Passerine

Aquatic bird (299)
Avian (81)
Bird (1871)
Bird of prey (407)
Birdcall (31)
Cuckoo (20)
Goatsucker (8)
Kingfisher (12)
Oilbird (2)
Parrot (95)
Passerine (433)
Piciform (55)
Pigeon (118)
Ratite (74)
Seabird (386)
Swifts (40)
Trogon (1)

Synopsis: 4.4. animals: Birds: Passerine:

Another set of studies demonstrated that ravens, too, know what others do and do not see.

the ravens usually picked up and tried to hide their cache elsewhere. Together, these experiments demonstrate both the ravens'gaze-following abilities and their tactical deception skills.

How about our pets? Well, researchers know dogs can be sneaky. In one experiment, dogs were instructed not to take food from boxes, a few

songbirds have got louder to compete with traffic noise. And, as many city dwellers know, there are now new varieties of urban rat, housemouse and cockroach.

and western scrub jays may mourn as well, each with their own customs. But we humans like to convince ourselves that we are somehow special, unique among the entire animal kingdom.

and creepers that blocked their way. Over time, their perseverance paid off as their hand-drawn maps began to reveal long-forgotten parts of the massive Mayan city of Caracol.

including a low-cost nutcracker for farmers in Morocco and a solar-powered incubator for guinea fowl in Burkina faso.

Rounding out the bottom five are killer bees, starlings, mountain pine beetles, brown tree snakes and Asian mongooses.

many species of songbird can tell how far away a rival is degraded by how its song is.

Honeybee on Snakeroot, a Creative Commons Attribution (2. 0) image from dendroica s photostream) Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati e

On one long block, accountant Henry Calderon welcomes older passers-by to rest in his air-conditioned lobby even if theyre not customers.

#said Kantha Shelke, co-president of the food research firm Corvus Blue. Or cheese#cheese is naturally a pale color

Dozens of starlings in the Karacabey district of Turkeys Bursa province were among the victims of a recent spate of mass animal deaths around the world that initially provoked much international alarm.

such as western scrub jays, tended to avoid noise, while other seed-eaters, like mice, appeared to prefer foraging in noisy areas.

because the instinct of jays is to hide many of the seeds, the newspaper quoted Clinton Francis,

Its Firebird III concept car#haped like a jet fighter, with titanium tail fins and a glass-bubble cockpit#as designed to run on a test track embedded with an electrical cable,

as well as mockery elsewhere#even Jay Leno got into the act. So, how the hell did this happen?

You've Never Seen a Snowflake In this Much Detail Accuweather Winter Weather Center Who Has the Best Chance for a White Christmas?

The Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium in New orleans is cooking up insect-filled Thanksgiving treats at their cafe called Bug Appã tit this Tuesday (Nov 26) and Wednesday (Nov 27.

The birds nest in tree hollows that are favoured also by species introduced to Tasmania-such as the European Starling

Fortunately few starlings visit Melaleuca. And for most of its history there have been very few people either.

When autumn hits the black-capped chickadee goes gangbusters collecting seeds and hiding them in hundreds of different spots in trees and on the ground.

Because stimuli throughout the day such as car headlights will set off a rooster's crow at any time it was also possible that increasing light was the trigger for the cock's crows.

and in response light and the crows of their fellow chickens but those behaviors were much stronger at daybreak.

Confuciusornis (125 to 140 million years) was sized a crow bird with a modern beak but enormous claws at the tips of the wings.

Iberomesornis a contemporary only the size of a sparrow was capable of flight and was probably an insectivore.

and cotingas locally extinct or barely hanging on the palm trees have no way to disperse their largest seeds.

And many animals other than humans have life spans that continue past their reproductive years including killer whales (Orcinus orca) mynah birds (Leucopsar rothschildi) and nematode worms (Caenorhabditis elegans.

The collared flycatcher (Ficedula albicollis) a migratory black-and-white bird lives only about five years maximum at that age 95 percent of collared flycatchers are dead.

But the flycatcher's mortality is fairly constant throughout adulthood not rising with age. Challenging theory The findings challenge the assumptions of classical theory suggesting the old ideas need a tweak Jones said.

or Nutcracker Man were becoming more specialized narrowing their diets and focusing on C4 foods.

The robin-sized murrelet lives at sea but lays one pointy blue-green egg each year on the flat mossy branch of a redwood.

the egg-sucking chick-eating Steller's jay. About 4000 murrelets remain in California with about 300 to 600 in central California's Santa cruz Mountains.

