Thick feathers for insulation from Arctic cold make Snowy Owls North America’s heaviest owl, typically weighing about 4 pounds—one pound heavier than a Great Horned Owl and twice the weight of a Great Gray Owl (North America’s tallest owl).
The snowy owl is the heaviest owl in North America, coming in at about 4 pounds thanks in large part to its feathers.
The oldest known Mallard was a male, and at least 27 years, 7 months old when he was shot in Arkansas in 2008. He had been banded in Louisiana in 1981.
The oldest known mallard was at least 27 years and 7 months.
vocal learning circuit
for - language - learning for the first time - vocal learning circuit - like birds
"Fast Food". Female house sparrow (Passer domesticus) on a city street prepares to feast on a... [+] discarded french fry. (Credit: hedera.baltica / CC BY-SA 2.0) hedera.baltica via a Creative Commons license
"Fast Food". Female house sparrow (Passer domesticus) on a city street prepares to feast on a discarded french fry. (Credit: hedera.baltica / CC BY-SA 2.0) HEDERA.BALTICA VIA A CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE
What I like about this photo is that when I was a kid, I was amazed when I saw a sparrow doing this very thing, scavenging french fries. I was around 7–8 years old. My mom had taken me on a shopping trip in her 1968 Buick Skylark, green with black roof. We stopped at McDonald's for a snack. She went in to get food and left me sitting in the car. She had parked in front of the shop, facing the hedge-bordered outdoor eating area. I saw sparrows hopping through those hedges and on the ground around them. A lucky few of them found several french fries and were either eating them or carrying them away in their beaks. As a little kid growing up in a rural area, I expected birds to eat only seeds or bugs, so this sparrow french fry feast was surprising and hilarious to me.>
Further transportation or engagement with the narrative along with identification with specific characters should elicit responses consistent with the intent of the intervention (Slater & Rouner, 2002).
Connecting back to a previous research point
past 2 decades
Bird's eye view-- spanning historically
the medical establishment often points to what they consider to be a lack of rigorous evidence that narrative could be a superior conduit
Discusses the bird's eye view
It seems fairly clear that the concern with sequences associated with birds was to convey the availability of eggs.
A historical perspective on the sciencesbrings into view controversies, and some beliefs and methodological con-victions that retrospectively turn out to be false—among Blumenberg’scharacteristically colorful picks are Augustine writing that “the stars werecreated for the consolation of people obliged to be active at night,” and“Linnaeus’s opinion that the song of the birds at the first light of morningwas instituted as consolation for the insomnia of the old.”84
something poetic about these examples even if they're poor science...
https://www.jenniferackermanauthor.com/genius-ofbirds
Lynne Kelly mentioned that there might be some interesting research on birds and memory with respect to songlines-like activity.
ere we only white birds, my
hmmm....the only white birds...as if too say the only pure ones??? pure as in what?
et’s wings
bird can symbolize freedom or captivity in a poem. Because he mentions too, the bird's wings as a separate entity. There is a distinctive image or flight, liberation, freedom.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/technology/birds-arent-real-gen-z-misinformation.html
Except that the creator of Birds Aren’t Real and the movement’s followers are in on a joke: They know that birds are, in fact, real and that their theory is made up.
Linking to a New York Times tag archive would not be considered evidence by any self-respecting conspiracy theorist.
If it seems that some young people are more adept than their elders at handling multiple streams of information—at, say, doing their homework while also emailing, texting, Googling, Digging, iTuning, and Angry Birding—that may be a developmental difference rather than a cultural one.
An uncommon verbing of iTunes as well as Angry Birds.
Bird sound encoding
I was at the bookstore yesterday and ran into two new useful resources that looked interesting in this space.
Specific to birdsong, there was
Read about and listen to birds from six continents. A beautiful painting illustrates each selection along with concise details about the bird's behavior, environment, and vocalizations. On the built-in digital audio player, hear each bird as it sings or calls in nature with audio of the birds provided by the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
This could be useful in using the book itself as a memory palace in addition to the fact that the bird calls are built directly into the book for immediate playback while reading/memorizing. There are a few other related books with built in sound in this series as well.
The other broader idea was that of
I saw the book A Bird A Day by Dominic Couzens (Batsford, 2021, ISBN: 978-1849945868) to help guide one towards learning about (or in our context maybe memorizing) a bird a day. It had names, photos, and other useful information which one might use to structure a palace to work at in small chunks. I know there are also many other related calendars which might also help one do something like this to build up a daily practice of memorizing data into a palace/journey/songline.
