On a Sunday afternoon in April, the main minibus terminal in Sukabumi, Indonesia, looked sleepy from the outside. But in an open space round the back, hundreds of men were gathered. Amid chatter and cigarette smoke, the air buzzed with excitement, for one of the region's biggest bird-singing competitions was set to begin, and a motorbike was among the prizes.

As the day progressed, dozens of songbirds were brought out for their 10-minute rounds, from tiny garden sunbirds and grey-cheeked bulbuls to larger oriental magpie-robins and orange-headed thrushes. Then the emcee announced the main event — the singing contest among the highly popular, strikingly handsome white-rumped shamas — and a hush fell over the crowd.

The shamas' owners murmured final words of encouragement and stepped away from their cages. Judges swept in with clipboards, assessing each bird for its song, ability to hold a steady tune, volume and showmanship. Soon it was down to a final two birds ... and then "Baby White" was crowned the winner amid cheers from the crowd.

Indonesians have a long-standing culture of keeping birds as pets, and songbirds are especially popular, prized by collectors for their melodious singing and colorful plumage. "I keep songbirds as a hobby, to relieve stress and also gain a bit of money," explained Harry Gunawan, a 78-year-old businessman and owner of 39 shamas, including the multiple prizewinning Baby White, while waiting for his new motorbike.

Gunawan's shamas are among an estimated 66 million to 84 million caged birds that are kept across Java, the island where 56 percent of Indonesia's population lives and one in three households owns birds. These include more than 3 million white-rumped shamas and 2 million oriental magpie-robins. Wild birds are believed to be better songsters; hence, many are trapped in forests then crammed into tiny crates, drainpipes and even plastic bottles, destined for pet markets in Jakarta, Surabaya and other big cities. Birds that survive the journey — estimates of mortality rates range from 30 to 80 percent — will spend the rest of their lives confined to cages.

This birdkeeping hobby, paired with the growing popularity of singing competitions, has already driven some species to extinction and many species — also threatened with habitat loss — are on the brink, a phenomenon dubbed "the Asian songbird crisis."

"The silent forest is really happening," says Agung Nur Haq, who is in charge of conservation at the Wak Gatak Songbird Rescue and Rehabilitation Center near Pontianak, West Kalimantan.

Experts warn that action must be taken quickly, or the consequences may be dire and irreversible. If nothing is done and populations can't recuperate, says Alexander Lees, a conservation biologist at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom, we may experience an "empty forest syndrome," whereby forests appear intact and lush but are devoid of animals.

Birds in demand

The illegal bird trade is thriving elsewhere in southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. But "Indonesia's songbird trade is one of the world's most prolific," says Chris Shepherd, a wildlife trade expert at the Center for Biological Diversity in Canada. "It's terrifying."

The biodiversity-rich nation is home to about 1,800 bird species — more than double the number found in the United States. Of those, one in five have been spotted in pet markets, including protected, endangered and endemic species (ones found nowhere else). These include the endangered black-winged myna and the Javan green magpie, of which fewer than 250 and 100 wild individuals, respectively, remain.

Estimates suggest that up to 30 percent of Indonesia’s population, some 90 million people, keeps between 164 million and 187 million wild-caught songbirds.

"There may be more birds behind bars than left in the wild," wrote Lees in an overview of the songbird crisis in Current Biology.

The fondness of Indonesians for caged birds stems from a centuries-old belief among the Javanese, the country's largest ethnic group, that a man is considered successful if he possesses five elements: a wife, a house, a vehicle, a ceremonial dagger and a bird. The bird symbolizes that he is in touch with his softer side, and can indulge in both work and leisure. In a 2025 study, researchers found that a bird's singing ability was the biggest driver of demand — after that, people preferred rare, endemic or unusual birds that flaunt one's status.

Singing competitions emerged in the 1970s as another reason to keep songbirds. These local or regional events are typically held monthly or weekly, involving up to 1,000 birds.