Squirrels ravens and owls also swipe murrelet eggs but jays are the biggest thieves in California gobbling up 80 percent of each year's brood.

Unless more eggs survive the central California population will go extinct within a century according to a 2010 study published in the journal Biological Conservation.

To boost California's murrelet numbers biologists in California's Redwood national and state parks are fighting back against Steller's jays and their human enablers.

The two-pronged approach will teach the black-crested jays to avoid murrelet eggs on pain of puking.

More importantly it will shrink the jay population by thwarting access to their primary food source human trash and food.

Saving the Rare Marbled Murrelet Every time folks throw out crumbs to bring out jays and squirrels it's having a real impact on a very rare bird nesting overhead in an old-growth redwood tree Bensen told Ouramazingplanet.

A Western bird the blue and black Steller's jays like to frequent cleared forest edges which are filled with bugs

As humans spend more time in the forest the jay's numbers are booming. Their density in campgrounds is nine times higher than in other forest areas said Portia Halbert an environmental scientist with the California State Parks.

We see this crazy overlap of jays in campgrounds because of the density of food Halbert told Ouramazingplanet.

and California least terns the jays eat their eggs too. Steller's jays don't seek out murrelet eggs.

But when the birds circle picnic areas near murrelet nests some discover the chicken-size eggs make a fine treat.

Killing Steller's jays won't help the murrelets; even more of the marauding birds will invade campgrounds to compete for vacant territory biologists have concluded.

Plus jays are part of the natural ecosystem said Richard Golightly a biologist at Humboldt State university in California.

Instead researchers think aversion training is the cheapest most effective way to stop Steller's jays from snacking on murrelets.

Small chicken eggs dyed blue-green and speckled with brown paint were offered as meals to jays with carbachol hidden inside.

Wild Steller's jays in this first treatment group usually tried just one taste of the carbachol-filled fake eggs.

The quick action helps the jays link the eggs with the illness. Some jays wouldn't even touch the eggs evidence that murrelet egg-nabbing is learned a behavior Golightly said.

In spring 2010 and spring 2011 a team zip-tied hundreds of the copycat eggs to redwood-tree branches in several parks.

whether wild jays learned to avoid tossing their lunch. The mimic eggs reduced egg-snatching by anywhere from 37 percent to more than 70 percent depending on where the eggs were deployed.

For instance one spot lost eggs to bears so not as many jays got to sample the carbachol.

The bogus eggs were set low on branches to avoid drawing jays toward real murrelet eggs.

A retched success The tests were so successful that Halbert applied for oil-spill restoration funds to start training Steller's jays in the state parks.

We've found a significant decrease in predations by jays the number of times eggs get broken she said.

In 2012 the smallest cutback in egg attacks by Steller's jays and other predators was 44 percent

When the enemy is full starve them Here's why taste aversion works so well for Steller's jays.

Long-lived with excellent memories the jays will recognize and avoid those rare blue-green eggs that made them retch.

if the parks can't shrink the jay population by getting rid of their campground crumb food source.

At Redwood National park the staff reconfigured the outdoor sinks so jays and squirrels can't steal leftovers from dishes.

With Steller's jays just a couple Cheetos is enough. They'll keep coming and coming and then eat the marbled murrelets.

Agelenidae spiders also called funnel weavers live throughout the world including North america. They build funnel-shaped webs between two braces such as branches or grass blades.

Behavior Like most species of spiders funnel weavers are nocturnal. They are known to flee from light.

The earthworms eat away at the puffy duff layer blanketing the forest floor where species such as salamanders and ovenbirds live Resner reported Sunday (Oct 27) at the Geological Society of America's annual meeting.

Female blue tits that construct bigger nests and decorate them with fragrant plants have male partners that are more willing to invest in raising chicks Spanish researchers report in the journal Behavioral Ecology.

 A female blue tit which is about the size of an adult hand from beak to tail picks her partner based on his colorful blue and yellow plumage and the sweetness of his song.

 Female blue tits work alone to build nests although males may add feathers later on. That means the nest may provide a window to the female's health.

