BryLog

Albatross cam for bird’s eye view (via BBC Earth News)

Unique pictures retrieved from the cameras placed on the albatrosses’ backs show the birds feeding alongside the killer whales, also known as orcas.

The birds are thought to feed on food scraps left by the marine mammals.

The discovery may explain how black-browed albatrosses find their prey in an apparently featureless open ocean, say the researchers.

Bearded Vulture in India (via BBC News)

Transgenic Songbirds Provide New Tool To Understanding Language and The Brain (via ScienceDaily)

You can learn a lot from an animal. By manipulating the DNA of mice, flies, frogs and worms, scientists have discovered a great deal about the genes and molecules behind many of life’s essential processes. These basic functions often work about the same in people as they do in “model” animals. But if you want to study more sophisticated cognitive processes such as humans’ ability to learn language from one another, you need a more sophisticated organism. For the first time, researchers have devised a way to alter the genes of the zebra finch, one of a handful of social animals that learn to “speak” by imitating their fellows….

Songbirds sing cross-species duet (via BBC News)

Two different Amazonian bird species sing the same song, say scientists.  Males of the two antbird species have evolved the same call to keep other males off their patch.  The researchers from Oxford University believe this is the first evidence of two separate species having evolved the same territorial song.

Pigeons’ Wings Sound the Alarm (via BBC News)

Startled pigeons might not appear to epitomise the wonder of evolution, but a study has discovered that the birds can communicate with their wings. When a crested pigeon is startled into flight its wings produce a whistling sound which serves as an alarm call.  The pigeons have “modified wings” that produce the whistle as they fly, but only this sudden take-off creates the alarm that causes other birds to flee.

Atlantic Puffins - A Photo from my recent trip to Machias Seal Island off the coast of Maine.

Long Beak Helps a Toucan Keep It Cool (via NY Times)

It consists of a bony core with a horny covering called the ramphotheca. Between the two there is a network of blood vessels. The researchers suggest that this arrangement makes it an ideal radiator, with blood as the coolant….

The experimental setup was quite simple, Dr. Andrade said. They put birds in a temperature-controlled chamber and monitored them with a thermal imaging camera to measure temperatures on the bill surface. They found that below an ambient temperature of about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, the bill was relatively cold, indicating that the blood vessels to it were constricted. But above that temperature blood flow to the bill increased.