Birding in Israel? Report your sightings to help build an eBird-like database of the country’s avifauna.
New studies find that:
- when birds migrate from the Arctic to South America, fragments of mosses, fungi, and other “diaspores” hitch a ride (and a similar phenomenon may have spread acacia trees from Hawaii to an island in the Indian Ocean);
- caterpillars which feed on many different types of plants are more attractive meals for birds than caterpillars which subsist on only one or two species;
- to tell their offspring from those of freeloading Common Cuckoos (like the specimen above snapped by Redgannet), some birds have developed unique eggshell patterns;
- and despite what Darwin thought, there doesn’t seem to be a relationship between the flashiness of a bird’s coloring and the complexity of its song.
Proving that cruelty knows no bounds, some (language unsuitable for a family blog) in Virginia Beach is shooting blow darts at birds. Meanwhile, an Oregon farmer caught a beating from a neighbor irritated by his loud “bird cannons.” (Who knew there was such a thing?)
Engineers are trying to mimic the mechanics of how birds perch in hopes of improving drones’ ability to land on wires.
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.
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