Posted in Birds, Saturday Birds on Oct 4th, 2008
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 [...]
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 [...]
Posted in Birds, Saturday Birds on Aug 16th, 2008
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.
Posted in Birds, Saturday Birds on Aug 9th, 2008
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 [...]
Posted in Birds, History, Vexillology on Aug 7th, 2008
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 [...]
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 [...]
Posted in Birds, Saturday Birds on Aug 2nd, 2008
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 [...]
Posted in Birds, WANT Wednesdays, Wildlife on Jul 30th, 2008
All I really want this week is my favorite birding spot back. For the past couple years I’ve enjoyed going down to the riverside of the St. Joe on IPFW’s campus (that’s Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne) and observing the waterfowl, shorebirds, gulls, and songbirds that live in the mixed habitat there. There’s a wooded [...]
Posted in Birds, Saturday Birds on Jul 26th, 2008
You probably know that starlings can form huge flocks (I’ve had a few moderately sized ones descend on my backyard before), but the spectacle of some of the larger ones is otherworldly:
The phenomenon is so impressive and seasonably reliable in southwestern Denmark that they have a name for it: sorta sol, or “black sun”. It’s [...]
Posted in Birds, Saturday Birds on Jul 19th, 2008
Is living in sin or being a lesbian an Amazing Thing? I think so, if you’re a Greylag goose or a Roseate tern:
Same-sex parenting in birds
I don’t know the precise word for what Greylags do; polyandry usually means that the female mates with both males, which isn’t the case here. And I’m a [...]
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