ornithology
tetrapodzoology | January 29, 2007
It turns out that Cretaceous troodontid dinosaurs had asymmetrical ears. This makes them like owls, which also have asymmetrical ears. But not all owls have asymmetrical ears and, what's more, the story of ear asymmetry in owls is itself a pretty remarkable one....
Before getting distracted by godwits, I was talking about troodontids and their asymmetrical ears (and this itself came as a distraction, as beforehand I was talking about the evolution of blood-feeding in birds). The irresistible comparison that comes to mind is of course with owls, as owls also have asymmetrical ears (though…
tetrapodzoology | January 27, 2007
My advice: get into the field and look at animals. Then wonder why some of them have curved bills, why they walk round in circles.. and whether a godwit is a big dowitcher or not.
A while back I made an effort to stop writing so much about birds, and to concentrate instead on other tetrapod groups (to find out why go here). Alas, if you live in the temperate zone, birds are (after hominids) the most familiar and frequently encountered tetrapods, so I can forgive myself for writing the following. Don't worry if you were expecting more on asymmetrical ears, or on vampires: I will still return…
tetrapodzoology | January 25, 2007
More on oxpeckers, on wound-feeding, and on the delightful habit of eating earwax...
In the previous post we looked at the behaviour of oxpeckers: the idea that they feed on blood and the other tissues of their hosts was introduced, and we can now doubt the idea that they are always symbiotic 'friends' of the mammals they clamber about on. As demonstrated by Paul Weeks in his several studies of the birds (Weeks 1999, 2000), oxpeckers spend a considerable amount of foraging time feeding - not on ticks - but on blood, ear wax, and on dead skin that they 'scissor' out of the fur. We also saw…
tetrapodzoology | January 23, 2007
Welcome to Tetrapod Zoology ver 2: and we start with blood-eating birds....
To everyone who has come over from the blog's former home on blogspot, thanks for coming on over, and to new readers: welcome. This is a blog devoted entirely to discussion of the evolution, history, diversity, biology and behaviour of tetrapods, and for the two or three of you that don't know, a tetrapod is any vertebrate animal that possesses four limbs, or descends from an ancestor that had four limbs. Essentially it's amphibians, mammals and reptiles (the latter including birds), and the close fossil relatives…
grrlscientist | January 23, 2007tags: Microraptor gui, microraptor, biplane, bird flight, evolution
The ancestors of modern birds are thought to have been small, feathered, dinosaurs, the theropods. One of these small feathered dinosaurs is Microraptor gui, a feathered dromaosaur that lived 125 million years ago in what is now China. According to the evidence, Microraptor gui was one of the earliest gliders. But unlike modern birds, it appears to have utilized four wings, like a biplane, because it had long and asymmetric flight feathers on both its hands and feet.
According to initial interpretations, Microraptor flew…
grrlscientist | January 17, 2007
A prairie falcon, Falco mexicanus.
This photo was taken on Christmas Eve in north-central Kansas.
Image: David A. Rintoul.
As long as you send images to me (and I hope it will be for forever), I shall continue to share them with my readership. My purpose for posting these images is to remind all of us of the grandeur of the natural world and that there is a world out there that is populated by millions of unique species. We are a part of this world whether we like it or not: we have a choice to either preserve these species or to destroy them in search of short-term monetary gains. But…
grrlscientist | January 6, 2007
Following (below the fold) are a few of the bird posters that I saw yesterday at SICB.
Class. Substantial data exists on the behavioral endocrinology of temperate-zone birds, yet ornithologists are just beginning to examine and compare tropical birds to temperate zone birds. In a recent comparative study, tropical birds had lower mean peak testosterone levels on average than temperate birds. However, several tropical species in the study had comparable or higher peak testosterone levels than temperate species. In contrast, in a study of peak testosterone levels in three species of the genus…
grrlscientist | December 21, 2006
Ingenuity
Orphaned Image. Please contact me for proper creditation.
I am receiving so many gorgeous pictures from you, dear readers, that I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the images and the creatures and places in them. If you have a high-resolution digitized nature image (I prefer JPG format) that you'd like to share with your fellow readers, feel free to email it to me, along with information about the image and how you'd like it to be credited.
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tags: canary, Ingenuity, bird
grrlscientist | December 5, 2006After comparing the brains of hummingbirds to those of other birds, scientists found that a specific nucleus (in this case, a "nucleus" refers to a distinct brain region) that detects any movement of the entire visual world. They found that this brain nuclei was two to five times bigger in the hummingbird than in any other species, relative to brain size.
"We reasoned that this nucleus helps the hummingbird stay stationary in space, even while they're flying," said said Doug Wong-Wylie, Canada Research Chair in Behavioural and Systems Neuroscience and psychology professor at the University…
grrlscientist | November 15, 2006
Male American goldfich, Carduelis tristis.
Ãmage: Justawriter.
Photo taken at Sullys Hill National Wildlife Preserve, North Dakota.
This image was sent to me by a long-time reader to cheer me up after the loss of my discharge date. Thanks!
