly suggests that birds follow a different developmental pattern from mammals, agrees behavioural neuroscientist Juli Wade at Michigan State university in East Lansing who works on sexual differentiation in the songs of zebra finches2.
Birds aren't the only exception to the rule. The mammal model also fails with some marsupials and invertebrates like fruitflies.
is harboured in mammals, birds and even insects. It can trigger abortions in goats and sheep and causes flu-like symptoms and sometimes pneumonia in humans.
Mosquito spray affects bird reproduction: Nature Newsa widely used microbicide may not be as environmentally friendly as previously thought.
But a new study has revealed adverse effects on the reproductive success of birds. When ingested by water-inhabiting mosquito larvae,
But work1 by Brigitte Poulin, a bird ecologist at the Tour du Valat research centre in Arles, France,
dropped dramatically compared with that of birds living in untreated sites. The fall in reproductive success was due to the loss of mosquitoes the birds'preferred food source.
We demonstrated that Bti clearly has an impact on house martins says Poulin. Before the Bti spraying in 2006, the researchers found no difference in type
and size of prey eaten by the birds in the control sites and the areas
and 14,857 prey items collected by the birds across three control sites and three treated sites.
They found that birds inhabiting the control sites predominately ate mosquitoes and midges. But flying ants accounted for a larger proportion of the birds'diet in the treated areas.
They found that 58%of the differences in food source and 63%of the variation in the size of prey taken by birds in the control
and treatment sites is due to Bti application. In contrast, differences in these factors as a result of naturally occurring seasonal or yearly variations,
%The overall breeding success of birds at sites sprayed with Bti was lower than those at untreated sites.
In contrast, birds at the control sites achieved an average of three fledging chicks. Pounlin says she hopes that the results will stop a proposed expansion of Bti spraying in the Camargue,
Pierre Mineau, a pesticide ecotoxicologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, says that the results could help to explain the drop in numbers of insectivorous birds occurring in North america.
these birds are not doing well but we are at a loss to explain it, he says.
when hardworking birds become handicapped, a study shows. Carrion crows (Corvus corone) form stable groups that share the responsibilities of breeding
and that larger groups even those filled with dallying birds may have a lower risk of predation
then trapped and clipped the wings of one bird from each group and repeated the data collection.
What's more, the laziest birds increased their helping behaviour the most. Five out of eight crows that had refused previously to visit the nest suddenly began feeding the chicks.
or because dominant birds force them to contribute. Dawdling animals may be more likely to chip in voluntarily
so Baglione next plans to use tame birds in aviaries. There's still a lot more to learn about how different individuals adjust their cooperative behaviour depending on the actions of others in the group he says.
Bird blues: As many as 1, 240 bird species are threatened with extinction, amounting to 12%of the 10,027 recognized bird species,
says the latest update of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. The bird count was conducted by Birdlife International, a global partnership of conservation organizations.
The IUCN list also confirmed the extinction of the Alaotra grebe (Tachybaptus rufolavatus), 25 years after the last confirmed sighting.
The waterfowl, found mainly in Lake Alaotra in eastern Madagascar, is thought to have been killed off by poaching and the introduction to its habitat of carnivorous fish.
¢go. nature. com/AD8G6E 22 28 august The 28th International Ornithological Congress discusses all things bird-related in Campos do Jord ae'£o, S ae'£o
making plants more threatened than birds, according to the first global analysis of the status of plant biodiversity.
Researchers have begun already sampling birds and will begin to do the same for insects in February.
Nature Newsresearchers have made genetically modified chickens that can't infect other birds with bird flu. The H5n1 strain of influenza which raged through Southeast asia a decade ago
The birds carry a genetic tweak that diverts an enzyme crucial for transmitting the H5n1 strain.
although large-scale distribution of the genetically modified (GM) birds will one day be feasible, their study is meant only to show proof-of-concept of the technique.
few health regulations and long-held cultural practices involving birds. In the developing world, we cannot follow the slaughter strategy used in the developed world,
Instead, developing countries try to control H5n1 by vaccinating birds. This doesn't prevent them from silently acquiring mild forms of the disease and
transmitting it to healthy birds. What's more, flu viruses mutate quickly and are famous for evading vaccines.
the GM birds wouldn't have these issues. They carry a genetic'cassette'dubbed a short-hairpin RNA,
The researchers infected decoy-carrying birds with H5n1 and housed them with uninfected birds, some with the transgene and some without.
