birds

For them, sleeping like this is as comfortable and natural as bed for us. In order to be safe on the branch, a bird...

Biologists at the University of St. Andrews (Scotland) have been inspired by the concept of Twitter, the microblogging service used to publish short text messages known as tweets, to observe what happens when birds come into contact while in Liberty.

Did you know that the shark, and not the ostrich, is the animal that lays the largest eggs, which can be 20 centimeters long? And that the tongue of the adult blue whale weighs four tons? Or that some species of snail can have up to 25,000 teeth?

Birds that live in areas where the weather is variable also have a much more diverse song repertoire than those that live in environments with stable conditions. These are the surprising findings of a study published in the journal Biology Letters.

Living in the middle of the African bush, gray parrots are able to reason logically in a similar way to great apes and three-year-old human children, according to an Austrian and German study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Imagine a world populated by giant dragonflies with wingspan of up to 70 centimeters. It is not science fiction. About 300 million years ago, in the late Carboniferous and early Permian period, insects reached their largest sizes. A team of scientists from the University of California in Santa Cruz (USA) has studied these giants through the fossil record and proposes that it was the evolution of the first birds that was the decisive factor in the decrease in size that the insects subsequently suffered.

Crows possess the ability to recognize familiar human voices, as well as the calls of other birds of different species. In this way, corvids, known for their continuous intelligence displays, are able to identify potential threats in their environment from sounds.

And they do not do it to eat, but to flirt. The spotted pergolero (Ptilonorhynchus maculata), a bird native to Papua and New Guinea, grows plants to attract females, according to a study published in the journal Current Biology.