After spring mating female blue tits collect moss and grass to construct the base of their nests inside the hollows of trees

As part of the study the team installed bird traps in blue tit nesting boxes a process that sometimes scared the birds away from home

The region they lived in is defined by researchers at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. It encompassed almost 10000 square miles (26000 square km) of territory going across the states of Utah Colorado

but sometimes prolonged periods of drought writes a team of Crow Canyon researchers in a 2011 online article. oeliving off the land has always been

The Crow Canyon researchers note that after A d. 500 a people whom archaeologists refer to as the oebasketmakers (named from their finely woven baskets) moved from the peripheries of the Mesa verde archaeological area into the center.

or discussed issues important to the group the Crow Canyon researchers write. This way of life appears to have been quite successful at least for a time.

Crow Canyon archaeologists note that these room blocks were made of adobe stone and plant materials with stone masonry becoming more important as time went on.

The Crow Canyon Archaeological Center archaeologists note that oelike great kivas great houses were public structures probably used for community-wide ceremonies

but much more distant locations in Mexico as well write the Crow Canyon archaeologists. The researchers who wrote the American Antiquity article note that the population in their study area continued to grow almost continuously after A d. 930 spiking in the 13th century.

In her explanation of reproduction to her young daughters she used images of blue eggs in the robin's nest wind blowing pollen dust from one plant to the other

and elk and plants mean for bird species like the Red-faced Warbler? Each spring Red-faced Warblers along with two other related species the Orange-crowned Warbler and Virginia s Warbler build cupped nests of grass tucked into the ground at the base of trees.

There they incubate their eggs and raise their young until they grow big enough to leave the nest.

In the past the three warbler species did not choose the same kind of nest sites. Instead each selected patches dominated by different tree species. Orange-crowned Warblers preferred nesting in clumps of maples Virginia s Warblers liked locusts

and Red-faced Warblers nested under small fir trees. But now that maples and locusts are crowned declining Orange

and Virginia s Warblers have preferred fewer nest sites to choose from and are forced increasingly to nest in sites similar to those of the Red-faced Warbler.

 So why does this matter? Well nest-site choices have consequences for nest survival and subsequent population numbers.

When the birds divvied up their use of the different nest sites in the past predation on their eggs

#The Wilderness Act Turns 50 John Weaver senior conservation scientist for the Wildlife Conservation Society has conducted field research in many wild areas across western North america over the past 45 years.

Songbirds Even songbirds have sported tiny backpacks for research purposes. Scientists at York University in Toronto used the packs to track wood thrushes and purple martins during the birds'migration from Pennsylvania to Central and South america.

The scientists found that the birds actually traveled three times faster than expected more than 311 miles (500 kilometers) per day the researchers said.

The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree has given my heart A change of mood

there have been spectacular declines in formerly common birds such as skylarks turtledoves and grey partridges as shown in the RSPB State of the UK s Birds Report

the Zivko Edge the Breitling MXS-R and the Corvus Racer. While they may look slightly different all three planes have streamlined aerodynamic bodies that are designed to maximize speed

One pilot Peter Besenyei will be flying the Hungarian-made Corvus Racer a plane designed specifically for him.

Sharovipteryx was a glider about the size of a modern crow with wing membranes attached to long hind legs.

There's a lot of pasting clumps of dirt onto exposed tree roots and a lot of curious glances from passers by.

Scavengers possibly Arctic foxes and ravens devoured Khroma's heart and lungs as well as parts of the trunk and skull between the time she was discovered in 2008

and how other nectivores like orioles and honeyeaters developed a taste for sweets. It's still not clear why birds lost their sweet receptor in the first place

Young songbirds are fed by their parents and after they fledge have a lot of mobility and exposure to a varied diet.)

Helpful passers-by with chains and four-wheel drives kindly offered to pull me out but really only made matters worse.

and more than 850 in neck snares including mountain lions river otters pronghorn antelope deer badgers beavers turtles turkeys ravens ducks geese great blue herons and even a golden eagle.

The mountain pine beetle outbreak and the climate signal associated with it is the canary in the coal mine about future disturbances.

along with salt-poor ice grains that are formed like snowflakes from pure water vapour. Salt-rich grains are frozen directly ocean water dragged up by strong vapour flow

Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak shared the 2009 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine,

Andrew Weaver, a climate researcher at the university, claimed that there had been sustained a hacking attempt in recent weeks.

Nature Newsbon appã tit! A team of European researchers has decoded the genome of the delectable PÃ rigord black truffle.

