This site uses cookies to improve your experience. To help us insure we adhere to various privacy regulations, please select your country/region of residence. If you do not select a country, we will assume you are from the United States. Select your Cookie Settings or view our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Used for the proper function of the website
Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Strictly Necessary: Used for the proper function of the website
Performance/Analytics: Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
Common Ravens tend to avoid nesting around lots of humans. Why else would they build their nest, which already contains two eggs, on the fire escape of the college’s science center? Which is what makes the Ravencam so special, according to Professor Nicholas Rodenhouse, who teaches environmental science and biological sciences.
I usually restrict my unfair jokes to humans. A paper on the species asks the important question “Does nest sanitation elicit egg rejection in an open-cup nesting cuckoo host rejecter?” ” So, either just a fake egg or a fake egg and trash (a peanut shell). ” That seems a bit unfair to me.
The local Bald Eagles are getting busy, I suspect there is an egg in the nest. There is a bit of science news. The Izu scincid lizards (Plestiodon latiscutatus) that inhabit the four Japanese Izu Islands with only bird predators are drab brown, mature later, lay small clutches of large eggs, and hatch large neonates.
(If you’re feeling particularly science-y, the full paper is here.). By studying Zebra Finches and domestic chickens, the scientists discovered that multiple sperm appear necessary for a fertilized egg to progress to the embryo stage (a process called “polyspermy”.)
They have special adaptations to stay warm and to keep their eggs and chicks warm. However, we now know that human ancestors became upright first, and were bipedal for millions of years before they started to use tools extensively, and then another million years went by before their brains started to evolve a significantly larger size.
They may be about bird eggs ( The Most Perfect Thing: The Inside (and Outside) of a Bird’s Egg , 2016), or a 17th-century ornithologist ( Virtuoso by Nature: The Scientific Worlds of Francis Willughby, 2016), or How Bullfinches learn songs from humans ( The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology.
Other hardy souls signed up for an early morning “Ostrich Run” 5k, with the prizes beinging–you guessed it–actual ostrich eggs. Emptied of their contents, of course.). A few days later, I was the assistant (a glorified gofer , if you will) for a morning-long session on migration.
As a Northeast birder I am familiar with the alarming decrease in the number of Red Knots along Atlantic shores and have signed petitions and written e-mails calling for legislation and rules that will limit the overharvesting of the horseshoe crab, whose eggs Red Knots depend on. million in the late 1990’s. Should the gulls be controlled?
According to a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study, human-induced climate change has doubled the area affected by forest fires in the western U.S. Birds are able to fly away, but their nests and eggs can be destroyed. References: 1 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
If you have always wondered what the minimum anesthetic concentration for isoflurane and sevoflurane for the Crested Serpent-eagle is, science has an answer. Apparently, some bird photographers think that any human artifacts shown on a bird photo immediately spoil the whole photo. Glad I did not have to watch these.
Erika is a first year graduate student studying Ecosystem Science and Conservation at Duke. As we looked closer, we saw the Sooty Terns nesting right on the ground itself, calling back and forth to each other as they sat on their speckled eggs. Sooty Terns are incredibly birds. Trips bird banding dry tortugas Florida'
According to the HBW, when breeding, male birds do most of the incubation and parenting while females often leave the nest up to one week before the eggs hatch. According to Couzens, after laying the eggs, females sometimes immediately abandon their first mate and pair up with another male. But maybe that is actually a good thing.
The author is Nick Cooney and he's the Director of The Humane League, an animal advocacy non-profit with offices in Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington DC. Change Of Heart provides science-based answers to many questions that are hotly debated among animal activists. In the author's words.
Bird communication is a complex and evolving science. The six chapters that follow explore bird communication in mating; defending territory; rearing children; responding to predators; interacting with neighbors and functioning in large groups; and communicating successfully in a noisy human world. There is so much here!
That system may treat sentient animals like car parts, ruin antibiotics we need for human medicine, and destroy rural communities by polluting our air and water, but at least it’s “efficient” (a word Mr. Hurst hammers three times). The idea that eggs from free-range chickens are somehow morally superior to other eggs is, frankly, weird.
This last implies of course an improvement in ethics, as opposed to morality, as I have defined it, unless we already understand 'Do as you would be done by' as applicable to whales, cattle, chickens, and so on, as it is to human beings. I eat eggs though they may come from battery hens.
It’s all about the improbable intersection of human beings and Emperor Penguins, and if I can’t make it to an Emperor Penguin colony (highly unlikely), reading this book has been the next best thing. It’s part memoir, part travelogue, part scientific narrative, part prologue to making an argument for Antarctic conservation.
If you want to know why most scientists support collecting this piece in Science explains it better than I can. I can understand why some people are conflicted, but the value to science of the collections is immense. Box after box of egg. This collection isn’t some ghastly memorial or symbol of human stupidity.
Of course, it is hard to resist looking at a paper titled “Host personality predicts cuckoo egg rejection in Daurian redstarts” Basically, the personality of a female redstart (bold or shy) predicts the responses to parasitic eggs – bold hosts are more likely to reject parasitic eggs.
