Red Knot are rather unprepossessing waders, but at certain times of the year they gather in enormous flocks. The BBC’s programme Autumnwatch recently had an item on this amazing spectacle. [Unfortunately, neither video will work outside the UK...] Here’s an extract for UK readers: Autumnwatch presenter Chris Packham has written a blog in which he reckons [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Birds’
05/05/2009
DANCING COCKATOO
November 2007 This video from Natalie Beresford (First Year). Why might this cockatoo dance? Is it like a bored tiger or an emprisoned polar bear, or is there something else going on? Why does it do the bow at the end?
05/05/2009
A BRAIN THE SIZE OF A CONTINENT
November 2007 Migration continues to fascinate scientists, dissecting the sensory cues involved, and the innate vs learned components. This open access article in PNAS looks at the ability of birds to migrate across the whole of the North American continent. There seems to be a mixture of learned and innate factors, with adult birds alone having a [...]
24/04/2009
DID DINOS BREATHE LIKE PENGUINS?
November 2007 Our very own Jonathan Codd features in this BBC news page, describing his work on the bones involved in dino breathing. The paper this was based on has just been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (open access).
23/04/2009
EVERY BIRD ON EARTH – ON VIDEO!
October 2007 After last week’s success with the video of the nutty Manakin bird, Per Smiseth sent in this link, which is to the Internet Bird Colection – a site that aims to assemble videos of every bird alive… Some very cool animals here!
23/04/2009
WEIRD MOONWALKING MANAKIN
October 2007 Definitely a video that will make you laugh! The male red-capped Manakin (Pipra mentalis), a bird found in Costa Rica and Belize (watch out for it if you go there on the Field Course), does a rather cool moonwalk as part of its courtship ritual. It also produces some rather bizarre clicks with its wings. Two YouTube [...]
22/04/2009
SPOT THE MISTEAK
October 2007 This story appeared on the BBC website and the national press today. What’s wrong with it? My 9-year old daughter spotted it straight away (which is obviously more than the journalists did!). Clue: you’d only have to change one letter to get a more likely explanation. “Visitors to a Somerset stately home have been warned to [...]
22/04/2009
WHY DO FEMALES PREFER MALES OF THEIR OWN SPECIES?
October 2007 Seems like a daft question, but the genetic bases of these effects can be quite simple. This article from Science (subscription needed to get past abstract) gives an example from pied flycatchers and shows that the genes are sex-linked. There’s also this summary in the same issue (same rules apply). Thanks to Per Smiseth for [...]
22/04/2009
BATS NOT SQUIRRELS, HUMMING-BIRDS NOT SPARROWS
October 2007 This from Emily Burdfield-Steel (2nd Year). Anyone who’s put nuts out for birds knows that squirrels will often come and snarf the lot. In Tucson (Arizona), people feed their humming-birds, but the food gets eaten by bats… Some of them are not particularly bright (scroll to the end).
