Vultures have evolved toconsume carrionwithout getting sick, thanks to their strong stomach acids that kill harmful bacteria. Meanwhile, true buzzards are skilled hunters that capture small live animals using their sharp talons and powerful beaks. While both birds play a role in keeping ecosystems b...
Bananaquits enjoy the hummingbird feeders, which their narrow curved beaks seem to manage. There, they are not pestered by the (very greedy) black-faced grassquits and the larger Greater Antillean Bullfinches who enjoy the other types of feeder available and take priority in the pecking order....
When I first wrote about this species, its binomial name wasRallus longirostrisie simply ‘long-beaked rail‘. Which it is. Then came an annual official AOU shuffling of species and revision of names. The clapper rail was re-designatedRallus crepitansor ‘rattling / rustling rail‘. Which it ...
affect song stability. We tested for the effects of local ancestry proportions within the physical regions that contain the candidate genes associated with IOI. We averaged the ancestry proportion (Q) across all SNPs within the boundaries of the candidate genes on which significant SNPs mapped direct...
and of the serene, cloudless sky that Hitchcock denies to Bodega Bay. But the hanging words and names nervously overlap and disintegrate, as if bitten to pieces by invisible beaks. The titles show a war between nature and culture, with the irrational and the primitive vanquishing human illusions...
Special adaptations to this way of life, in the form of slender, sometimes curved beaks and tongues provided with brushes or shaped into tubes, are found in more than 1,600 species of eight families: hummingbirds, sunbirds, honeyeaters, brush-tongued parrots, white-eyes, flower-peckers, ...
bird of prey, anybirdthat pursues otheranimalsforfood; it is a famousapex predator(meaning without a natural predator or enemy). Birds of prey are classified in two orders:FalconiformesandStrigiformes. All birds of prey have hook-tippedbeaksand sharp curvedclawscalled talons (in nonpredatory vult...
They’re also particular about how they hold fish in their beaks. This trait is still unexplained, though some think it is related to where these birds like to hunt.13. Brünnich’s guillemotNo bird spends more energy in flight than a Brünnich’s guillemot, but this Arctic bird makes ...
Names roll off the tongue in a colourful incantation: the red-footed booby, the blue-winged kookaburra, the azure-crowned hummingbird, and the rainbow bee-eater. One section demonstrates the remarkable difference in beaks, featuring fish-grabbers, flesh-rippers, insect-finders, fruit-...
Vocal rhythm plays a fundamental role in sexual selection and species recognition in birds, but little is known of its genetic basis due to the confounding effect of vocal learning in model systems. Uncovering its genetic basis could facilitate identifyi