birds

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, just cannot catch a break. First, a coolant leak destroyed some of the magnets that guide the energy beam. Then LHC officials postponed the restart of the machine to add additional safety features.

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Question submitted by Ward Danekas of Franklin Grove, Ill.

The answer appears to be no. A bird will spend hours tossing a pebble in the air, but it's nearly impossible to discern if it's goofing around or honing its talon-eye coordination. Gordon Burghardt, an expert on animal behavior at the University of Tennessee, defines play as behavior that doesn't seem to have a survival purpose, is rewarding in and of itself, and is performed when an animal is fully fed and stress-free.

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It's not that they can't. They just don't need to, says Mike Murray, a veterinarian at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. Birds have the anatomical and physical ability to pass gas, he explains, "but if I saw gas in a bird's gastrointestinal tract on an x-ray, I'd suspect that something abnormal was going on in there."

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All pet owners will happily explain to you their dog or cat's character traits -- probably in far more detail than you ever wanted to know. But the idea of animal personality is not one that's been formally studied all that much.

A new study has classed a species of bird into groups of more and less aggressive males. Researchers gauged the response of male collared flycatchers to female birds, to a strange object, and to other males. They found that each type of individual displayed consistent behavior in each of these situations.

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Previously, it was believed that dancing was unique to humans. Now, two separate studies have shown that parrots have the ability to bob their heads and tap their feet to a number of different beats, proving that humans aren't the only ones with rhythm. One of the birds studied even has a favorite song: "Everybody" by the Backstreet Boys.

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Evolution in the Fast Lane

Members of the Zosteropidae family are not birds of a feather. White-eyes, sparrow-like songbirds, are the fastest-evolving bird on record. According to a recent genetic analysis of several dozen subspecies by Chris Filardi, a biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, 80 species have emerged in the past two million years. Among vertebrates, only the cichlid fish evolves faster, probably due to abrupt changes in its geographically confined habitat, a common catalyst for speciation. But white-eyes populate three continents, so Filardi suspects that sexual selection and social behavior drives the birds' speedy diversification, which includes changing plumage and songs.

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Unfortunately, there’s pretty much no way to protect jet engines from geese or other large birds. In fact, fastening some sort of shield over a jet engine could actually make things worse.

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You won’t find geolocator backpacks in the North Face catalog anytime soon, but if you fly south for the winter you may notice one strapped to the back of a migrating songbird. That’s how an inventive group of researchers have been tracking the speed and location of purple martins and wood thrushes flying from Pennsylvania to South America and back. What they’ve have found is truly astonishing.

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