Today (actually already yesterday – it’s late!) I headed down towards Eilat with Mark and Amity to join the Eilat Bird Festival /COTF / IBOC events. We made a quick stop at Har Amasa that was simply brilliant. There were birds everywhere, and what quality. I was really looking forward to arrive on site and […]
Tag: finch
Appreciating Cardinals
It has been raining and gray here for days that feel like weeks. It seems to make the red cardinals stand out even more than usual. It reminds me of something Terri Guillemets wrote: “Winter is the slow-down Winter is the search for self Winter gives the silence you need to listen Winter goes gray […]
Tap-Dancing Birds Revealed For First Time in New Video
Forget the funky chicken—the blue-capped cordon bleu prefers a tap dance to attract mates, a new study says. Scientists already knew males of these blue-and-tan African finches bob and sing as part of their courtship display. So did males of two closely related species, the red-cheeked cordon-bleu and the blue-breasted cordon-bleu. But new high-speed video […]
A study of island birds reveals that biodiversity is everywhere
Charles Darwin was famously inspired by the differing beak shapes and lengths of Galápagos finches – so inspired he eventually thought up the idea of evolution by natural selection. Now, researchers working on Santa Cruz Island, a small rocky island jutting out from the Pacific Ocean a few miles from the California coast, have once […]
Saving Darwin’s finches from blood-sucking parasites
In two small areas of mangrove forest on the west side of Isabela, the largest of the Galápagos Islands, the 80 or so remaining members of one of the world’s most endangered bird species are in serious trouble. Philornis downsi, a parasitic fly brought to the archipelago by humans, lays its eggs in the nests […]
Darwin’s finches deploy pesticides to combat blood-sucking maggots
Several species of Galapagos finch are in serious danger from a deadly nest parasite. But there may be a simple and ingenious solution, according to new research This article was written by Henry Nicholls for The Guardian.
Galápagos finches that inspired Darwin under threat from parasitical flies
The Galápagos finches are part of the history of science. Darwin collected them during the round-the-world voyage of HMS Beagle and their study helped the naturalist conceive the theory of evolution. Although all the birds belonged to a single group, the 14 species were spread across different islands in the archipelago. Darwin developed the idea […]