New Zealand has some weird birds, and they know it. Sure, you’ve probably seen the Seussian kiwi, but what about the kākāpo, a flightless parrot that looks like a particularly friendly owl? Have you heard of the morepork, an owl so named because it sounds like it shouts “MORE PORK,” or the wrybill, the only bird with…
Birds and planes are a bad combination, but it’s not so easy to shoo our avian friends away from airport runways. Thankfully, scientists from France have stumbled upon an ingenious solution to the problem—an optical illusion that appears to scare the crap out of large predatory birds.
In an oddly poetic act, moths will on occasion drink the tears from the eyes of a sleeping bird. Sounds harmless, but this rare interaction is an unmistakably one-sided affair.
Madagascar’s history contains some truly enormous animals, from giant lemurs to giant tortoises. The island was also home to 10-foot-tall flightless birds, which sadly disappeared hundreds of years ago. But how we humans classified those birds was, well, a mess.
High in the Ecuadorian Andes, a stunningly beautiful species of hummingbird—decorated with a flashy, sapphire throat—has revealed itself to science for the first time. But scientists fear it’s already perilously close to extinction.
The discovery of a 127-million-year-old fossil in northeastern China is filling an important evolutionary gap between modern birds and the winged, dinosaur-like creatures that came before them.
Anyone who’s seen the funky movie Rio knows of the Spix’s macaw, the beautiful and goofy blue bird thought to be among the last of his kind in the film. While the character Blu succeeds in saving his species by falling in love and ultimately becoming a father, the reality isn’t nearly as sweet.
New research into the migration habits of Tawaki penguins has revealed an absolutely marathon trek in which these aquatic birds travel upwards of 1,550 miles (2,500 kilometers) from home, sometimes swimming as much as 50 miles (80 kilometers) per day to reach their feeding sites.
Do you ever get so excited about something that your whole face starts to turn red? Well, it seems that blue-and-yellow macaws do the same thing, according to new research—though the exact reason they go red in the face is still unknown.
DNA evidence appears to have revealed an ancient parrot-breeding operation in the southwestern United States, a new study reports.
A French theme park has begun using six trained birds belonging to the crow family to pick up litter and cigarette butts, the BBC reports.
If you heard a bear roar for the first time but didn’t see the snarling beast, what would you think? Would you be scared? Maybe, but maybe not—the forest is full of strange noises. But what if, at the same time, one of your friends said, “Holy shit, I know all about that clawed monster and we need to get in the car”?
Great tits appear to have nearly as much self-control as chimpanzees, if a new experiment’s results are accurate. They might even have more self-control than the humans who still make jokes about the name “great tit.”
Crows and ravens are hard to tell apart, but basically, the common raven is bigger than the American and Northwestern crow. So, you might think that ravens would win in a fight. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Parrots are known for their intelligence, but why they should be so much smarter than other birds isn’t entirely clear. New research suggests parrots have an enlarged brain circuit responsible for higher-order thinking—a brain circuit with strikingly mammalian-like characteristics.
Photographing wildlife takes a special combination of patience and talent. Birds make the task even more difficult, since they are experts at flying away and disappearing into tall trees.
New research shows that crows can recreate tools from memory, a capacity previously thought impossible for birds.
Birds couldn’t care less about your human entertainment, and a killdeer certainly isn’t going to change its breeding plans to accommodate Ottawa’s annual Bluesfest music festival.
If you start listening to birds, you’ll realize that they have a species-specific sets of calls. Would you consider these songs a form of culture? Maybe, maybe not—but bird calls are passed down through generations, much as human traditions are. And it appears that some birds may have song traditions that persist over…
Bird parents, like many human mothers and fathers, often struggle to become empty nesters. But as new research suggests, the tension that arises between baby birds who don’t want to leave the nest and parents who would very much like them out ultimately results in an ideal departure time that boosts survival rates.
