The special Gulls, Crows, Pigeons, Woodpeckers issue (volume 29, number 5) of the magazine has flown its way (through the internet, in PDF form) to subscribers. The table of contents and several free articles are online. We heartily encourage you to buy your very own copy of the issue, or even better to subscribe to […]
Nippon.com profiles Ig Nobel Prize winner Shigeru Watanabe. It begins: Japan’s Ig Nobel Prize Winners Monet or Picasso? Japanese Researcher Watanabe Shigeru Proves Art Is for the Birds Keiō University Professor Emeritus Watanabe Shigeru and colleagues won the Ig Nobel Prize in psychology in 1995 for showing that birds can distinguish between different styles of […]
Some of the old experiments at or near the Air Force research labs in Dayton, Ohio, are on display in this video. The video comes with this info, added by someone somewhere at some time: Coverage of research at the Aerospace Medical Division HQ 657Oth Aerospace Medical Research Laboratories including scenes of F-104 seat ejection; […]
“In his previous inauguration, Nixon had noticed that there were a large number of birds in the trees, and didn’t like the thought of being pooped on as he drove down the National Mall in Washington DC in an open-top limo. Nixon ordered that the pigeons were to be removed – and so the US […]
Pigeons may be as good as some bad radiologists, in some ways, maybe, suggests this new study: “Pigeons (Columba livia) as Trainable Observers of Pathology and Radiology Breast Cancer Images,” Richard M. Levenson, Elizabeth A. Krupinski, Victor M. Navarro, and Edward A. Wasserman, PLoS ONE, 10(11): e0141357. (Thanks to Ig Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Oberzaucher for […]
Professor Shigeru Watanabe was one of the co-winners of the 1995 IgNobel psychology prize (for success in training pigeons to discriminate between the paintings of Picasso and those of Monet.) Since then, the professor’s research team at Keio University, Japan, have linked up with Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada, to create and test what could well […]
The question : ‘Why do some*(see note below) birds bob their heads when walking?’ has perplexed scientists for many years. Some researchers suggest that head-bobbing may be correlated with the morphology of the retina, but others propose that it’s mechanically linked to the locomotor system, and that its visual functions are secondarily adapted. Either way, […]
While in Japan Professor Yukio Hirose worries about pigeons pooping on statues, in The Netherlands a young man is making a musical stink about the high prices being paid for racing pigeons. He, the young man, expresses himself in this song: His plight is translated, both in language and context, for people outside the Netherlands, […]
In the award-winning children’s book ‘Don’t let the pigeon drive the bus’ by Mo Willems, (Hyperion Books for Children, 2003) a persistent pigeon ‘asks, pleads, cajoles, wheedles, connives, negotiates, demands and uses emotional blackmail in attempts to get behind the wheel’. The bus driver is decidedly reluctant to let the pigeon drive. But why? “On […]
A proposed new law restricts the appearance, in films, of non-local pigeons. Here is the complete text of the bill: HOUSE DOCKET, NO. 2203 FILED ON: 1/12/2009 HOUSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No. 816 AN ACT RELATIVE TO PIGEONS IN MOTION PICTURES. Be it enacted […]