Birds
-
Wily lyrebirds
The males mimic noisy flocks to boost mating success.
Males are prone to try anything to get lucky, and lyrebirds seem to have it clinched, according to study published in...
-
Noisy silence
Study suggests NZ pest-control regime has little impact on birds.
New Zealand’s use of toxic aerial baits to rid the islands of invasive mammal predators has attracted claims that for...
-
Birds of a feather
Photographer Søren Solkær used his COVID year to capture one of the most spectacular – but little...
Søren Solkær makes his living photographing fashion and pop culture, but he has a secret love of common starlings – S...
-
Tropical birds evolved slowly
Are biodiversity hotspots ‘coldspots’ for new species?
Scientists have uncovered a surprising paradox in species evolution: birds in tropical hotspots evolved much more slo...
-
Songs, sounds and the life of birds
They remember their tunes but are disrupted by our noise.
Birds’ affinity for sound has its upsides and downsides, it seems. On the one hand, scientists have found that zeb...
-
Bird genome project really takes off
We now know a lot more about the avian tree of life.
Bird lovers can now rejoice in exploring the genomes of nearly all bird families. About 40% of the newly sequenced...
-
Wind? That’s barely a breeze
Lily shows how to handle gusty conditions.
Birds can fly easily in winds that would challenge engineered air vehicles of a similar size, and now Lily the Britis...
-
Penguins were here, but a while back
Fresh signs of old remains a surprising find.
While searching Antarctica’s rocky Cape Irizar, US biologist Steven Emslie stumbled upon ancient remains of penguins,...
-
Snapshot
Lyrical lyrebird also an ecosystem engineer
Its soil displacement tops the global rankings.
The superb lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae) is known for its impressive mimicry of other birds’ songs and even camer...
-
A bird’s life in the changing tropics
Studies examine climate change impact and response.
Two new studies in the journal Nature Climate Change highlight the delicate balance birds face in trying to survive g...
-
Why penguins are where they are
Genomic analysis traces their origin and travels.
Penguins first appeared about 22 million years ago, not in Antarctica, as many scientists have thought, but in the co...
-
Birds don’t sleep well in the city
Study measures neurological responses to light pollution.
We continue to learn more about the damaging impact of light pollution. Most recently, an Australian study – the f...