| From: Brumar89 | 5/4/2024 12:45:56 PM | | | | | |
Elusive great crested flycatcher brings its distinctive bird song to Houston backyards
By Gary Clark,CorrespondentMay 4, 2024
The quick whistled notes of the great crested flycatcher ring out from the forest canopy this spring.
Kathy Adams Clark/KAC Productions
When it comes to bird songs, I'm like a teenager constantly listening to iTunes.
Bird vocalizations in my neighborhood give me a daylong source of joy. And I know the name of every bird by its songs, calls, chippy notes and other sounds. Even when I go to a doctor's office, which I do more frequently as I age, I'm comforted by the sounds of birds from parking lot trees.
That's why I went on high alert when I heard the great crested flycatcher, a migratory songbird that had arrived from its winter home south of the border. Its dawn song — "weeeUP-weeeeER" — rang out from a tree across the street from my house. And, yes, I ran out the door with binoculars in hand, hoping to glimpse the handsome bird.
Hope is the word in this case because while hearing the bird is easy, seeing it can be frustrating. Although it has nearly an 8-inch-long posture when perched, the bird can masterfully conceal itself within the leafy canopy of a tree.
But I never despair, knowing that the bird must eventually perch in full view before launching its rapid aerial attack on flying insects. I'll even hear the snap of its beak on a flying insect like a wasp or even a butterfly, the latter to my vexation. But the bird must eat and feed its chicks.
Watching the bird perched on an outer tree branch before taking flight, I can see its lemon-yellow belly and olive-brown head with fluffy crown feathers resembling a crest. I can see the reddish color on the outer wings and under the tail when the bird takes flight.
The bird arrived in my neighborhood after migrating from wintering homes in northern South America, Central America or southern Mexico. Having seen the great crested flycatcher on wintering grounds in Central America, I'm tipping my cap to the bird, which may have traveled more than 2,000 miles to breed and raise chicks in my neighborhood. Even if it flew roughly 900 miles from southern Mexico, I welcome it to the trees around my house.
The bird breeds throughout the eastern half of Texas and the eastern half of the U.S. and Canada. It’s scientifically classified as Myiarchus crinitus, which roughly means fly marauder with long hair. Did someone think the bird's fluffy crest resembled hair?
Great crested flycatcher facts
- Great crested flycatchers probably migrate along Mexico’s northeastern corridor into Texas, but the number of birds flying across the Gulf of Mexico to Texas remains a mystery.
- Some birds breeding in the eastern U.S. spend winters in South Florida.
- Although the birds may use a variety of trees for nesting, they prefer deciduous trees within local wooded neighborhoods, local parks, and woodlands.
- Males and females have the same appearance.
- A female constructs a bulky nest inside a tree cavity and lines it with soft material that often includes snakeskin, which apparently deters nest predators.
- Great crested flycatchers belong in the Myiarchus genus of migratory birds that include ash-throated flycatchers breeding in the western half of Texas and brown-crested flycatchers breeding in the state’s Rio Grande Valley.
|
|
| | Ornithology | Pastime Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| From: Brumar89 | 5/15/2024 1:36:28 PM | | | | | | 
Indigo Bunting. Just seeing this bird is a sight to behold, but witnessing it in flight is truly unforgettable. It is a very dark neon blue bird flying against the vivid green backdrop of spring. The beautiful all-blue male Indigo Bunting sings with cheerful gusto and looks like a scrap of sky with wings. Sometimes nicknamed "blue canaries," these brilliantly colored yet widespread birds whistle their bouncy songs throughout late spring and summer all over eastern North America. You can find Indigo Buntings in weedy fields and shrubby areas near trees, singing from dawn to dusk atop the tallest perch in sight, or foraging for seeds and insects in low vegetation. This beautiful all-blue male Indigo Bunting sings with cheerful gusto and looks like a scrap of sky with wings. Sometimes nicknamed "blue canaries," these brilliantly colored yet widespread birds whistle their bouncy songs through the late spring and summer all over eastern North America. Look for Indigo Buntings in weedy fields and shrubby areas near trees, singing from dawn to dusk atop the tallest perch in sight or foraging for seeds and insects in low vegetation. |
| | Ornithology | Pastime Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| From: Brumar89 | 5/24/2024 3:05:04 PM | | | | | | Crows Can Actually Count Out Loud, Amazing New Study Shows
NATURE24 May 2024
By MICHELLE STARR
 A carrion crow. (Alexis Lours/iNaturalist, CC BY 4.0)
It's no secret that corvids are capable of some amazing feats of creative and intelligent thinking, but a newly discovered ability has us stunned.