"The owners go home with, at the very least, tons of prestige, but more often lots of prize money, sometimes up to 10 years' salary," says acoustic biologist Benjamin Mirin, founder of the Creative Conservation Lab with Cornell University. Competitors also stand to win exclusive trophies, goats, motorcycles and even cars.

Mirin, who has been studying the songbird trade since 2018, says the events can be life-changing. "They're so popular and financially beneficial that they're accelerating the poaching of birds to the point where now the forests are falling silent."

Unfortunately, wild-caught birds are perceived to have better song quality and a wider singing repertoire than their captive-bred counterparts. As a result, competitions "have been driving the demand in certain species," says Serene Chng, a wildlife trade researcher at TRAFFIC, a nonprofit focused on reducing harmful and illegal trafficking of plants and animals.

An expert group formed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature has identified 52 species that are most impacted by trade in Asia. These include the straw-headed bulbul (known for its lovely duets) and the Bali starling (with its stark white plumage and electric-blue eye ring). Although Indonesian law forbids the capture and trade of more than 500 bird species, many of them songbirds, enforcement is weak, thanks to poor resources, corruption and other factors. Consequently, several species, including the Javan pied starling, are now locally extinct.

It's hard to predict what will happen to ecosystems if songbird species are wiped out en masse in Indonesia. Birds play important ecological roles: pollinating plants, dispersing seeds and helping with insect control. The Pacific island of Guam offers a cautionary tale: It lost nearly all of its songbirds after the brown tree snake, which preyed on the birds and their eggs, was accidentally introduced after World War II. Guam's forests shifted to what Lees has described as "a nightmarish alternative state as a spider-dominated ecosystem." It was, he says, "pretty catastrophic."

Indonesia is much larger and far less isolated, so "your starting conditions are not as bad," says Lees. "But if we don't recuperate some of those populations, then we can expect maybe similar sorts of downstream impacts."

A sanctuary

Government agencies have had some success in tracking down wild-captured birds but are reluctant to confiscate them because they lack a place to house them. This dilemma in West Kalimantan province, a hotspot for illegal bird trade activity, led to the establishment of the Wak Gatak sanctuary by the nonprofit group Planet Indonesia.

One of its key aims is to provide suitable facilities to encourage more frequent confiscations and rescues by authorities with Indonesia's natural resources and conservation agency, BKSDA, while ensuring the welfare of confiscated songbirds, says Abrar Ahmad, a technical advisor for terrestrial conservation at Wak Gatak.

The center, which sits on a leafy plot near the city of Pontianak, is worlds apart from the dark, cramped conditions birds endure when smuggled aboard a truck or ship. On a morning in April, visitors turn off a sleepy road and drive past the gates down a short muddy track. Dragonflies flit lazily through tall grass and a smattering of coconut, banana and durian trees sway in the distance. The facilities are modest: a small office block with light-filled aviaries.

Animals often arrive at Wak Gatak in an alarming state: Malnourished, with missing feathers, many appear fatigued or withdrawn, says Happy Ferdiansyah, Wak Gatak's head veterinarian. Some birds have wounds on their upper beaks from gnawing on cage bars, while others — especially if they're more territorial — suffer leg fractures from fighting with other birds in close quarters.

"A lot of them, 70 to 80 percent, die within the first two weeks. Their condition is very poor," says Ferdiansyah.

To avoid causing the birds further stress, his team conducts only a visual inspection of the new arrivals. Those that are obviously ill are transferred to the on-site clinic for treatment. The rest are transferred to cages in quarantine.

The birds receive vitamins, nourishment (an assortment of fruits, insects, sugar syrup and so on), in addition to enjoying more space — one or two individuals typically share an oven-size cage. They remain in quarantine for at least 14 days, a critical time period when diseases such as avian influenza and Newcastle disease tend to manifest, says conservation director Haq. To test for these and other issues, Ferdiansyah and his fellow vets analyze blood and stool samples, in addition to carrying out rapid antigen tests.