Combined with work on songbirds, this study strongly suggests that birds follow a different developmental pattern from mammals,

and ravens and the old and helpless were killed and thrown over cliffs, Patterson says. And according to his shells, it was indeed a difficult era,

The team shows that the breeding success of house martins (Delichon urbicum) in Bti-treated areas in a national park in the Camargue, France,

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

says Scott Weaver, who studies virus-mosquito interactions at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

Lazy crows pitch in when it counts: Nature Newsfreeloading crows start to contribute to group efforts

when hardworking birds become handicapped, a study shows. Carrion crows (Corvus corone) form stable groups that share the responsibilities of breeding

and caring for the young. Dominant breeders rely on helpers to feed chicks, but they also tolerate individuals that don't seem to help at all.

The research team used camouflaged video cameras to collect data on how often 61 wild crows from 17 social groups in northern Spain fed chicks.

When clipped crows reduced their chick feeding by about 30, %only non-breeders intensified their care-giving efforts.

Five out of eight crows that had refused previously to visit the nest suddenly began feeding the chicks.

Loitering crows may help the whole group by ensuring that provisions for offspring remain constant during tough times:

the increased effort of non-breeders compensated fully for the diminished offerings of the disabled crows.

because they may derive indirect gains from the group's overall reproductive success. The factors that influence helping behaviour are difficult to examine using skittish crows in the wild,

met less resistance when she encouraged village weavers to switch from artificial to natural dyes in the production of their woollen carpets and kilims,

which improved the weavers'business. That was very easy, she says. We showed them they could make more money.

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,

One author of the report, Tekalign Mamo, Ethiopia's minister of state for agriculture and rural development, told Nature that policy-makers at Durban should take examples of good agricultural practice

As well as Beddington and Mamo, they include Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research in S £o Paulo,

Andrew Weaver and Neil Swart, both climate scientists at the University of Victoria in British columbia, listened to the rhetoric and decided to run some calculations.

Weaver says.""And frankly, these numbers aren t as big as I thought they would be.

Weaver and Swart tried to answer this question in a recent commentary in Nature Climate Change1.

However, such a life-cycle comparison is included not in Weaver and Swart s analysis, owing to the complexity of assessing future technological changes for this and other fuels.

The 19 Â June report, chaired by sociologist Janet Finch at the University of Manchester,

and killed nearly every single Stephens Island wren just as they were discovered by science in 1900.

City life turns blackbirds into early birdsjust as city slickers have paced faster lives than country folk,

The finding helps to explain prior reports that urban songbirds adopt more nocturnal lifestyles2-4 data that prompted Davide Dominoni, an ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, Germany,

Dominoni and his colleagues set up an experiment with European blackbirds (Turdus merula). The scientists attached tiny 2. 2-gram radio-pulse transmitters to blackbirds living in Munich, Germany,

as well as to those living in a nearby forest. The transmitters monitored the birds activity for three weeks.

Dominoni collected blackbirds from both locations and placed them into light-and soundproof enclosures. For ten days these enclosures were illuminated with a constant

Having such weakly set biological clocks could be a boon for the blackbirds.""It could make them better at coping with city environments that are not as predictable as the wilderness,

Birds protect Costa rica's coffee cropthe yellow warbler may not pull a perfect latte, but it turns out it's a friend to coffee drinkers all the same.

Research in Costa rica shows that hungry warblers and other birds significantly reduce damage by a devastating coffee pest, the coffee berry borer beetle.

the team identified the yellow warbler (Setophaga petechia) and four other species as beetle eaters. Next, the researchers combined data about bird abundance, forest cover and beetle populations from six coffee plantations.

For example, honeybees (Apis mellifera) and gray jays (Perisoreus canadensis) 2 have been seen to violate IIA, and so have hummingbirds (Selasphorus rufus) 3."On witnessing such behaviour in the past,

the life cycle of moose ticks and how wolves might be driven to form packs to ward off scavengers such as ravens, rather than for any hunting advantage.

You'll notice that on this toy you won't see any of the most common North american wild animals--no raccoons no coyotes no deer no robins no hawks and no foxes.

The male red-billed buffalo weaver is the only species of bird we know of that exhibits orgasm-like behavior according to Tim Birkhead a professor in Sheffield University's Department of Animal and Plant sciences.

The buffalo weaver a native of Sub-saharan africa has a fake penis--it has no sperm duct

but when Birkhead and his colleagues manually stimulated a buffalo weaver's mock member the bird had seemed

TWO TIT ONE TIME! ON YOU I SIGN! ONE TIME! TRY THE SIGH!?YOU WALK YA HIGH!

