BirdCast Podcast

A scientist in England has made an enlightening discovery about Atlantic puffins — under a UV light, their bills glow like a freshly cracked glow stick.

“It was sort of discovered by accident,” said Jamie Dunning, the ornithologist who first saw the beaks light up.

Source: University of Oxford 

Homing pigeons may share the human capacity to build on the knowledge of others, improving their navigational efficiency over time, a new Oxford University study has found.

The ability to gather, pass on and improve on knowledge over generations is known as cumulative culture. Until now humans and, arguably some other primates, were the only species thought to be capable of it.

Takao Sasaki and Dora Biro, Research Associates in the Department of Zoology at Oxford University, conducted a study testing whether homing pigeons can gradually improve their flight paths, over time. They removed and replaced individuals in pairs of birds that were given a specific navigational task. Ten chains of birds were released from the same site and generational succession was simulated with the continuous replacement of birds familiar with the route with inexperienced birds who had never flown the course before. The idea was that these individuals could then pass their experience of the route down to the next pair generation, and also enable the collective intelligence of the group to continuously improve the route’s efficiency.

The findings, published in Nature Communications, suggest that over time, the student does indeed become the teacher. The pairs’ homing performance improved consistently over generations - they streamlined their route to be more direct. Later generation groups eventually outperformed individuals that flew solo or in groups that never changed membership. Homing routes were also found to be more similar in consecutive generations of the same chain of pigeon pairs than across them, showing cross-generational knowledge transfer, or a “culture” of homing routes.

Takao Sasaki, co-author and Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology said: ‘At one stage scientists thought that only humans had the cognitive capacity to accumulate knowledge as a society. Our study shows that pigeons share these abilities with humans, at least to the extent that they are capable of improving on a behavioural solution progressively over time. Nonetheless, we do not claim that they achieve this through the same processes.’

Lost British birdsong discovered in New Zealand birds | The Guardian

A new study reveals that a type of native birdsong, now lost in Britain, can still be heard in New Zealand where the birds were introduced in the 19th century. By comparing recordings of yellowhammer accents in both countries scientists were able to hear how the birds’ song might have sounded in the UK 150 years ago.

The study, published in Ecography, examined yellowhammer accents in the UK and New Zealand, where over 600 of the birds were introduced in the 1860’s and 70’s and later became pests. It found some dialects that likely existed in the UK appear to have gone extinct, yet they still exist in New Zealand – a phenomenon that also occurs in human languages. The researchers say the decline in birdsong is likely to be linked to falling yellowhammer populations in the UK.

The research was led by a Czech team, who encouraged volunteers to collect and submit recordings of singing yellowhammers using smartphones and cameras. Using these citizen science project recordings, the scientists compared the patterns of yellowhammer dialects in the native range of Great Britain, and in the invaded range of New Zealand.

The New Zealand birds had almost twice as many dialects as their British relatives, overturning the scientists’ expectations that the range of dialects would be greater in the mother country.

Lead author Pavel Pipek, of the Charles University in Prague, said: “It was fascinating to have this unique opportunity to study yellowhammer dialects from native and introduced populations and how they have evolved over 150 years.

“This phenomenon of lost birds’ dialect is an avian equivalent of what happens with human languages. For example, some English words, which are no longer spoken in Great Britain, are still in use in the former British colonies.”

A giant goose that lived on a Mediterranean island between six and nine million years ago had wings tailored for combat.

Weighing 22 kilograms and standing perhaps 1.5 metres tall, Garganornis ballmanni might be the biggest member of the duck, goose and swan family ever to have lived. Its fossilised bones have been found at Gargano and Scontrone in central Italy – a region that, during the Miocene, consisted of islands populated by unique species.

Its wing bones are short for its size, suggesting it couldn’t fly. Now an analysis led by Marco Pavia at the University of Turin, Italy, shows that the carpometacarpus bone – equivalent to the hand bones in humans – had a rounded lump called the carpal knob, a feature present in modern birds that fight each other over territory. These include some ducks, geese and the extinct Rodrigues solitaire, the closest relative of the dodo.

“It’s covered over with hard skin, so it becomes a really effective weapon. In solitaires, they certainly broke each others’ bones,” says Julian Hume of the Natural History Museum in London.

Another year older and another chick in store for Wisdom, the oldest known wild bird in the world!

Now roughly 66 years old (and counting), this incredible Laysan albatross was sighted earlier this month incubating an egg at Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.

