The Bird Thead

[LFC]

[RichTBikkies]

If that's a herring gull it wouldn't waste time on subtle chat. It would dive-bomb you like a Stuka, knock your little bag of chips to the ground with its gigantic foot, then swoop and pick them up.

This happened to me on the sea front at St Ives, Cornwall, except it was an ice-cream in a cone. My nerves were in rags. RAGS, I tell you!

[LFC]

Jul 19, 2021 15:36:30 GMT RichTBikkies said:

If that's a herring gull it wouldn't waste time on subtle chat.

I think it's a Laughing Gull, a very common bird along the East and Gulf Coasts of North America. They are smaller than Herring Gulls but they are also a lot more nimble. They usually zip in, grab your food, and zip out.

[andydp]

Jul 19, 2021 15:58:25 GMT LFC said:

Jul 19, 2021 15:36:30 GMT RichTBikkies said:

If that's a herring gull it wouldn't waste time on subtle chat.

I think it's a Laughing Gull, a very common bird along the East and Gulf Coasts of North America. They are smaller than Herring Gulls but they are also a lot more nimble. They usually zip in, grab your food, and zip out.

[goldenvalley]

Cockatoos are learning to open trash containers in Sydney, Australia.  

[RichTBikkies]

Because they're white birds this doesn't distress me as much as the crows did in Hitchcock's "The Birds". For my money this is the most scary scene in the film.

Or in any film?



My kitchen, unusually in the UK, looks out on my front lawn. I once watched a carrion crow killing a pigeon under my ash tree. It was as horrible as a clip of a policeman beating up an innocent person. I was slow on the uptake and couldn't get to the pigeon in time. So now crows, though splendid creatures, spook me a bit.

[pnwguy]

But what about magpies?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HivhKv7wA-w

[AnBr]

So a crow took out a rat with wings? What's the problem?

[RichTBikkies]

Jul 24, 2021 21:19:20 GMT AnBr said:

So a crow took out a rat with wings? What's the problem?

Reread my third-from-last sentence. If you still don't get it I'll intone the single word "optics".

[AnBr]

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[goldenvalley]

Jul 29, 2021 15:16:12 GMT AnBr said:

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This hits home for me.  We just had our whole driveway replaced...and sometimes turkeys and ducks come through our yard.

[LFC]

Huh, a bird board game. I'll have to ask some of my birding buds if they've ever played.

[RichTBikkies]

"Huh" is a great name for a board game. 

[goldenvalley]

[AnBr]

Don't tell me, that fence came from Acme.

[goldenvalley]

Meep meep!

[andydp]

Sept 13, 2021 16:38:16 GMT goldenvalley said:

One anvil drop will take care of that problem.

[pnwguy]

Sept 14, 2021 10:52:06 GMT andydp said:

Sept 13, 2021 16:38:16 GMT goldenvalley said:

One anvil drop will take care of that problem.

Or an order arriving from Acme Ladder Company

[Bact PhD]

Eew.

www.npr.org/2021/09/16/1038097872/new-york-dead-birds

Early Tuesday morning, Melissa Breyer set out to do her usual volunteer work — collecting the bodies of migratory birds who had died colliding with skyscrapers in downtown Manhattan.

That morning was much worse than usual. In just over an hour, Breyer picked 226 tiny, lifeless bodies off the sidewalks around the World Trade Center. Another 35 had died but fallen onto inaccessible awnings. Thirty were still alive in need of veterinary aid and were transferred to the care of a wild bird rehabilitation center.

"When you have 226 dead window-struck migratory birds from one morning, it's hard to get them all in one photo," she wrote on Twitter, with a picture showing dozens of birds, many of them warblers, in all shades of yellow, brown and grey.

[goldenvalley]

Birds thrived during Covid 10 Lockdowns.

[andydp]

Sept 23, 2021 2:50:02 GMT goldenvalley said:

Birds thrived during Covid 10 Lockdowns.

The WSJ link is paywalled.  Found this one from NPR:

www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/09/22/1039593706/birds-thrived-in-urban-settings-during-pandemic-lockdowns

[LFC]

Just staggering.

An international traveler just broke the world's record for longest nonstop flight. Among birds that is.

A bar-tailed godwit (Limosa lapponica) just flew for 11 days straight from Alaska to New Zealand, traversing a distance of 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers) without stopping, breaking the longest nonstop flight among birds known to scientists, The Guardian reported.

Bar-tailed godwits are "big, noisy and cinnamon-colored," according to the National Audubon Society. And they are known to undertake impressive migrations between Alaska and New Zealand, flying thousands of miles without stopping. But one particular bird, driven by easterly winds that prolonged his journey, flew longer than any of his kind known to date.
CLOSE

The scientists tracked this particular male godwit — known as "4BBRW" for the colored identification rings on its legs, stacked blue, blue, red and then white — through its onboard satellite tag. In 2019, they caught and tagged 4BBRW along with 19 other bar-tailed godwits in the Firth of Thames, southeast of Auckland.

The endurance flyer set off from southwest Alaska on Sept. 16 after having spent a couple of months feeding in Alaska's mudflats, according to The Guardian. Though the godwits pack on weight during this time, they are known to shrink their internal organs for their migration in order to travel light, according to The Guardian.

Related: Photos: birds evolved from dinosaurs, museum exhibit shows

After leaving Alaska, the godwit flew south over the Aleutian Islands and landed in a bay near Auckland in New Zealand 11 days later. His satellite clocked in at 7,987 miles (12,854 km), according to The Guardian. But rounding errors likely mean that the journey actually extended over about 7,581 miles (12,200 km), according to the scientists. Sometimes, he flew up to 55 mph (89 km/h). Previously, the longest nonstop flight recorded among birds was made by a female bar-tailed godwit that flew around 7,145 miles (11,500 km) in nine days in 2007, according to National Geographic.

[AnBr]

[AnBr]

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[LFC]

Wow. This may be the largest creature I've ever heard of accomplishing this feat.

In a truly double-take-inducing finding, geneticists recently surveyed a population of critically endangered California condors and found that two of the birds reproduced without actually mating.

This phenomenon, called parthenogenesis (a nice callback to Athena springing from Zeus’s head), happens occasionally in reptiles and fishes but rarely in birds. The scientists stumbled across the discovery when going back through the genetic records of the condors from the mid-2000s. Their findings were published today in the Journal of Heredity.