Most of the birds that received the primary infection died, but didn't pass on the flu to any of their uninfected cagemates.
The researchers found that the amount of virus present in the infected GM birds was not significantly different from that in non-transgenic controls.
It must be something above and beyond the effect on replication that's having this effect,
it costs approximately £50, 000 (US$79, 000) to produce a small number of stable transgenic birds you can characterize
She and Tiley argue that getting similar transgenic birds into global production would be possible
in part because it is much easier to study seed distribution by birds and terrestrial mammals.
Almost two-thirds of species, including many birds, frogs, butterflies, trees and grassland flowers, breed or bloom earlier.
Koh and his colleagues found that the conversion to oil-palm plantations had put four species of bird at risk of extinction in Borneo,
birds and forest-dwelling mammals were exposed to daily doses up to 100 times greater -and fish and marine algae to doses several thousand times greater-than are considered generally safe.
However, the dose rates were still high enough to reduce the reproductive success of birds rodents and trees-in particular pine and spruce.
over how radiation affects the fitness of birds and invertebrates. A recent study2 that reports reduced survival in barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, where dose rates are now barely above natural values,
finds that bird species with orange feathers living in the fallout zone seem to be more susceptible to radiation than their drabber gray and black fellows1.
and that this molecular trade-off is shaping bird populations around the former nuclear power plant.
One of the team, Anders M ¸ller from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, donned a radiation-protection suit to make four bird-watching trips between 2006 and 2009 to the Red
In a 2007 analysis of the data from the first bird counts made in spring 2006,
Mousseau and M ¸ller found that birds whose feathers were coloured with bright yellow and red carotenoid-based pigments showed a decline in abundance as radiation levels increased,
though there was no comparable correlation for bird species with melanin-based colouring, such as brown, black and reddish-brown2.
what gives redheads their hair colour and Red Forest birds such as the hoopoe (Upupa epops) their distinctive palette of light browns and their orange crown feathers.
or help the birds blend in to their environment, but they have a chemical cost. Making phaeomelanin consumes large amounts of a tripeptide called glutathione (GSH) which is an antioxidant molecule that can also protect tissues from radiation damage by mopping up free radicals.
or phaeomelanin pigments on the distribution and abundance of bird species in the Red Forest.
would use up a bird's stocks of GSH, making it more susceptible to radiation. The researchers reanalysed the survey data on 97 bird species in search of differences between orange-brown birds, assigned a phaeomelanin score from 0 to 5 depending on the intensity and extent of the colours,
and grey or black birds, to which they assigned a eumelanin score. Eumelanin levels, it turned out, had no correlation with bird abundance in relation to background radiation,
but birds with relatively high levels of phaeomelanin became rarer as radiation levels increased. Biologist Kevin Mcgraw of Arizona State university in Tempe says that pigments are good ecological tools:
these colours are real-life indicators of population viability and individual health. If we can amass long-term data sets before these disasters we can get a sense of the changes that occur due to humans.
Nevertheless, he and other biologists have argued for years that scoring bird pigments by eye is not as persuasive as a chemical analysis,
but that the size of the study makes that difficult: It'd be real tough to ask them to do intense pigment sampling for 97 species. But Galv ¡
But the biodiversity of farmland birds declined by 43%between 1970 and 1998. Continued population growth and climate change in the country will probably put more pressure on ecosystems in the future, further reducing benefits and services.
allow health organizations to monitor birds and other animals for the mutations that would provide an early warning of a pandemic
The 2007 peak in avian viral sampling was largely the result of surveys of more than 100,000 wild birds to monitor for the arrival of H5n1 in the Americas1,
The size of a country s poultry population is no predictor of how many samples that country will generate (see Many birds, few samples.
wild birds and other species are also important targets for surveillance, and endemic countries have limited resources."
'Tree of life'constructed for all living bird speciesscientists have mapped the evolutionary relationships among all 9,
993 of the world's known living bird species. The study, published today in Nature1,
is an ambitious project that uses DNA-sequence data to create a phylogenetic tree a branching map of evolutionary relationships among species that also links global bird speciation rates across space and time."
to divide bird species into 158 clades, well-established groups believed to have evolved from a common ancestor2.
Erica Olsen/FLPATHERE are known nearly 10,000 species of birds. Species diversify over time, but it's difficult to account for a species past movements without complete fossil evidence.
"This is certainly not the last word on phylogeny of birds. We hope it will trigger additional efforts to continue improving our understanding of the avian tree of life
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