Buttered Waffles » Birds

Birds-Doing-Amazing-Things Saturdays: Weewoo!

Butter — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 18:13:06 +0000

Instead of an Attenborough nature show clip this Saturday, here’s another homemade YouTube clip of an excellent mimic:

**weewoo the talking starling**

People consider starlings pests, but I don’t. The avifauna around here would be poorer for having no enormous roadside flocks of shimmery black beauties swarming in the evening. (See this previous post for an example of the enormous proportions this phenomenon reaches in Europe.) And they can talk.

Birds-Doing-Amazing-Things Saturdays: Problem-solving Crows

Butter — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 10:00:28 +0000

Here’s another example of crows doing some problem-solving, this time in Japan:

**Ornithology – David Attenborough – “Japanese Crow”**

Corvids are known from other observations and experiments to be smart, so this level of problem-solving wouldn’t seem to be beyond them, but it’s always good to maintain a bit of skepticism. There may be confirmation bias at work here: there’s a population of crows in this city in Japan, dropping nuts at various places, and we notice and marvel at the ones that happen to do so at intersections, and not so much at the others. A quick search of recent journal articles didn’t reveal anything about it (well, I did find one book, but it just cited the Attenborough special); still, if the behavior here is observed repeatedly, and if, as some reports have it, they’ve been observed moving the nuts to a different location if the cars miss them, it’s probably reasonable to conclude that the purported learning is real.

The PBS companion site to the Attenborough special has a good introduction to this and other commonly known examples of avian intelligence.

Where I relax

Butter — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 04:18:46 +0000

Here’s why I love walking by the riverside on campus:

*Common wildlife on the St. Joe. Click to enlarge the preview, or click here for a hi-res version with no captions.*

This is on the bank of the St. Joseph River at IPFW, looking west. On the near side is a little parkland with a few ornamental trees; on the far side is a bit of forest on a little peninsula that, situated behind the soccer fields, has been allowed to remain wild. I thought the avian diversity here was worth noting, especially since the symmetry with which they organized themselves was nice. That egret has been hanging around the last few weeks; I’d seen egrets here only once before, about a year ago.

The birds pictured are, left to right, Canada Goose (Branta canadensis), Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodius), Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos), and Great Egret (Ardea alba).

Waffles’s Birds do Amazing Things

Waffles — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 21:25:58 +0000

What’s up, compadrés! It’s Waffles here — Butter and I decided to switch things up a bit, and do each other’s regular features this week. I’m going to bring you a wonderful web video about penguins. Well, one in particular:

Birds-Doing-Amazing-Things Saturdays: Pheasant Feathers

Butter — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 14:50:25 +0000

We already saw some remarkable courtship displays in the Vogelkop Bowerbird. Here are some more, mainly pheasants:

**Ornithology – David Attenborough – “Impressing the Females”**

As in the bowerbirds, these are examples of sexual selection run wild.

Birds-Doing-Amazing-Things Saturdays: A Tool-using Heron

Butter — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 23:38:19 +0000

We’ve already seen an instance of tool use in birds with Betty the New Caledonian Crow. Here’s another example of a bird improvising with a nearby object in a successful attempt to get food (the amateur narrator is a little… odd and, as one of the YouTube commentors pointed out, kind of Poohish, but ignore that and watch the behavior of the organism):

Amazing Bird Fishes Like a Human

This is a Green Heron (Butorides virescens), which, like many herons, catches fish. This species, though, has mastered the trick of using bait. The bird’s entry at Cornell’s All About Birds guide confirms that this tool use is common for the species; according to the entry, the bird has also been observed using insects, worms, twigs, and feathers as bait. Green herons are native to North and Central America (as far south as Colombia) and can be found, like other herons, in marshes and around ponds.

Birds as political and ethnic symbols

Butter — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:12:57 +0000

You know what I like? Flags. They’re just symbols, of course, and like frackin’ crackers, they aren’t particularly special by themselves, and their maltreatment can breach dams of pent-up emotions and irrationality and make life unpleasant for all involved. But I still like the craft involved in encapsulating a bit of the culture or history of a group of people, or the geography or general look and ambience of a place, and making it look sober, compelling, even awe-inspiring—or at least not completely superfluous and trite.