Her mate, Akeakamai, is likely off foraging within the 200-mile boundary of the newly-expanded monument. Stay tuned this winter for more Wisdom updates!

Photo: Kristina McOmber/ Kupu Conservation Leadership Program & U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Invasive plants dye woodpeckers red

The Northern Flicker comes in two varieties—the birds of the west have a salmon pink or orange tinge to the undersides of their wings, while the eastern birds are yellow. Where the two populations meet in the middle, they frequently hybridize, producing birds with a blend of both colors. For years, however, flickers far to the east of the hybrid zone have been popping up with red-orange wing feathers. The prevailing explanation has been that they must somehow have genes from the western population, but Jocelyn Hudon of the Royal Alberta Museum and his colleagues have determined that the eastern birds’ unusual color actually has a different source: a pigment called rhodoxanthin, which comes from the berries of two species of invasive honeysuckle plants.

Hudon and his colleagues used spectrophotometry and chromatography to show that rhodoxanthin, rather than the type of carotenoid pigment that colors western red-shafted birds, was present in the feathers of yellow-shafted flicker specimens with the aberrant red coloration. Data from a bird-banding station helped confirm that the birds acquire the red pigment during their fall molt about early August, which coincides with the availability of ripe honeysuckle berries. The honeysuckles have also been implicated as the source of unusual orange feathers in Cedar Waxwings.

The Oldest Bird Voice Box Ever Found - The New York Times

A new study of a 66-million-year-old bird may provide insight into some of the noises possibly heard at the end of the dinosaur era.

Researchers studying the fossilized remains of an Antarctic waterfowl called Vegavis iaai discovered within its chest the oldest known avian voice box, called a syrinx. The finding, published Wednesday in Nature, suggests that the ancient bird “honked” and “quacked” like today’s geese and ducks.

Mammals like humans and reptiles like crocodiles make noises by vibrating vocal folds in their larynxes, which is in the back of the throat. But for birds, their chirps, squawks and tweets come from a specially-evolved organ called the syrinx, which is in the windpipe where it branches into the left and right lungs.

“It’s essentially like having your voice box deep in your chest right next to the heart,” said Julia Clarke, a paleontologist from the University of Texas at Austin, and lead author of the study.

The syrinx is hard to find in ancient bird specimens because it is made of calcified cartilage that does not typically fossilize well. Only a handful that are older than a few million years old have ever been found. It took nearly two decades to uncover the syrinx in this specimen, and Dr. Clarke said she did not set out to discover it.

Vegavis iaai was originally found on Vega Island in Antarctica in 1992 by Argentine researchers. Years later, they gave it to Dr. Clarke to analyze. She and her team classified it in 2005. In 2013 while Dr. Clarke was coincidentally working on a project on the evolution of dinosaur and bird vocalization, she decided to take another look at the specimen’s vertebrae before returning it. Embedded in the rock, she discovered the syrinx.

“I was like ‘Oh my gosh.’ I couldn’t believe it. We had been asking this question ‘What would fossil data look like that could add to our understanding of avian sound making?’” she said. “And then I’m rechecking a specimen in my lab that I had for five years, and there it is. That was kind of crazy.”

Using CT scans, she compared the ancient syrinx to that of 12 other modern birds as well as another ancient fossil, and found that the organ was most closely related to those seen in ducks and geese. The finding suggests that birds, which are living dinosaurs, evolved the organ relatively late in their evolutionary line.

Warm-up benefit could explain morning birdsong | Science News

Vocally warming up puts more dazzle into a bird’s singing for the day, a new test shows, perhaps helping to explain widespread outbursts of birdsong at dawn.

Males of Puerto Rico’s Adelaide’s warblers (Setophaga adelaidae) start trilling through their repertoires of 30 or so songs while it’s still pitch black. Tracking the songs of individual males showed that the order of performance had a strong effect on performance quality, behavioral ecologist David Logue said August 17 at the North American Ornithological Conference. In the early versions of particular songs, males didn’t quickly change pitch as well as they did later, Logue, of the University of Lethbridge in Canada, and colleagues found.

This was the first test for a warm-up effect for daily singing among birds, Logue said. To catch the full stretch of repetitions of songs, Orlando J. Medina (now with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) had to beat the warblers at getting out of the nest in the morning. His recordings of each of nine males’ morning performance for four days allowed computer analysis of how fast a male swept through his trills.

We’ve spread European Starlings to cities all around the world, and they’re often considered a highly invasive species. But they’re neat to watch as their colors change throughout the year.