TWO TIT ONE TIME! ON YOU I SIGN! ONE TIME! TRY THE SIGH!?YOU WALK YA HIGH!

TWO TIT ONE TIME! ON YOU I SIGN! ONE TIME! TRY THE SIGH!?YOU WALK YA HIGH!

Literally every insectivorous animal in the northeast--songbirds carnivorous birds (hawks owls) opossums foxes cats shrews snakes spiders and even dogs--will gorge on cicadas.

Redwing blackbirds and eastern bluebirds have been found to have much stronger and healthier broods in years that coincide with Magicicada's emergence as do mammals like foxes and raccoons.

Its not like squirrels are hoarders or foxes or ravens...or many other animals that demonstrate distinctly Human qualities.

Luckily it is now possible to buy a hybrid lawn mower known as the Raven MPV-710. In many ways a hybrid mower makes sense.

Almost a cross between ATV and mower the Raven MPV-710 appears to be one of the highest-tech options on the market.

Because of the electric direct drive Raven says it transfers more power to the wheels than most mowers on the market

Used as a generator the Raven's engine is more frugal than other mowers so you'll get up to 12 hours of running on a 5-gallon fill.

Every year for the past 30 years researchers have been acting like urban Darwins observing cliff swallows in Nebraska

an unknown starling you have seen never or the lettuce you had with your lunch. So when my mother was making

and use of these toxic pesticides until determined safe Friends of the Earth president Erich Pica told the AP P

Only discovered less than two years ago scientists know little about these marvelously strange web-weavers

In other members of the family Araneidae (the taxonomic family that includes orb-weavers) once males are sexually mature they pretty much hang out in the webs of the females

The average grackle or chickadee by comparison has so many close relations that they all share the same evolutionary effort.

Others like marsh-nesting seaside sparrows or the honey bees that produce mangrove honey rely on one or the other.

and/or endangered species like the Canary Island date palm or the Cretan date palm to the identification of hybrids having an ornamental value'.

and nuthatches were feeding on the emerald ash borer. They hoped that unlike other exotic invasive species which run amok in new regions because of the lack of predators to keep them in check the emerald ash borer might meet its match in native predators--bark foraging birds like the woodpecker and nuthatch.

This kind of bio-control would be as or perhaps more efficient than other methods to slow the spread of this pest said Flower.

and the white-breasted nuthatch the important bark foraging birds in this region increased as the emerald ash borer increased.

and the nuthatch to have an impact on the population of the emerald ash borer said Whelan.

and blue tits scout for food in the morning but only return to eat it in late afternoon to maximize their chances of evading predators in the day without starving to death overnight Oxford university research has found.

The birds studied were a mixture of great tits (Parus major) blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) marsh tits (Poecile palustris) coal tits (Periparus ater) and nuthatches (Sitta europaea.

'We used new tracking technologies to investigate how great tits blue tits and other common garden birds balance the competing risks of predation

Dracaena kaweesakii is a relative of the beautiful Canary Island dragon tree Dracaena draco. It is an ecologically important species found only on limestone hills

In the 1970s red spruce was the forest equivalent of a canary in the coal mine signaling that acid rain was damaging forests

as a result of winter injury U s. Forest Service and University of Vermont scientists came up with a surprising result--three decades later the canary is feeling much better.

Between 2005 and 2008 he used constant-effort mist netting to capture songbirds band them determine

#Bright birds make good mothersfemale blue tits with brightly coloured crowns are better mothers than duller birds according to a new study led by the University of York.

While the crown of a blue tit looks just blue to us to another bird it has added the dimension of appearing UV-reflectant.

The three-year study of blue tits which also involved researchers from the University of California Davis USA and the University of Glasgow showed that mothers with more UV-reflectant crown feathers did not lay more eggs

Previous studies have shown that male blue tits prefer mates that exhibit highly UV-reflectant crown feathers.

UV plumage can signal maternal quality in blue tits so a male choosing a brightly coloured female will gain a good mother for his chicks and a less stressed partner.

In blue tits (Cyanistes Caeruleus) both sexes exhibit bright UV-reflectant crown feathers. The birds are socially monogamous with the female solely incubating the eggs

The researchers looked at the relative UV reflectance of the crown feathers of female blue tits

With up to 14 chicks to care for blue tit mothers in our study were feeding their broods every couple of minutes.

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