A November 1 report in the Los Angeles Times reads like an extract from a crime novel: Smithsonian bird researcher is convicted of trying to poison cats A postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian’s Migratory Bird Center at the National Zoo was found guilty Monday of attempting to poison cats in her northwest Washington neighborhood. Security […]
Tag: Birds
Horror bird-film dropping from the sky?
Comes news that could lead someone to adapt Alfred Hitchcock’s horror film “The Birds” and take it in a different direction—a direction that’s both scary and scatalogical. Maryn McKenna, the science journalist widely known as Scary Disease Girl, tweeted this alert: Seagulls: threat or menace? They’re pooping resistant bacteria on your favorite beach. She gives […]
Boobies at Sea, with Cameras and Comrades
Today’s Boobies-at-Sea Study-of-the-Day is: “Social Interactions of Juvenile Brown Boobies at Sea as Observed with Animal-Borne Video Cameras,” Ken Yoda, Miku Murakoshi, Kota Tsutsui, Hiroyoshi Kohno, PLoS ONE 6(5): e19602. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0019602. (Thanks to investigator Robin Abrahams for alerting us to it.) The authors, include video, some of which you can watch (or, depending on how […]
Birds drops from the sky, explained
Kees Moeliker, who knows a thing or two about bird collision/deaths (he was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for documenting what is now perhaps the most famous bird collision/death in history — the collision was the prelude to the first scientifically documented case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck) explains the current crop of […]