While humans can only broadcast about one percent of their vocal power through their speech, some animals and mammals are able to broadcast 100 percent. The secret to their long-range howls? A combination of high pitch, a wide-open mouth and a clever use of the body’s shape to direct sound – none of which are factors that humans can replicate.
Using weather surveillance radar and citizen-science data, researchers are learning how migratory birds return to their breeding grounds in North America each spring with near-pinpoint accuracy.
Identifying bottlenecks — i.e. places where birds concentrate on migration — helps bird conservationists know what areas to focus on and get the most bang for their buck, since a large percentage of a species’ population can pass through these small areas.
Newly publicized audiovisuals support full species status for one of the dancing birds-of-paradise in New Guinea.
A new experimental study from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has found that administering a naturally produced hormone to pinyon jays can increase food sharing among the highly social species.
Unlike related hummingbird species, Costa’s perform their dives to the side of females, rather than in front of them. In a paper published today in Current Biology, researchers at the University of California, Riverside show this trajectory minimizes an audible Doppler sound that occurs when the Costa’s dive.
Johns Hopkins University researchers have developed a way to study the brain of a bat as it flies, recording for the first time what happens as a roving animal focuses and refocuses its attention.
New research suggests that species that live on green roofs arrived by hitching lifts on birds or by riding air currents.
With spring bird migration just getting underway, anyone captivated by these twice-yearly epic journeys will enjoy delving into new online maps that predict large movements of birds and show where they are occurring in near real-time.
Climate change could disrupt a critical fueling-up stage for migratory birds just as they’re preparing to depart on their autumn journeys to Central America, according to research published in the journal Ecology Letters.
A study from UT Southwestern's Peter O'Donnell Jr. Brain Institute demonstrates that a bird's song can be altered -- to the syllable -- by activating and deactivating a neuronal pathway responsible for helping the brain determine whether a vocalization is performed correctly.
Two former New Mexico State University biology graduate students are currently publishing their dissertation research investigating how the selection of mates may have contributed to the development of sophisticated cognitive abilities in birds.
Joshua Horns is an eBird user himself and a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Utah. In a paper published today in Biological Conservation, Horns and colleagues report that eBird observations match trends in bird species populations measured by U.S. government surveys to within 0.4 percent.
A new study almost 20 years in the making provides some of the strongest evidence yet of the "speciation reversal" phenomenon in two lineages of Common Ravens.
A new study involving Iowa State University scientists explores how birds in the Mariana Islands help to disperse the seeds of a wild chili plant. The research highlights the unique ways different species help one another, a concept known as mutualism.
When Lena Struwe was hiking in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve in Costa Rica three years ago, she spotted a yellowish harvestman, a spider-type animal, on a hiking trail rail and took a photo with her camera. It turned out her photo of the long-legged arachnid, Eucynorta conigera, was the first ever of that species and only the third sighting of it ever reported.
More than 70 percent of the global King penguin population, currently forming colonies in Crozet, Kerguelen and Marion sub-Antarctic islands, may be nothing more than a memory in a matter of decades, as global warming will soon force the birds to move south, or disappear. This is the conclusion of a study published in the current issue of the prestigious journal Nature Climate Change and performed by an international team of researchers from France, Monaco, Italy, Norway, South Africa, Austria and US.
A student in New Mexico State University’s Biology Department recently published a paper in “Condor,” a scientific journal, about the nesting and populating of Cooper’s hawks in urban areas.
Which is better for bird diversity: Arabica or Robusta beans?
In a new study, published this week in the journal Current Biology, scientists from UChicago show that some neurons in bird brains form the same kind of circuitry and have the same molecular signature as cells that enable connectivity between different areas of the mammalian neocortex.
While the giant birds that once dominated New Zealand are all extinct, a study of their preserved dung (coprolites) has revealed many aspects of their ancient ecosystem, with important insights for ongoing conservation efforts.
Toppling a widespread assumption that a “lactation” hormone only cues animals to produce food for their babies, Cornell University researchers have shown the hormone also prompts zebra finches to be good parents.
Cornell University researchers have created a solar wildlife tag, an innovation that solves key challenges in bird-tracking devices: how to make them lightweight and long-lasting.
Two local raptors made unexpected recoveries this month following exposure to common and deadly man-made toxins: lead and rodenticide.
Plants and animals are generally thought to colonize from continents to islands, over time leading to the evolution of separate island species. But a new study published in the Journal of Biogeography suggests a re-thinking of colonizing patterns.
If you install solar panels on your roof and avoid dousing your lawn with chemicals and pesticides, your online peers may consider you to be environmentally friendly. But this street cred can all be erased if you let your cat roam around outdoors.
