Tag Archives: birds

Friday Cat Fun #10: Cat and Crow Friends

Very cool, it is amazing what happens in life. And that bird is remarkably patient. Getting, even playfully, ambushed by a cat doesn’t seem like something what would come naturally. At least with polar bears and huskies they both are used to playing rough with their own.

Bird Brain

Bird-brains smarter than your average ape

In a recent study 20 individuals from the great ape species were unable to transfer their knowledge from the trap-table and trap-tube or vice versa, despite the fact that both these puzzles work in the same way. Strikingly the crows in The University of Auckland study were able to solve the trap-table problem after their experience with the trap-tube.

“The crows appeared to solve these complex problems by identifying causal regularities,” says Professor Russell Gray of the Department of Psychology. “The crows’ success with the trap-table suggests that the crows were transferring their causal understanding to this novel problem by analogical reasoning. However, the crows didn’t understand the difference between a hole with a bottom and one without. This suggests the level of cognition here is intermediate between human-like reasoning and associative learning.”

“It was very surprising to see the crows solve the trap-table,” says PhD student Alex Taylor. “The trap table puzzle was visually different from the trap-tube in its colour, shape and material. Transfer between these two distinct problems is not predicted by theories of associative learning and is something not even the great apes have so far been able to do.”

Dealth of Artic Plankton a Warning on Warming

Death bloom of plankton a warning on warming by David Perlman

Vanishing Arctic sea ice brought on by climate change is causing the crucially important microscopic marine plants called phytoplankton to bloom explosively and die away as never before, a phenomenon that is likely to create havoc among migratory creatures that rely on the ocean for food, Stanford scientists have found.
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Phytoplankton throughout the world’s oceans is the crucial nutrient at the base of the food web on which all marine life depends; when it’s plentiful, life thrives and when it’s gone, marine life is impossible.
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“It’s a complex system,” Arrigo said in an interview, “but as the changes in ice cover throw the timing of phytoplankton abundance off, then the birds and animals whose brains have long been programmed to migrate north at specific times of the year will have missed the boat if there’s no nourishment for them when they get there.”

Every spring and summer, phytoplankton in the Arctic blooms richly in explosive pulses, nourished by nitrogen and phosphorous in the seawater, and when those chemicals are consumed, the blooms end, Arrigo said.

Friday Fun: Penguin Evades Orcas

A penguin takes sanctuary on a boat while killer whales circle.

Backyard Wildlife: Crows

bird dives at crow

Here is an action shot of a bird diving at a crow in my backyard, presumably to get the crow to leave. I noticed this for going on for several weeks (follow link for better view of the dive-bombing bird). The crow didn’t seem to mind too much most of the time.

I visited Madison this week and saw 4 wild turkeys wandering around in a residential area. I didn’t have my camera handy however, so I didn’t get a photo 🙁 It was a strange and cool site.

Crows Carry Cameras for Science:

The cameras look through the legs of the birds, transmitting what they record to a person holding a receiver several hundred meters away.
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To understand more about how and why the crows use tools, researchers need a lot of details about their lives in the wild
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Videos included footage of the crows using plant stems as tools to probe for food and even carrying a tool from one place to another. The images showed that birds on the ground pick up just 8 bits of food an hour.

Speciation of Dendroica Warblers

Speciation for Dendroica Warblers

They developed a mathematical model that attributed patterns of speciation to the way that closely related species divide up their environment. According to this model, when there are few relatives around to compete for resources, such as when an environment is first colonized, species differentiate rapidly.
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This model is robust: even when the authors assumed that their phylogenetic tree contains only 25 percent of all Dendroica species, they found that their Î³ test was still valid, indicating that this genus experienced an explosive bout of adaptive radiation before settling down to a “more normal” rate of speciation.

This mathematical model provides an incisive tool to gain a clearer understanding of the pattern and rate of speciation for groups of closely related species, even in the absence of a fossil record, simply by analyzing their DNA.

Molecular Action May Help Keep Birds on Course

Four decades after scientists showed that migratory birds use Earth’s magnetic field to orient themselves during their seasonal journeys, researchers have at last found a molecular mechanism that may explain how they do it.

If the hypothesis is true, the planet’s magnetic field lines — which arch around Earth from north to south — may be plainly visible to birds, like the dashed line in the middle of a road.

The work, described online yesterday in the journal Nature, was conducted in a test tube and does not prove that birds actually use the mechanism. And researchers aligned with a competing model say they are not convinced.

But by identifying for the first time a molecule that reacts to very weak magnetic fields, the experiments prove the plausibility of a long-hypothesized method of avian navigation that has had a credibility problem because no one had ever found a molecule with the required sensitivity.

Backyard Wildlife: Birds

photo of a bird

The last few days a bird like this one has been chasing a crow in my yard (unfortunately I have not been able to get an action picture of that). If you know what type of bird this is please add a comment.

When I see robins pecking away in the grass sometimes I see them get worms but my guess is they often are eating other stuff. I also see starlings feeding on my lawn. I found some online links that I quote below on what robins and starlings eat.

From the Yardener:

Next to beneficial insects, songbirds consume the most pest insects in your yard. Robins, blackbirds, flickers and starlings will eat a lot of webworms if they are in your lawn. Many seed-eating birds prey on caterpillars while raising their young. Encourage birds to settle in or near your yard and prey on fleas by offering them food, water, and shelter.

Cornell University: American Robin

The American Robin eats both fruit and invertebrates. Earthworms are important during the breeding season, but fruit is the main diet during winter. Robins eat different types of food depending on the time of day; they eat earthworms early in the day and more fruit later in the day.

History And Biology Of European Starlings In North America
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Bird Brain Language Research

Molecular Mapping of Movement-Associated Areas in the Avian Brain: A Motor Theory for Vocal Learning Origin

Vocal learning is a critical behavioral substrate for spoken human language. It is a rare trait found in three distantly related groups of birds-songbirds, hummingbirds, and parrots. These avian groups have remarkably similar systems of cerebral vocal nuclei for the control of learned vocalizations that are not found in their more closely related vocal non-learning relatives. These findings led to the hypothesis that brain pathways for vocal learning in different groups evolved independently from a common ancestor but under pre-existing constraints. Here, we suggest one constraint, a pre-existing system for movement control.

Using behavioral molecular mapping, we discovered that in songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds, all cerebral vocal learning nuclei are adjacent to discrete brain areas active during limb and body movements. Similar to the relationships between vocal nuclei activation and singing, activation in the adjacent areas correlated with the amount of movement performed and was independent of auditory and visual input.
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Based upon these findings, we propose a motor theory for the origin of vocal learning, this being that the brain areas specialized for vocal learning in vocal learners evolved as a specialization of a pre-existing motor pathway that controls movement.

Dino-Era Feathers Found Encased in Amber

Seven dino-era feathers found perfectly preserved in amber in western France highlight a crucial stage in feather evolution, scientists report. The hundred-million-year-old plumage has features of both feather-like fibers found with some two-legged dinosaurs known as theropods and of modern bird feathers, the researchers said.
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The find provides a clear example “of the passage between primitive filamentous down and a modern feather,” said team member Didier NÃ©raudeau of the University of Rennes in France. The study team isn’t sure yet whether the feathers belonged to a dino or a bird. But fossil teeth from two dino families thought to have been feathered were excavated from rocks just above the layer that contained the amber, Perrichot said. “It is entirely plausible that the feathers come from a dinosaur rather than from a bird,” he said.