It’s interesting that in the pursuit of these goals, it’s common to use images of birds. So as a bit of geopolitical education, and just for fun, here are some of my favorite bird-bearing flags of the world. Note the absence of any of the upright, stylized heraldic eagles with straggly feathers; see the flags of Germany (specifically, the state flag), Albania, Montenegro, Poland, and Austria for examples. They’re quite dignified and possessed of storied histories, no doubt (the two-headed ones in Eastern Europe come from the Holy Roman Empire, for example), and they’re quite impressive, but they’re everywhere, and really, after several hundred years they’re getting a tad stale. The Avian class has more emblematical potential than that:

National Flags

*Dominica*. Badge displays the endemic endangered Sisserou Parrot. An IUCN estimate has 150 individuals left alive.

*Kazakhstan*. Charged with a Golden Eagle, a traditional symbol of Kazakh tribes.

*Uganda*. Charged with the Grey Crowned Crane, the badge under British rule. The bird is native to sub-Saharan Africa.

*Papua New Guinea*. Charged with a Raggiana Bird of Paradise in the fly. The bird is common on New Guinea.

*Kiribati.* Charged with a Great Frigatebird above the waves. The bird is common in the tropical areas of the Pacific and Atlantic.

*Guatemala.* Coat of arms includes a Resplendent Quetzal perching on a bayoneted rifle. The bird is found only in Central America and is listed by the IUCN as Near Threatened, mainly because of deforestation.

Many more examples can be found if we examine subnational units, such as states, provinces, and municipalities; these will follow in a later post.

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Image credits: All flag images retrieved from Wikipedia. Sisserou Parrot: Retrieved from http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/tt/11e/ Golden Eagle: Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:GoldenEagle2.jpg Grey Crowned Crane: Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Grey_Crowned_Crane_7.jpg Licence: GNU v. 1.2. Raggiana Bird of Paradise: Retrieved from http://calphotos.berkeley.edu © 2007 John White. Great Frigatebird: Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Male_great_frigatebird.JPG License: Public domain. Resplendent Quetzal: Retrieved from http://www.sigmatecc.com.mx/063054/Contenido/TablaPlantillaAve.html

Ethological correction

Butter — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:13:32 +0000

In lamenting the loss of the riverside habitat on campus where the geese used to gather, I think I was wrong about the type of behavioral modification I’ve observed in Whitey and the Honkers. I identified it as operant conditioning, but I think it’s better explained as classical, or Pavlovian, conditioning. They’ve simply learned to associate one neutral thing—pudgy white guy with backpack—with another, desirable thing: getting corn tossed at them. As evidenced by the behavior in the video, they associate the neutral stimulus with the good stimulus even when the good stimulus isn’t present.

Operant conditioning, by contrast, occurs when the animal operates on something in its environment with expectation of producing good consequences or avoiding bad ones. Training a dog or a sea lion to jump through a hoop by providing positive reinforcement, such as a treat, after a successful performance is an example. For the record, though, birds are capable of this type of training. See this parrot riding a scooter or this pigeon in one of B.F. Skinner’s behavioral experiments.

Birds-Doing-Amazing-Things Saturdays: Superb Lyrebird

Butter — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 03:21:52 +0000

Last week I mentioned briefly the European starling’s ability to mimic. But among mimics, the Superb lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae) of Australia, named for its tail, reigns supreme when it comes to detail and precision. In this clip, David Attenborough spies on one in his display area in the woods, and as usual, provides just enough narration to be clear and otherwise remains in the background as the bird does his amazing thing:

The ability of some birds to do this—all the more remarkable since they can’t change the shape of their mouths the way we can— comes from their syrinx, the avian equivalent to the human voicebox. The diagram at that Wikipedia link gives at least a hint of what a complex, impressive organ it is.

LOLCat Fridays: This one’s not funny

Butter — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:38:58 +0000

Waffles believes LOLcats can contain philosophical lessons, and I agree. This one illustrates the general crappiness of how our universe is set up, and it might make you cry, so I put it below the fold. Warning: Adult NOMing ahead:

This one doesn’t need much analysis, really. I grabbed the (captionless) screencap from this video on YouTube. (Be warned, the peeping goes on for long after the fuzzball has disappeared down the thing’s gullet.) Once in a while I need to make my citified self watch something like this to stay grounded and remind myself that Nature is really a bitch a lot of the time, even though I tend to see only the cute, fuzzy parts. But complete cynicism is a mistake: The beautiful parts are still there and are still enjoyable, and it’s wrong not to protect them when we can. Even the algorithmic evolutionary processes that led to that snake becoming the merciless predator it is are magnificent in their own way.