A team of scientists has shown that crows can 'count' out loud – producing a specific and deliberate number of caws in response to visual and auditory cues. While other animals such as honeybees have shown an ability to understand numbers, this specific manifestation of numeric literacy has not yet been observed in any other non-human species.
"Producing a specific number of vocalizations with purpose requires a sophisticated combination of numerical abilities and vocal control," writes the team of researchers led by neuroscientist Diana Liao of the University of Tübingen in Germany.
"Whether this capacity exists in animals other than humans is yet unknown. We show that crows can flexibly produce variable numbers of one to four vocalizations in response to arbitrary cues associated with numerical values."
The ability to count aloud is distinct from understanding numbers. It requires not only that understanding, but purposeful vocal control with the aim of communication. Humans are known to use speech to count numbers and communicate quantities, an ability taught young.
When toddlers are learning to count, learning the specific numbers associated with specific quantities can take a bit of time to master. In the interim, children can sometimes use random numbers to make a vocal tally. Instead of counting "one, two, three," they might say "one, one, four," or "three, ten, one." The number of vocalizations is correct, but the words themselves are jumbled.
The biological origin of symbolic counting is unknown, but since crows are known to understand difficult numerical concepts such as zero, Liao and colleagues thought they represented a good candidate for investigating more sophisticated number skills.
 A diagram illustrating the experiment. ( Liao et al., Science, 2024)They conducted their study on three carrion crows ( Corvus corone), which the researchers trained to produce a variable number of vocalizations, between one and four, upon being shown an arbitrary symbol or audio cue. Once they had produced the requisite number of caws, the crows then had to peck a target to signify that they were done.
All three crows, the researchers found, were able to produce the correct number of caws in response to the cues, with the occasional error mostly presenting as one caw too many or too few.
This, the researchers say, is similar to the way human toddlers count, using a non-symbolic approximate number system that is planned in advance before the first vocalization.
Interestingly, the timing and sound of the first vocalization in a sequence were linked to how many vocalizations were made subsequently, and each vocalization in a sequence had acoustic features specific to its place in that sequence.
The feat is especially impressive for crows since deliberate vocalizations are more difficult to produce and have longer reaction times than, say, pecks or head movements.
It could indicate a previously unknown channel for avian communication in the wild. Chickadees, for instance, produce a greater number of "dee" sounds in their alarm calls for larger predators.
"Our results demonstrate that crows can flexibly and deliberately produce an instructed number of vocalizations by using the 'approximate number system', a non-symbolic number estimation system shared by humans and animals," the researchers write in their paper.
"This competency in crows also mirrors toddlers' enumeration skills before they learn to understand cardinal number words and may therefore constitute an evolutionary precursor of true counting where numbers are part of a combinatorial symbol system."
The research has been published in Science. |
| | Ornithology | Pastime Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| From: Brumar89 | 6/7/2024 5:46:16 PM | | | | | | The only completely red bird in North America, the strawberry-colored male Summer Tanager is an eye-catching sight against the green leaves of the forest canopy. The mustard-yellow female is harder to spot, though both sexes have a very distinctive chuckling call note. Fairly common during the summer, these birds migrate as far as the middle of South America each winter. All year long they specialize in catching bees and wasps on the wing, somehow avoiding being stung by their catches.
 |
| | Ornithology | Pastime Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| |
