Birds, features and articles | Educational Science

Oct 16, 2020

Bird flies 7,500 miles nonstop, breaking world record

An international traveler just broke the world's record for longest nonstop flight. Among birds that is. A bar-tailed godwit (Limosa lapponica) just flew for 11 days straight from Alaska to New Zealand, traversing a distance of 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers) without stopping, breaking the longest nonstop flight among birds known...

Oct 19, 2020

Half-male, half-female songbird discovered in Pennsylvania

Biologists recently made a once-in-a-lifetime discovery of a bird that's male on the right side and female on the left. Researchers captured the bird, a rose-breasted grosbeak (Pheucticus ludovicianus), at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History's Powdermill Nature Reserve, an environmental research center in Rector, Pennsylvania. Plumage colors usually signal...

Nov 25, 2020

Dino-era bird had the head of a Velociraptor and beak of a toucan

In what may be one of the weirdest animal mash-ups, scientists have found the 68 million-year-old fossilized skull of an early bird with a Velociraptor-like face and a toucan-like beak, a new study finds. This crow-size bird lived in northwestern Madagascar during the late Cretaceous, when dinosaurs walked the Earth....

Jan 15, 2021

Raven 'queen' missing from Tower of London, feared dead

One of the iconic ravens that resides in the Tower of London is missing, and officials fear the worst. Will the tower fall, as legend warns? (Probably not.) Merlina, a female raven (Corvus corax), joined the corvid community at the tower in 2007, and has reigned since then as the...

Jan 16, 2021

'Joe the Pigeon' gets reprieve from death, after leg band found to be fake

Australia's avian celebrity Joe the Pigeon is getting a new lease on life after authorities determined he is not a biosecurity threat. Joe's story started last month when a man in Melbourne found the seemingly emaciated pigeon wearing a leg band in his backyard. According to Australia's 9News, the man,...

Feb 24, 2021

Video captures unusual death of baby bird drowned by a fish

When a sparrow's nest flooded during high tide in coastal Georgia, a fish jumped at the chance to make a meal of a newly hatched chick, and a scientist's video camera caught a first-ever view of the entire deadly encounter. Footage showed a small fish called a mummichog (Fundulus heteroclitus)...

Mar 10, 2021

Something is killing California's songbirds

Songbirds are dying across parts of California and the Pacific Northwest, and officials think crowds at bird feeders are to blame, according to recent news reports. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and wildlife rehabilitation centers have been inundated with calls since December 2020 from California residents reporting...

Mar 25, 2021

Cause of mysterious bald eagle deaths found after 25 years

A mysterious neurodegenerative disease has been killing bald eagles and other animals at lakes across the United States. And after 25 years of sleuthing, researchers have finally figured out its cause. The disease, known as vacuolar myelinopathy (VM), was first discovered in 1994 when a large number of bald eagle...

Mar 29, 2021

Why do hummingbirds 'hum'?

Colorful hummingbirds get their name from the hum generated by their fast-moving wings as they hover; these tiny aerodynamic marvels have the fastest wingbeat of all birds, clocking in at around 70 strokes per second (more than 4,000 per minute). But how exactly do their wings produce a humming noise?...

Apr 21, 2021

Pelican rescued from Deepwater Horizon disaster flies hundreds of miles home

A brown pelican rescued from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill 11 years ago has finally returned home. After being found completely covered in oil on June 14, 2010, the bird was taken from Louisiana to Georgia to avoid the ongoing spill, where it was later rehabilitated and released. Now, over...

Apr 26, 2021

Cuckoo bird has crossed the Sahara 10 times in 5 years

A cuckoo bird named PJ just broke an impressive record: He traveled more than 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers) in the past five years while migrating to and from the U.K. Common cuckoos (Cuculus canorus) spend their winters in Africa and migrate to the U.K. in the spring to breed, typically...

May 4, 2021

This Muppet-faced frogmouth is the 'most Instagrammable bird' on Earth

The sky is full of exceptional birds. Cardinals bedecked with half-male, half-female plumage; godwits that can soar 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers) across oceans nonstop; parrots that can best Harvard undergrads in a classic con game (no student loans required). Then, there are birds whose only claim to fame is their...

May 14, 2021

Condors won't stop visiting (and trashing) this California woman's house. Here's why.

Over the weekend ~15 California condors descended on my moms house and absolutely trashed her deck. They still haven’t left. It sucks but also this is unheard of, there’s only 160 of these birds flying free in the state and a flock of them decided to start a war with...

Jun 14, 2021

Crows understand the 'concept of zero' (despite their bird brains)

Crows may be bird-brains, but the feathered creatures can understand the highly abstract concept of zero, new research suggests. The concept of zero, as used in a number system, fully developed in human society around the fifth century A.D., or potentially a few centuries earlier, Live Science previously reported. For...

Jun 17, 2021

World's first bionic vulture created

A wild vulture recently had surgery in Vienna to implant a bionic leg. While still a nestling, Mia suffered a major injury to her right leg. Her parents had used sheep wool to hold the nest together, and some of the fibers became tangled around the young vulture's ankle. With...