The chapter, The Effects of Methylmercury on Wildlife: A Comprehensive Review and Approach for Interpretation, authored by BRI Executive Director and Chief Scientist, David Evers, was recently published in Elsevier's Encyclopedia of the Antrhopocene, 1st Edition.
A University of Delaware study has examined how light pollution lures birds into urban areas during fall migration, a trend that poses risk for the fowl that often fly into buildings and has increased with the addition of brighter LED lights. The researchers were interested in seeing what factors shape the birds' distributions and why they occur in certain areas.
Reproduction among bald eagles in a remote national park in Minnesota was aided when their nests were protected from human disturbance, according to a study published today (Jan. 9, 2018) in the Journal of Applied Ecology.
A new study by CU Boulder researchers found that blue birds nesting near noisy oil and gas operations have hormonal changes similar to people with PTSD, smaller nestlings and fewer eggs that hatch
In a USGS program, volunteers tracked bird deaths along Lake Michigan from 2010 to 2013 to discover what conditions lead to large die-offs. The researchers found that warm waters and algae — both of which have become more frequent over the years — tended to precede bird deaths, likely because they promoted the growth of botulism toxin-producing bacteria.
A New Mexico State University professor in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences is conducting research on golden eagles being killed by wind turbines and other human-related factors.
NAU researcher Jeff Foster led the team of international scientists who tried to definitively answer several questions—where did this fungus come from? And more importantly, can a resistance be evolved?
Logging of the largest trees in the Sierra Nevada’s national forests ended in the early 1990s after agreements were struck to protect species’ habitat. But new research reported Dec. 6 in the journal Diversity and Distributions by University of Wisconsin–Madison ecologists shows that spotted owls, one of the iconic species logging restrictions were meant to protect, have continued to experience population declines in the forests.
An interdisciplinary team is using a covert sound-based approach, worthy of an avian CSI, to study the link between crows' calls and their behavior.
Pigeons aren't so bird-brained after all. New research from the University of Iowa shows that pigeons can discriminate the abstract concepts of space and time, likely using a different region of the brain than humans and primates to do so. Results appear in the journal Current Biology.
A Tulane University researcher has found that a decline in the number of wood thrushes is probably due to deforestation in Central America.
A major study looking at changes in where UK birds have been found over the past 40 years has validated the latest climate change models being used to forecast impacts on birds and other animals.
A new study co-authored by WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) addresses concerns over the many Arctic shorebird populations in precipitous decline. Evident from the study is that monitoring and protection of habitat where the birds breed, winter, and stopover is critical to their survival and to that of a global migration spectacle.
An update on the Restore the Call including the release of eight loon chicks onto lakes in southeastern Massachusetts.
The Goffin's cockatoo is not a specialised tool user in the wild but has shown the capacity to invent and use different types of tools in captivity. Now cognitive biologists from the University of Vienna and the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna tested these parrots in a tool use task, requiring the birds to move objects in relation to a surface. The animals had to choose the correct "key" to insert into a "keyhole" in a box, aligning its shape to the shape of a surface cutout inside the box during insertion. The parrots were not only able to select the correct key but also required fewer placement attempts to align simple shapes than primates in a similar study.
Rural counties continue to rank lowest among counties across the U.S., in terms of health outcomes. A group of national organizations including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National 4-H Council are leading the way to close the rural health gap.
Planting native trees and shrubs in your yard can really help songbirds. Researchers from the University of Delaware and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center studied the Carolina chickadee around Washington, D.C. and found native trees and shrubs support much more 'bird food' than non-natives do.
What began as a Twitter joke between two researchers has turned into a four-year, $2.5 million National Science Foundation grant to take 3-D digital scans of 20,000 museum vertebrate specimens and make them available to everyone online.
Blood samples taken by first responders showed that individuals exposed to small amounts of oil from the spill suffered from hemolytic anemia—a condition that occurs when toxins enter the blood stream and damage red blood cells that carry oxygen to tissues.
CIPRES, for CyberInfrastructure for Phylogenetic RESearch, is a web-based portal or “gateway” launched at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego that allows researchers to explore evolutionary connections among species using supercomputers provided by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) XSEDE (eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) project.
Researchers in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis are challenging the notion that environment drives the evolution of brain size. A new study was released Sept. 25 in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
Human activities could change the pace of evolution, similar to what occurred 66 million years ago when a giant asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, leaving modern birds as their only descendants. That's one conclusion drawn by the authors of a new study published in Systematic Biology.
In a new paper published in PLOS ONE, researchers describe a recent, rapid, and ongoing invasion of monk parakeets in Mexico, and the regulatory changes that affected the species’ spread.
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