The broader "Thing-a-day" calendar category might also be useful for other topics one might want to memorize as well as to have a structure set up for encouraging spaced repetition.
@doughoff Thanks for kicking this off. I'm relieved to see someone else occupied (personally I'm worried) with this topic.
I've recently begun some work on memorizing birds in North America. Bird song is one of the more intimidating areas for me as I have absolutely zero knowledge of music beyond a pair of functioning ears.
In my early searches for a comprehensive text to work from, I did note that the book Birds of North America (Golden Field Guides series) by Chandler S. Robbins, & Bertel Bruun, and Herbert S. Zim (St. Martin's Press, 2001) was one of the few guides that dealt with birdsong and had a short section on the subject in the front and listed visual sonograms for most birds. Sadly, the book didn't include audio which I think may have been incredibly helpful in matching the sound with the visuals.
I have bookmarked a few websites that deal with it, though there are sure to be many others that match birdsong audio to a visual representation of some sort. Here are a few of those:
Initially I imagined that through direct experience in listening and viewing these sonograms, I might come to some sort of facility with them. Next I would potentially rely on the concept of pareidolia to come up with some images to attach to them.
In any case, I thought I'd sketch out my general plan and some of the resources and words I'd come across to see if they may be of help to others. I'm looking forward to seeing what others may have come up with or used as well. Birdsong will assuredly be the last piece of the puzzle that I build into my bird repertoire.
Incidentally, after having done some significant library searching and bird guide/handbook review, I've chosen Birds of North America, Francois Vuilleumier (Dorling Kindersley, 2020, ISBN:978-0-7440-2053-3) as my "bible" for it's structuring of bird families, photographs, descriptions, and variety of data about birds and their ranges. It's about as comprehensive (for my area of the world) as anything out there, is well laid out, and sort of makes its own method of loci based on page layouts and color schemes. It is too large to take out into the field easily, but I find that working on storing the data is easier in the comfort of the house than the wilderness.
I'll also note that it has representative visual flight diagrams which may be relatively easy to categorize and therefore memorize bird flight patterns. If others have better or more detailed resources for this, I'd love to know those as well.
Account started on 2021-05-12 at 11:37 PM
Bizarre...
Yet aside from humans, only a few other species, including orangutans and bonobos, seem to willingly help others. Now, scientists say they’ve found the first nonmammals that are also altruists: African gray parrots.
Parrots!
An artist impression of the Kogarah North Precinct wih Georges River Girls High School on the right.
These sort of renders have a lot to answer for.
Concept video
The problems of modern urbanism. Urbanism for birds.
I would be remiss in not mentioning Pres. Roosevelt’s great friend and ally Winston Churchill who not only helped end World War II but was a lover and companion to a number of parrots.
I have never seen a picture with Winston Churchill and parrots. It raises him higher in my esteem. I bet they swore also.
Pol was taught to swear and screamed curse words at his funeral. The African Grey had to be ejected from the funeral ceremony when he started cursing in both English and Spanish, all learned from the president!
Seems like Jackson had the last laugh!
she heroically rescued the parrot as the fire was engulfing the White House.
This should be the story that everyone knows!
One raven in the experiment figured out how to work their rock/box contraption first, then began teaching the method to other ravens, and finally invented its own way of doing it. Instead of dropping a rock to release a treat, the future Ruler of the Raven Kingdom constructed a layer of twigs in the tube, and pushed another stick down through the layer to force it open. The bird had to be removed from the experiment before it could teach any other birds how to do it.
This is so cool! (Until they take over the world, that is...)
Yesterday’s Delta Boeing 717 flight DL1943 from Detroit to Atlanta became a 22 minute trip from Detroit to Detroit when there was a bird discovered flying around the cockpit. And it wasn’t the first time a bird flew around the cockpit that day on that plane.
What the heck?
This bird was thought to have been extinct for 100 years, with the creature passing into birding legend. Now, researchers have announced that they have found a population of the rare parrots hiding deep in the bush of Western Australia.
Wow, incredible!!
Bird eyes have had eons longer to optimize. Along with their higher cone count, they achieve a far more regular spacing of the cells.
Bird eyes have had eons longer to optimize. Along with their higher cone count, they achieve a far more regular spacing of the cells.
Something of this kind we see birds practice, which divide food collected in their beaks among their tender and helpless young ones, but when they seem sufficiently grown, teach them, by degrees, to venture out of the nest and flutter round their place of abode, themselves leading the way, and at last leave their strength, when properly tried, to the open sky and their own self-confidence.
Great metaphor. My tutoring center would love this quote