Once their health has been given the all-clear, the birds are moved to rehabilitation aviaries on the opposite side of the premises. These enclosures are much more luxurious: bathroom-size, dotted with green plants, with generous views of the surroundings and sky.

Here, stimulation is key, as is getting the birds comfortable with flying again. "The aviaries have different perches and plants for the birds to hop around or to hide in the bush," says Ferdiansyah. "We also do food enrichment like giving them live insects or putting the food in different places."

Only some birds are fit for release. Those that appear habituated to people are not good candidates; they may continue to approach humans and might teach non-natural calls to wild birds or just fail to communicate with them. The center, for example, currently houses four locally endangered and protected common hill mynas — glossy black starlings with heavy orange bills that are renowned for their intelligence and mimicry. When I visited, the birds happily wolf-whistled, chuckled and offered the traditional Islamic greeting "As-salamu alaykum," among smatterings of Indonesian chatter. These mynas have been at Wak Gatak for nearly a year and will remain there for the foreseeable future.

But for birds that are suitable to release, the center works with BKSDA to identify possible sites. Ideally, these would be forest lands in good condition, with abundant food and water, minimal human activity and few natural predators like civets and snakes, says Ferdiansyah. A local community that's supportive of conservation is a plus — increasing positive outcomes, such as survival and reproduction, by 10 percent, according to a 2023 study that analyzed 305 wildlife restoration projects in 80 countries.

Once a site is determined and permits are secured, Ferdiansyah and his team transport the birds — as they did at the end of April, taking 130 birds to a nature reserve seven hours north of Pontianak. At such sites, the team carries out what’s known as a soft release, placing the birds in a large makeshift cage that allows them to acclimate to their new surroundings. After four to 10 days, the team opens the cage, allowing the birds to fly away when ready. Team members stay on for up to two weeks, tracking the birds to make sure they're settling in problem-free.

It's rough, sweaty work, says Ferdiansyah, but highly rewarding. The center has so far helped 348 songbirds return to the wild. The April release is their largest to date, and included some crimson sunbirds and greater green leafbirds, the latter of which is endangered. Another 705 birds were seized in December from a ship at the local port in Pontianak. Within hours, most of the birds had died. But 36 are still recovering at Wak Gatak and 22 have been rehabilitated and released.

Nearly 3,000 birds from 45 species have passed through the center's doors since it opened in 2022. It’s proof that such a rehabilitation facility — the only one in Indonesia for the foreseeable future — can make an impact.

But given how many songbirds are in peril, its work is a drop in the ocean.

To slow the crisis, experts say it must be fought on multiple fronts, but above all, at its root: demand. It requires "thinking about how we can shift attitudes and behaviors to reduce pressure on wild populations," says Lees, who explores such measures in a look at the state of the world’s birds in the 2022 Annual Review of Environment and Resources. In 2023, the Wak Gatak team carried out a campaign across some of the city's billboards, discouraging people from joining songbird competitions. And in the coming months, they'll host a series of behavior-change workshops in two towns close to forests where birds are commonly poached and competitions are growing in number.

Shifting the needle will not be easy. Indonesia's songbird hobbyist groups are powerful — in 2018, they successfully petitioned to have five species downlisted from the national list of protected birds. Plus, government officials often take part in competitions themselves. In 2018, for example, then-president Joko Widodo presided over the President's Cup, one of Indonesia's most prestigious songbird competitions, even entering his own white-rumped shama.

Yet change is possible: Ferdiansyah himself kept four songbirds as a kid because they "sounded very nice" and he thought he could make them happy. But when he entered veterinary college, he realized the error of his ways and set the birds free.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine's newsletter.

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Corvids, including ravens and crows, have earned a reputation for being some of the smartest birds on Earth. They can recognize human faces, use tools, solve multistep puzzles and even hold funerals.

In recent years, scientists have added another surprising skill to the list: a grasp of numbers. Research suggests that corvids can distinguish between different quantities and, in some cases, even perform statistical analysis.

