Bird Sense
My Summary
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Highlights
Kiwis can smell earthworms through 15 cm of soil! With such a sensitive nose, what does a kiwi experience on encountering another kiwi’s droppings — location: 64
The wedge-tailed eagle has the largest eye relative to body size of any bird. — location: 290
One reason falcons see so well is because they have two visual hot spots at the back of each eye – two foveas – rather than the one that humans have. — location: 328
The smallest eyes are those of hummingbirds, the largest are those of the ostrich. — location: 429
a powerful muscular stomach, the gizzard (which birds use to grind up their food), located near the centre of gravity in the abdomen. — location: 454
In a famous experiment conducted in 1961, Dr Irwin Moon wore image-inverting spectacles that effectively turned the world upside down. At first he found it horribly disorientating, but after eight days of wearing the spectacles Dr Moon had adjusted and ‘saw’ the world the right way up again. To prove it, he drove his motorbike and took his plane for a spin – without mishap. Moon’s extreme experiment provided irrefutable evidence that we ‘see’ with our brain rather than with our eyes.17 — location: 469
If you have observed captive birds of prey, you will see that they often move their head from side to side or up and down as they watch you approach. They do this because they are alternating your image on their two foveas, the shallow one for close up, the deep one for distance. — location: 555
Birds are different in that their hair cells are replaced. Birds also seem to be more tolerant of damage created by loud sounds than we — location: 1010
You might be surprised to learn that humans also experience predictable, regular changes in their hearing ability – or at least females do. Oestrogen is the key: when oestrogen levels are high, a man’s voice sounds richer. The effect is so subtle that most women are unaware of — location: 1046
oilbirds use echolocation like bats. — location: 1396
oilbirds used a low-frequency sound. — location: 1397
partner to preen him.1 Ornithologists refer to one individual preening another as allopreening (‘allo’ meaning ‘other’), — location: 1447
The record-holder for high-density living is the common guillemot, — location: 1550
The heating device is the brood patch, an area of skin from which the feathers are lost some days or weeks before incubation starts, and whose blood supply is increased. — location: 1734
Birds seem to be indifferent to capsaicin, the substance that for us makes chilli peppers hot; — location: 2122
from decaying organic matter, including animal bodies. Union Oil therefore added higher concentrations of mercaptan to the gas to help them locate leaks. — location: 2455
The northern hemisphere’s counterpart to the kiwi is the woodcock. — location: 2618
Much more significantly, Tom, working with Betsy Bang, showed how petrels whose olfactory nerve had been cut (an operation that renders birds anosmatic – smell-blind) were unable to relocate their colony, whereas unoperated-upon birds could do so, and from as far away as Europe.59 — location: 2704
In response to pure air, none of the birds showed any change in heart rate, but in response to DMS all ten birds exhibited a pronounced increase, thus providing some of the best evidence so far that naturally occurring odours may help birds like prions navigate across the ocean.63 — location: 2739
Because it is extremely difficult to cut the olfactory nerve without also cutting this nerve, most previous experiments cut both, thereby ‘knocking out’ both senses. — location: 2774
particularly impressive is the bar-tailed godwit’s eight-day, 11,000-km non-stop flight from New Zealand to Alaska. — location: 2840
The Emlen funnel revolutionised the study of bird migration. It consists of a blotting paper funnel about 40 cm in diameter at its widest, with an ink pad at the bottom, and a domed wire mesh top – through which the birds can see the sky. As the bird hops, the ink on its feet leaves a trace on the blotting paper which provides an index of both the direction and the intensity of migration. — location: 2921
Under normal circumstances this greeting display lasts a minute or two, but Sarah Wanless, who studied gannets at Bempton Cliffs in northern England, observed a particularly prolonged instance. At one of the nests she was regularly checking, the female of the pair disappeared, leaving the male to care for the tiny chick alone, which, against all the odds, he did. One evening, the female returned after a remarkable five-week absence and luckily Sarah was there to witness it. To her amazement, the two birds performed an intense greeting ceremony that lasted a full seventeen minutes! — location: 3351
Created by Niall Bell (niall@niallbell.com)