Archives: Birds

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

A murder and a mutant

I woke up the other day to see this: A little closer: Those aren’t leaves covering the trees – they’re crows! There must have been a few thousand of them (the picture only shows part of the flock, which extended to cover several other trees and rooftops). This is the third time this winter... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Bird-inspired drones

This Christmas the strong winds decorated the trees with shiny new drones: (photo by Rod Croskery) Drones of the future are going to get a lot more maneuverable. A group at Imperial College London has now built an aquatic diving drone with wings that can tuck in for protection during rapid plunges, inspired by the... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

How hummingbirds control flight

We have a new study out on how birds use visual cues in flight. Here is a summary: Thanks to Charlie for helping to capture the video footage! The study is a collaboration with Tyee Fellows and Doug Altshuler at UBC. For the experiments, we used eight high-speed black & white cameras to capture the entire... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

A bad year for birds

June 2013 was bad for tree swallows. At the Queen’s University Biological Station, over 90% of nests failed as a result of persistent cold, rainy weather. This happened to be the same year we were conducting an experiment on the hormonal mechanisms of parental care in these birds. The bad weather made for a... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Feel the vibration

In between field work, I’ve been making a lot of videos lately – mostly for my students in the summer course in Ecology and the Environment. But my latest creation is entirely different: it’s for the upcoming American Ornithologists’ Union (read: bird nerd) conference. It features slow-motion clips of peacocks vibrating their train... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Nest in the city

One of the most incredible things about peafowl is how well these birds thrive in the suburbs. There were hundreds in Arcadia, CA, where I studied them, and every once in a while I hear about some other town where they’ve taken over – Orange County, Palos Verdes, Miami – they even disperse and... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Hipsters who hunt

An update on a previous post: my good friends Martin and Vanya are the official poster boys of a new movement. Collecting oyster mushrooms north of Kingston. Photo by Charlie Croskery. Read about it here, as told by Vanya’s sister-in-law, Emma Marris. It’s a great article. Charlie took the photos at the Croskery farm (more... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Neanderthals were into birds

Well, into their feathers anyway. Thanks to a new study out this week, we now have paleontological proof that Neanderthals collected birds for more than just food. They probably used bird feathers for decoration – just like we do – suggesting that we aren’t the only hominid species to have developed an artistic culture1.... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Pitting science against media

Photo by Dick Daniels from Wikimedia Commons. Odds are that the Laysan albatrosses in the photo above are a male and his female mate, but it’s worth checking their sex chromosomes to be sure. The reason? In this long-lived species, most of the adults are females, and two females often pair up to raise chicks... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Very superstitious

The Shark Worlds came to Kingston last month – not a fish thing, but rather the world championships for the Shark class of sailboat. My friend Martin was competing (his boat name? Cloaca. Martin is a biologist who takes taxonomic accuracy seriously). As he was recounting some of his adventures, he mentioned that he had done quite... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Peacocking on Parliament Hill

Here’s my poster from the Evolution conference in Ottawa: The colours are a bit off in this shrunken version, but you can download a larger PDF version here. The poster covers some of my work on the lesser-known green peacock (a close relative of the familiar blue variety). Green and blue peafowl have markedly different body colours,... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Life imitates [filmmaking] art

Congratulations to Myra Burrell – her peacockumentary has been short-listed for the Animal Behavior Society’s film festival! Myra, a veteran of the natural history film program at the University of Otago in New Zealand, traveled to California with me in 2010. She helped with peacock field work, capturing more females than anyone thought... More

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