bird

Increased underwater noise is making it hard for whales to communicate. Now ambient noise is causing birds to sing louder, so they can still attract a mate.

Charles Q. Choi writes in LiveScience.com that bird songs are becoming faster and higher-pitched, so that other birds of the same species can hear them above the din of airplane and street noise.

Netherlands behavioral biologist Hans Slabbekoorn drove a car and rode his bike through Europe, in order to record a bird called the great tit, which has a song that sounds like “a bicycle hand pump.”
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We’ve learned about war from hummingbirds and we can learn about memory from a strange little bird call the Clark’s nutcracker. Biologists who study squirrels have come to the conclusion that they have rather limited memories and don’t really “find” the nuts they bury, they just dig up ones that some other squirrel has hidden. But these birds bury tiny nuts in a 15 mile radius, then remember where they put them months later. Those of us who are forgetful would like to know how it’s done.
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Birds are smarter than we think they are, perhaps because they are the descendents of dinosaurs. We think of dinos as having been huge and fairly stupid, but maybe they were actually both huge and SMART. Biologists have recently deciphered the “bee dance” that honeybees do to tell other bees where the honey is. Now they are trying to decipher bird calls.
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Newswise – In Utah, birds are being given “breathalyzer” tests. Nope,cops aren’t stopping them for flying too fast?a biologist istrying to determine whether sparrows and warblers aremigrating under the influence of bayberries, gnats, or otherfoods, in an effort to help protect the habitats ofmigrating birds. It turns out that birds can get too drunkto fly, just like people can become too drunk to drive.
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