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Weekend Birdery: Reviled Geese
Branta canadensis is not widely beloved. These geese can be troublesome honkers and, weighing about 9 pounds, pose serious risks to human aviation when their numbers are unchecked. Still it was a bit...
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Weekend Birdery: Oil Cleanup Crews May Be Worse Than Oil
At coastal nesting sites in Florida, well-meaning oil cleanup crews have inadvertently trampled shorebird nesting sites, apparently becoming as much of a threat as the oil itself in some cases. A...
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Weekend Birdery: The Mosquito
The mosquito, according to leading organismal biologists, is not a bird. It does fly, and it is featured in this Weekend Birdery post. Yet it is not a bird. People in southern states sometimes like to...
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Weekend Birdery: Townsend’s Warbler
I saw one of these little critters outside my window last month. It’s Dendroica townsendi, and it’s the 250th species to make my life list.
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Weekend Birdery: Flamingos’ Post-Modern Kitsch
There’s always been a fine line between authentic flamingo yard art and ironic flamingo yard art. But it turns out that real-life actual flamingos are themselves the ultimate self-reflexive exploiters...
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Weekend Birdery: History of the Bird
People have been flipping the bird for thousands of years. It may very well be the most widespread and longest-lived obscene finger gesture there is. It appeared in Aristophanes’ 5th-century B.C. play...
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Death in the Air, Death Everywhere
Liz Condo/The Advocate, via Associated Press It seems that the 3,000-5,000 blackbirds that dropped dead from the sky in Arkansas on new year’s eve died of blunt-force trauma. The theory is that they...
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The State of the Birds 2011
The 2011 State of the Birds report (pdf) was released a few weeks ago to a flurry of media attention1. And so it is altogether meet that I announce to you, my fellow Americans, that the state of our...
View ArticleWeekend Birdery: Hummingbird Tongues
Science Friday brings us the latest in tongue research in this video. Apparently what we previously thought we knew about how hummingbirds drink—and about how dogs drink, but this isn’t weekend...
View ArticleWeekend Birdery: Impressions of the Lyrebird
A lyrebird is kind of like that guy from the Police Academy movies who could do all the sounds, except, a bird. Other birds, hammers, chainsaws, drills, car alarms, etc. Just watch: Via Robert Krulwich.
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