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Some Ingenuity Can Go a Long Way

10,000 Birds

The use of tool by animals is surprisingly rare. Among birds the Egyptian Vulture uses rocks to crack Ostrich eggs, the New Caledonian Crow and Woodpecker Finch (one of several Darwin Finches of the Galapagos Islands), uses sticks to extract grubs from inside a branch. Further support for inherent behavior comes from experiments.

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How Birds Evolve: What Science Reveals about Their Origin, Lives, and Diversity: A Book Review by a Non-Science Person

10,000 Birds

He is also a serious birder (and a birding friend), and his birding observations and adventures are used throughout the book to introduce evolutionary questions and illustrate the mental interplay between personal experience and scientific curiosity. The book is smartly organized into 12 chapters. This is a book that requires attention.

Science 234
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Birds of the West: An Artist’s Guide–A Book Review

10,000 Birds

The lengthy Introduction gives both a personal history and a global history of birds and art, including brief profiles of John James Audubon and the far lesser known Genevieve Estelle Jones, who conceived of a book eventually called Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio in the late 19th century.

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Feather Trails: A Journey of Discovery Among Endangered Birds–A Book Review

10,000 Birds

Her experiences are framed within the larger scientific histories how once common species become endangered, and of how people and organizations have strategized and explored controversial paths to bring their numbers up and nurture them till they fill our skies. This is the chapter where Osborn talks about “second chances.”

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Far From Land: The Mysterious Lives of Seabirds–A Book Review

10,000 Birds

Where does the female Emperor Penguin go after she has produced that one egg and handed it over to the male for incubation? An array of tools ranging from geolocators to satellite trackers to depth measurers to miniature cameras have been employed by ornithologists and biologists over the past twenty years, yielding scads of information.

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Bird Banding the Dry Tortugas

10,000 Birds

As we looked closer, we saw the Sooty Terns nesting right on the ground itself, calling back and forth to each other as they sat on their speckled eggs. Of the ten students, two had gone on the trip the year before and one had experience with the Sooty Terns, meaning 30% of us knew what we were doing, and 70% had zero idea.

Birds 189
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The Birds of Trinidad and Tobago: Two Guides, One Book Review

10,000 Birds

Experiments in the field (the famed Asa Wright Nature Center veranda) involving Bananaquits and bananas came up with numbers ranging from 7 to 16, but a tanager always came along to interfere with Bananaquits’ noisy appreciation of their namesake fruit. (2) Which hummingbird was more beautiful—Tufted Coquette or Ruby-topaz Hummingbird? (3)

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