One Oriental Pratincole of them was courageously raising its wings when I unknowingly drove towards its eggs – I reversed, but I am not so sure about the next person using that road … Being yelled at by the chick of an Oriental Pratincole. I guess looking elegant during sex is difficult for most humans, too.
The species is classified as Near Threatened for all the usual depressing reasons – pollution, drainage, hunting, and the collection of eggs and nestlings ( source ). They are also quite catholic (sorry, I really like this word) in their prey selection, feeding on 17 different species of fish and prawn in the study cited above.
In the slightly frighteningly named journal “Science of The Total Environment”, there is a paper on organochlorine compounds in Purple Heron eggs nesting in sites located around a chloralkali plant (Ebro River). Summary result: relevant chemicals emitted by the plant can be found in the eggs.
More than 150 bird species are known to have become extinct over the past 500 years, and many more are estimated to have been driven to extinction before they became known to science. This plain used to be little affected by humans, being grazed by just a few cattle, goats and camels.
49-50) She is also adept at writing about conservation’s larger context in terms of its history, public policy struggles, and the science behind species re-introduction. Well-researched and footnoted, these sections never feel disconnected from the more personal sections.
Shorebird identification takes time and is often stressful, there’s heat glare and bugs and drones and dogs and humans. It’s a book that counterpoints and combines facts and personal experiences, science-based and eloquent writing styles, textual description and visual information, a history of abundance and an uncertain future.
Animal science” – distinct from zoology, the science of Earth’s millions of animal species – is what LGUs call meat-industry courses, including slaughtering animals, making ice cream, the full range of meat-linked endeavor. RPA launched its 10,000 Years Is Enough campaign to get our universities out of the meat industry in 2003.
We immediately get a sense of the pigeons’ abundance, beauty, and danger to human activity. She portrays humans merged with Passenger Pigeons; the images are then framed to look like 19th century calling cards. This bit of science is a nice final counterpoint to an account that has emphasized art, history, and literature.
The Sacred Ibis was seen as the incarnation of the god Thoth, who (with gods apparently better at multitasking than humans) was (or maybe still is, who knows?) was responsible for maintaining the universe, judging the dead, and for writing and science ( source ). Possibly also for doing the dishes. Two ways of life folded at once.
Indeed, most cuckoo eggs are accepted by the babax ( source ), although a small proportion of hosts reject cuckoo eggs and often boast about this capability when having a few too many drinks. Meaning: we did real science, Martens did not. ” Meaning: we did real science, Martens did not.
Storks, Ibises and Spoonbills of the World states that “disturbance by local people, tourists, and egg and zoo collectors has similarly reduced the colonies, and more protection is vital”. Despite the fact that efforts are made to ensure they are not imprinted on humans, they are naturally confiding, even friendly.
Earlier attempts to spread the risk around had failed, so Don and his team applied science to the problem, spending several months studying the birds in the wild in order to work out how to care for them and to decide what type of habitat to release them into. It worked, and the translocated birds were soon breeding.
Gisela Kaplan has written a book about the species, and how they seem unperturbed by humans: “It’s one of their most successful defense strategies. When these birds breed, this can lead to highly cringeworthy announcements, for example from Adelaide Zoo : “We have egg-citing news!”
Alternatively, imagine I set the dial to produce simple heat, like the kind that comes out of your stove to cook your scrambled eggs. The kind of energy produced by a cell phone signal is way more like the heat that cooks your eggs than like the scary radiation that comes form an H-bomb or X-ray machine or whatever.
I visited Tengchong in late 2020 and wrote about it – but I also went there earlier, in 2017, and this post shows some photos I took during that trip, along with the usual comments that seem to be much more about ridiculing my fellow humans (especially ornithologists and the like) than providing useful information on birds.
The Zoo episode focuses on two Pink Pigeon couples: The Stud and Serendipity, a male and female that the zoo people hope will mate and produce a viable egg, and Thelma and Louise, a same-sex pair-bonded couple who the zoo people hope will incubate the egg and nurture the chick. Because, Ms. On the WCS web page, Ms.
Jennifer Ackerman points out in the introduction to What the Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds , that we don’t know much, but that very soon we may know a lot more. What the Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds is a joyous, fascinating read.
Of course, the same applies to pizza services for humans. Which sounds like a species name taken from a science fiction novel for children. The bees pursue the bird until it settles down somewhere, try to sting it, and get eaten ( source ). Why move toward the food when you can have the food move to you? Reluctantly back to birds.
Fortunately for the buntings, they seem to detect most cuckoo eggs smuggled in (75% in one study). A study found that for Plain Prinia , egg characteristics in a mainland China location with many cuckoos make it much easier to spot cuckoo eggs than in a Taiwan location with few cuckoos ( source ). Better safe than sorry.
We organize all of the trending information in your field so you don't have to. Join 30+ users and stay up to date on the latest articles your peers are reading.
You know about us, now we want to get to know you!
Let's personalize your content
Let's get even more personalized
We recognize your account from another site in our network, please click 'Send Email' below to continue with verifying your account and setting a password.
Let's personalize your content