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
A paper on the species asks the important question “Does nest sanitation elicit egg rejection in an open-cup nesting cuckoo host rejecter?” ” To rephrase: if you put some trash into a nest of a bird along with a cuckoo egg, does that improve the chance that the cuckoo egg will be kicked out? How to find out?
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.
In this way, the cuckolding Cuckoo can convince its cuckoldee, the Reed Warbler, to back off when the Cuckoo comes around, allowing the Cuckoo to toss out one of the Warbler’s eggs and replace it with one of its own, to be raised by the hapless Warbler parents. Science 3 August 2012: 578–580 a.
A few families have a small number of eggs in the clutches, like gulls or cormorants. Others, like the petrels and some of the auks, will lay a single egg per breeding attempt. Unique among the auks, indeed among seabirds, they will attempt to double brood, to lay another clutch after successfully raising the first chick.
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?
If you have always wondered what the minimum anesthetic concentration for isoflurane and sevoflurane for the Crested Serpent-eagle is, science has an answer. As you can easily judge from the dullness of this information, it is not something I made up but rather an appalling example of nepotism in the naming of birds.
If you remember that the first edition of Sibley was published with “National Audubon Society” on the cover, raise your hand. The photographs are from VIREO, the ornithological image collection associated with the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, which licenses bird photographs to many guides and reference books.
This bit of science is a nice final counterpoint to an account that has emphasized art, history, and literature. He effectively brings his point across by presenting facts and images and a little bit of hard science. How many eggs did a pigeon lay? I think this is one of the reasons I enjoy reading his books.
In the former, a female lays her fertilized egg in the nest of another species, in the hopes that her offspring will be raised by the unwitting hosts. In the latter, three or more adult individuals contribute to the raising of offspring. Science (New York, N.Y.), doi:10.1126/science.1240039. Somveille, M.,
The first eggs are usually laid at the end of May or sometimes in the first week of June, but this can vary depending on the weather. Both sexes incubate, with the eggs taking an average of 19 or 20 days to hatch. This book is based on a long-running study of Swifts nesting in a tower at Oxford University’s Museum of Science.
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. The birding life.
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”. Many have been shot since the project started, despite a great deal of publicity raising awareness of the birds.
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.
She lives part-time in Uruguay and is co-director of the Fiction Meets Science program at the University of Bremen, Germany, which seeks to bridge the “two cultures” of science and literature. Her narrator is Gabriel, 23, raised in Northern California by an American father and a Uruguayan mother.
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.
Many, many things happened in the area of bird science this year, so this review can not be comprehensive. Birds are raised from the egg to follow a certain migration timing, but that timing shifts when the egg hatches later or earlier due to changes in conditions. With global warming, this has meant earlier hatching.
In contrast, the females need to make sure not to get duped into raising actual cuckoos – the buntings are a targeted host species ( source ). Fortunately for the buntings, they seem to detect most cuckoo eggs smuggled in (75% in one study). Maybe there is some justice in this world after all. Better safe than sorry.
I have written about the interesting sex life of these jacanas a few times already (short version: female mates with male, lays a bunch of eggs for him to incubate and raise the chicks, leaves him, finds another male, repeat). But it is all for science, I hear them say. but they do. See the sequence below.
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