Birds

Angry Birds, What’s Black and White and Hungry All Over, and a Little Something for the Ladies: This Week in Bird News

March 1, 2017 by Meredith Mann No Comments

If there’s one common theme to this week’s bird news items, it’s their collective bizarreness:

The eagle has landed—on the drone, as France trains birds to take out drones that stray into restricted airspace.

It’s a feeding frenzy in southern Argentina, as one million-plus Magellanic Penguins descend on Punta Tombo’s beaches due to an unusual glut of sardines and anchovies. (The smart-looking example in the photo above is by Michael Catanzariti, through Wikimedia Commons.)

So crazy it just might work? Scientists ponder the feasibility of genetically engineering chickens to lay the eggs of endangered bird species.

The law of unintended consequences has tragic effects at a zoo in England, as rat poison ends up killing the Rainbow Lorikeets it was intended to protect.

Mobbing predators seems to help songbirds show their love interests just how macho and attractive they really are.

Written by Meredith Mann

The lowly Red-winged Blackbirds in suburban New York triggered Meredith Mann's interest in birds. Five years later, she's explored some of the the USA's coolest hotspots, from Plum Island in Massachusetts to the Magic Hedge in Chicago to the deserts of Fallon, Nevada. She recently migrated from the Windy City (where she proudly served as a Chicago Bird Collision Monitor, rescuing migrants from skyscrapers and sidewalks) to Philadelphia, where she plans to find new editing and writing gigs; keep up her cool-finds chronicle, Blog5B; and discover which cheesesteak really is the best. And she will accept any and all invitations to bird Cape May, NJ.