All articles tagged with #birds
Researchers analyzing Jan Brueghel the Elder’s painting Air argue it depicts a noctule bat catching a bird midflight, aligning with recent evidence that larger bats eat birds. The study links modern tracking with historical art and suggests more natural-history knowledge may be hiding in paintings, though it remains unclear whether Brueghel observed the event or drew on symbolic or secondhand observations.
A Waitomo cave in New Zealand yielded a million-year fossil cache—including 12 bird species, four frog species, and an ancient parrot related to the kākāpō—trapped between two volcanic ash layers dated at about 1.55 and 1.0 million years ago. This makes the site the oldest known North Island cave and offers a pre-human avifauna markedly different from later communities, illustrating how volcanic eruptions and rapid climate shifts reshaped ecosystems long before humans arrived (with estimates that 33–50% of species disappeared in that interval). The find fills a major gap in New Zealand’s fossil record and reshapes understanding of the islands’ natural history.
After the Reflecting Pool’s renovation, a dead duck was spotted there and two more were found nearby; the two ducks recovered from Constitution Gardens will undergo necropsies to determine their cause of death as wildlife investigators assess impacts of the restoration on the local population.
FT’s Dylan Neri reviews Steve Brusatte’s The Story of Birds, arguing that birds are dinosaurs and tracing how a coelurosaur lineage led to modern birds via feathers, flight, and endothermy, anchored by Archaeopteryx; the book offers an accessible, evidence-packed narrative that makes a compelling case for evolution, even if occasionally the prose leans toward familiar authorial flair.
A study of 120 bird species finds masturbation is widespread in both wild and captive birds, more common in males and linked to a species’ mating system; wild birds showed higher rates than captive ones. The researchers suggest it may serve as a sexual outlet, help clear sperm, or reflect an evolutionary pattern across lineages, challenging the idea that captivity causes stress-related acts. The work, published in Ecology and Evolution, indicates masturbation has an evolutionary basis across birds.
German researchers found iron-rich macrophages in pigeons’ liver detect Earth’s magnetic field and guide navigation; removing these cells disrupts the birds’ sense of direction in cloudy weather, while they can still use the sun on clear days, providing a physical basis for geomagnetic sensing and suggesting multiple cues may guide long-distance navigation.
New research shows that the inner retina of birds can function without oxygen by relying on anaerobic glycolysis fueled by glucose supplied via the pecten oculi, while the outer retina uses oxygen. This arrangement supports the birds’ high-energy vision and reveals how the eye’s evolutionary tinkering may have evolved to maintain function during low-oxygen conditions, with potential implications for understanding tissue hypoxia in humans.
Researchers tracked 216 Hawaiian honeycreeper nests and found 39 instances of stealing nest materials, showing that kleptoparasitism is a common strategy among these island birds to cope with harsh nesting conditions.
A Nature Communications study analyzed 1,139 images of bird wings with theoretical morphospace to test if wings are optimized for flight. Results show that for most birds, wing shapes are not tuned for maximum flight efficiency; hummingbirds and penguins come closest to the predicted optimal shapes, while flightless birds like ostriches are far from optimal. Albatross wings illustrate a constraint: their long, thin wings aid long-distance travel but hinder landing, a necessary trade‑off for breeding. The findings challenge the idea that natural selection always yields the most efficient flight and suggest wing shapes reflect diverse lifestyles and energetic demands, with potential bioinspired engineering implications.
A Fox News Digital investigation finds regulators have allowed the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility to operate despite ongoing wildlife deaths—thousands of birds killed annually by the plant’s concentrated solar beams—under a monitoring-and-mitigation regime that avoids fines or shutdowns. The plant, funded as part of the Obama-era clean energy push, was approved with the expectation that wildlife impacts would be managed later; enforcement is shared among multiple agencies, and penalties for incidental bird deaths have been narrowed by legal reinterpretations, keeping the facility in compliance even as bird mortality continues.
A European, multi-country study across 37 bird species found urban birds take flight sooner when approached by women than by men, with men able to stand closer by about a meter. The exact cues driving this sex difference—such as scent, gait, or body shape—remain unknown, and researchers call for follow-up experiments to identify the responsible signals. The 2,701 observations suggest urban birds are sensitive to subtle human cues, with implications for urban ecology and how scientists study animal behavior in cities.
An international study of 37 urban bird species across five European countries found birds let male researchers approach about three feet closer before fleeing than female researchers, a robust sex-based difference in flight initiation distance across cities and species. Researchers ruled out obvious factors like hair length, body size, and height, and suggested possibilities such as subtle appearance cues or odor, but no definitive explanation yet. The finding is consistent but remains puzzling to scientists.
In a Live Science interview promoting his new book The Story of Birds, paleontologist Steve Brusatte argues that birds are true dinosaurs and that their distinctive features—feathers evolved first for warmth, not flight; lightweight bones and strong flight muscles; and rapid growth—helped the avian line survive the mass extinction 66 million years ago. He explains how pterosaurs and birds coexisted for millions of years, why only modern, beaked, fast‑growing birds endured, and how seeds likely supported post‑asteroid survival. Today, birds face declines from habitat loss, pollution, and climate change, but conservation successes like bald eagles and California condors show resilience, fueling his optimism that birds may endure humanity’s impact—perhaps even longer than our species.
Birds are modern dinosaurs: they evolved from small, feathered theropods, with feathers likely first for insulation and display rather than flight; wings grew as bodies shrank, eventually yielding true flight—Archaeopteryx is a famous early flier about 150 million years ago. Fossils and DNA now support a post‑asteroid surge in bird diversity (owls, hawks, parrots, songbirds), while many extinct birds—terror birds, moa, elephant birds, pelagornithids—show the wider ecological roles birds once filled. Ongoing discoveries and genome studies keep refining when flight started and which dinosaurs were closest to birds.
Live Science highlights Steve Brusatte’s account of the moment feathered dinosaurs proved birds came from dinosaurs: the 1996 discovery of a small, feather-covered coelurosaur in China (Sinosauropteryx) photographed by Currie and Chen and shown to John Ostrom, who cried upon seeing it. This ‘fluffy fossil’ sparked a worldwide rush to find feathered dinosaurs, expanding the tally to numerous species and cementing the view that modern birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs.