« Drone Records Muslims Going at It With Goats | Main | Every day on the TV and radio we hear: it’s all under control. »

August 9, 2014

‘The Thing With Feathers’

0810-bks-Croke-1-master675-v2.jpg
Tiny bee hummingbirds are so small you could mail 16 of them for the price of a single stamp.
Robins can navigate with the right eye alone, but not the left. Albatrosses, who spend 95 percent of their lives over open ocean, are thought to be able to shut down half their brains while continuing to fly at 40 m.p.h. For blackcap warblers, the direction of migration is clearly innate, so crossbreeding a group of blackcaps who flew south for fall migration with a group that oriented westward resulted in offspring who flew in a southwesterly direction. And if bird breakups are seen in human terms, flamingos’ behavior — their divorce rate is 99 percent — fits their flashy profile. Albatrosses, by contrast, really do hang in there for the long haul, staying together till death.
‘The Homing Instinct’

Posted by gerardvanderleun at August 9, 2014 7:42 AM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.

Your Say

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all....

Posted by: Rob De Witt [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 9, 2014 11:19 AM

I think the birds that race through our dense forest can see twice at the same time out of the same eyes. Once at close range to keep from hitting the field of branches, and twice for long distance to see where it is they are trying to go. And they do it so fluidly.

Posted by: ghostsniper [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 9, 2014 12:47 PM

My uncle Letsgo Lozko raised bantam chickens. He subscribed to a horticultural journal and when an article was published on the results of a seminar of Avian psychologists he read it with interest.
Conclusions from a panel of international experts showed that birds in general do not have high I.Q.s but that among the various groups of birds, bantam chickens scored highest in standard avian testing.
He cut out the article and framed it and hung it on the wall of his chicken coop.

Posted by: chasmatic [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 9, 2014 10:18 PM

Clearly our Congressmen/women have devolved from the albatross, as the former is able to fly with 100% of its brain shutdown, and always in the wrong direction.

Posted by: Stug Guts [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 10, 2014 1:41 PM

Post a comment




Remember Me?

(you may use HTML tags for style)