| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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.
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| From: Brumar89 | 6/11/2024 4:12:09 PM | | | | | | 
Beautiful little American Redstart. A lively warbler that hops among tree branches in search of insects, the male American Redstart is coal-black with vivid orange patches on the sides, wings, and tail. True to its Halloween-themed color scheme, the redstart seems to startle its prey out of the foliage by flashing its strikingly patterned tail and wing feathers. Females and immature males have more subdued yellow “flash patterns” on a gray background. These sweet-singing warblers nest in open woodlands across much of North America. |
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| From: Brumar89 | 6/13/2024 1:59:59 PM | | | | | |
The Red-winged Blackbird is a familiar sight atop cattails, along soggy roadsides, and on telephone wires. Glossy-black males have scarlet-and-yellow shoulder patches they can puff up or hide depending on how confident they feel. Females are a subdued, streaky brown, almost like a large, dark sparrow. Their early and tumbling song are happy indications of the return of spring.
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| From: Brumar89 | 6/14/2024 6:46:13 AM | | | | | | .....
An international team of scientists researched the complex relationship to unearth relationship secrets between the black-chinned hummingbirds, northern goshawks, and Cooper's hawks. They set up shop at the Southwest Research Station, in the Chiricahua Mountains, located in southeastern Arizona to study 342 hummingbird nests. The "trait-mediated trophic cascade" phenomenon first published in the Science Advances journal reveals that hummers cluster their nests beneath hawks, with only 20% brave enough to not build their nests in the immediate vicinity of raptor nests. The study also revealed that the tiny species has a higher chance of reproductive success if the area serves as a hawk's home, too.
The heightened success can be attributed to a "jay-free cone," colloquially dubbed as the "cone of protection". To elaborate, hawks are known to hunt their prey from above and grab them in their powerful talons before flying away and making a snack of them. Since hummers nest beneath hawk nests to remain protected, jays have to adapt and fly above a raptor's nest to avoid becoming its meal of the day, effectively avoiding hummingbird nests in the process. In fact, hummer nests lying in the cone of safety (extending to about 170 meters wide) had a 31% daily survival rate as compared to 6% for the ones outside. Proximity matters, too. The closer the raptor nest; better the protection hummingbirds enjoy.
Read More: housedigest.com |
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