The birds and the bees

lizkat

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These guys are wonderful fishers but hilarious and goofy in flight sometimes.

flaps up gear down.jpg
 

Yoused

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knee deep in the road apples of the 4 horsemen

lizkat

Watching March roll out real winter
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The bar-tailed godwit weighs max about 400 grams (under a pound) and hasn't webbed feet, so cannot land on water and get up out of it again. This five-month old first-time migrant wore a tiny satellite tracking device and flew from Alaska nonstop over the Pacific Ocean to Tasmania in 11 days, a distance of 13560km (8425 miles). Typically this species loses up to half its body weight making the trip.


https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1584815549137440768/
 

lizkat

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That is an average of about 30mph. Most humans cannot run 10mph for 50 yards.

Somehow they know where to go, too... even not having been there before. Apparently it's common for first-year godwits to fly together, separately from adults. So a whole flock can end up at the mercy of whatever "road map" unreels itself in the brains of whichever birds end up as leaders of a given flock. Interesting to think about that in terms of a possibly random but adaptive trait as climate change goes on: the younger ones --by chance in this or that year-- may avoid an increasingly risky choice made by birds that have followed a certain flight path before and just stick to it thereafter.

Beats me why people came to use the term "bird-brain" disparagingly. Maybe they were only applying it to domesticated poultry. Some turkeys bred for table seem to be pretty stupid compared to their wild cousins.
 
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