If you have a high-resolution digitized nature image that you'd like to share with your fellow readers, feel free to email it to me, along with information about the image and how you'd like it to be credited.
.
tags: American goldfinch, bird, ornithology
grrlscientist | October 23, 2006One question that people like to ask me is how I decided to study evolution in birds? The fact is that I had always been particularly interested in birds so I have a life-long history of watching and feeding wild birds as well as breeing and training captive birds, so it would seem natural that I would eventually end up studying them, too .. right?
Well, my journey wasn't as straighforward as that since I worried I would never be able to make a living as an ornithologist, so I instead went into microbiology and studied to be a virologist. Daily, my life was focused on sussing out the…
grrlscientist | October 15, 2006
The newly described YariguÃes Brush-Finch,Atlapetes latinuchus yariguierum.
Photo: Blanca Huertas, Natural History Museum.
A previously unknown subspecies of bird was discovered on an isolated South American mountain range. This coloful bird is approximately the size of a stick of butter. It has a fiery rust-red cap, lemon-yellow throat and a sooty-yellow belly streaked with bright yellow that contrast with a black beak, eye patch, wings, legs and tail (pictured). The bird's coloration distinguishes it from its closest relative, the Yellow-breasted Brush-Finch, because its back is black…
grrlscientist | July 7, 2006For those of you who are bird watchers, and those of you who research birds, you will be interested to know that the American Ornithologists' Union (AOU) just published its 47th Supplement to their Check List of North American Birds -- its 6th Supplement since the seventh edition was first published in 1998. This Supplement is published after new data -- mostly DNA data -- becomes available to the AOU.
(below the fold)
According to this paper [free PDF], nine main changes are noted in this Supplement;
three species were added because AOU split them from species that already appear on the…
grrlscientist | June 7, 2006In April 2006, to celebrate naturalist Sir David Attenborough's 80th birthday, the public were asked to vote on their favorite of his television moments. This clip of the superb lyrebird, Menura novaehollandiae, from his ten-part series, The Life of Birds, was voted number one.
(video below the fold because there is no "start" button; it begins downloading as soon as the page pops up) [3:34]
There are two species of lyrebirds that are endemic to Australia. They are ground-dwelling birds that are most notable for their extraordinary ability to mimic natural and artificial sounds from their…
grrlscientist | May 30, 2006The Institute for Bird Populations announced that its journal, Bird Populations, will become entirely electronic beginning with its upcoming issue.
First published in 1993, Bird Populations fills a major gap in the scientific literature because no other technical publication is dedicated to the study of dynamic avian demography and biogeography from a global perspective. This annual publication carries peer-reviewed papers of original research, reports from major avian monitoring projects around the world, and review, synthesis and commentary articles.
Hattip: Thomas Gardali; PRBO…
grrlscientist | April 9, 2006
Female hummingbird, asleep.
Photo by Dylan Maldonado.
A flash of scarlet and emerald zooms past me as I poke my sleepy head out of the kitchen door, a vibrant splash of summer color against the sullen winter sky. Suddenly, an indignant Anna's Hummingbird, Calypte anna, confronts me, beak-to-nose, demanding his breakfast. Shivering, I retreat quickly into the kitchen to prepare warm sugar water for my feathery guest.
Hummingbirds are classified into the avian family, Trochilidae, which is from the Greek word, trochilos, or "small bird." In fact, the smallest avian species alive today is the…
grrlscientist | March 16, 2006Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
-- Carl SaganA trio of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, Campephilus principalis.
Adult male (left) and female (lower right).
Painting by John James Audubon (1785-1851).
With every day that passes, the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker looks more like an apparition or, more likely, a case of mistaken identity. Bird artist and ID expert, David Sibley, and several of his colleagues, Louis Bevier, Michael Patten, and Chris Elphick, published a rebuttal that was released today at 2pm EST by the top-tier journal, Science (this rebuttal should be accessible…
grrlscientist | February 7, 2006
Male Berlepsch's Six-wired Bird of Paradise, Parotia berlepschi.
Photo by Bruce Beehler.
Click image for larger version in its own window.
I would give anything -- in fact, I'd give absolutely everything I ever had, currently have and could ever hope to have -- to be part of the recent Conservation International (CI) expedition to Indonesia. This month-long expedition was the brain child of scientist and CI vice president, Bruce Beehler. His goal? To explore the mysterious Foja Mountains in western New Guinea, formerly known as Irian Jaya.
Beehler gathered a team of 25 international…
grrlscientist | February 6, 2006When Pittsburgh paleontologist Matt Lamanna jokingly promised his fellow scientists that he would eat a duck foot if they unearthed a rare bird fossil, he never expected that they would discover a large group of them in northwest China. This discovery, the most significant in the past 25 years, was made in the Changma Basin, a desert located more than 1,000 miles away from the famed Liaoning fossil quarries.
"The dinosaur-bird transition is the hottest topic in dinosaur paleontology," says Lamanna.
Some evolutionary biologists think that birds and dinosaurs are too different to be directly…