These discoveries have raised a provocative question: How deep do the roots of mathematical thinking go? While modern humans are the only known species to develop formal mathematics, studies of crows, monkeys and other animals suggest that the cognitive building blocks of math may have evolved hundreds of millions of years before people began doing calculations.

Few researchers have done more to uncover these abilities than Andreas Nieder, a professor of animal physiology and the director of the Institute of Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen in Germany. By examining the neural activity of both monkeys and crows, Nieder has found evidence that very different animal brains can process numerical information in surprisingly similar ways. Live Science spoke with Nieder about how these findings may reveal that the origins of mathematics are far older than our species.

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry: How did you get into researching crows and primates?

Andreas Nieder: After studying the auditory and visual systems for several years as a student, I realized that I wanted to focus on the neuronal foundations of intelligence and cognitive control functions. How does the brain give rise to abstract concepts, working memory, or the ability to follow complex rules deliberately? Of course, to study intelligence, you need intelligence specialists. I therefore began working with primates ‪—‬ more specifically, rhesus monkeys, arguably among the most intelligent mammals. They are closely related to humans, possess relatively similar brains, and share many cognitive abilities with us.

However, as a trained biologist, I was always interested in a broader evolutionary question: Are sophisticated cognitive abilities unique to mammals, or can they emerge in very different brains? Crows provided an ideal comparative species. Birds diverged from mammals more than 360 million years ago — roughly six times longer ago than the extinction of the dinosaurs. Yet despite this immense evolutionary distance, corvids display remarkably flexible behavior; in many ways, they are the feathered primates of the air.

KHC: Are crows difficult to study? Are they fun? Do they have personalities?

AN: Both primates and crows are demanding to study. Because they are highly intelligent, they require special housing and care. Since we investigate cognitive abilities under tightly controlled experimental conditions, they also require extensive behavioral training by skilled personnel. And, of course, the regulations governing research with these species are particularly strict.

At the same time, they are fascinating research subjects. Individual monkeys and crows differ noticeably in temperament and behavior. Some are curious and adventurous, others are cautious and reserved, and some learn new tasks much faster than others.

Their qualities can be quite striking. Some are reliable, highly motivated workers that perform consistently day after day. Others are sensitive divas who seem to require special treatment before they are willing to cooperate. Researchers generally avoid anthropomorphizing, but there is little doubt that individual animals exhibit stable behavioral traits that we would reasonably describe as distinct characters.

KHC: You've found that crows understand the concept of zero. How do we know this?

AN: We trained crows to recognize different numbers — sets containing one, two, three, four objects, and so forth. We then included trials in which no items appeared at all. The remarkable finding was that the birds treated an empty set as a quantity and as part of the numerical continuum. They behaved as though the empty set belonged before "one." Their error patterns were particularly revealing: They confused zero more often with one than with larger numbers, exactly as one would expect if zero were mentally represented as a numerical quantity next to one. In addition, recordings from neurons in the crow brain showed cells that responded selectively to empty sets. This suggests that zero is not merely a behavioral trick but is represented neurally as a meaningful numerical category.

KHC: To play devil's advocate, is the ability to recognize the difference between something and the lack of something really that surprising? Is it akin to the human concept of zero?

AN: That's an important question. Simply recognizing that nothing is present or absent is not surprising. Many animals can distinguish between the presence and absence of objects. The key issue is whether they treat "nothing" as a quantity that can be compared to other quantities.

Our experiments suggest that crows do more than detect absence. They position empty sets within an ordered numerical sequence, at the low end of the number line, and show distance effects similar to those observed with other numbers. For example, they find it easier to distinguish zero from two than zero from one.

That said, we should not claim that crows possess the full human mathematical concept of zero. Humans use symbolic zero in arithmetic, algebra, calculus and formal mathematics. What we have demonstrated is a foundational precursor: a nonsymbolic numerical representation of zero. This may represent an evolutionary building block from which more sophisticated human concepts eventually developed.

KHC: You've also found that crows can perform statistical analysis. Tell me more about these findings and what you showed.

AN: We trained carrion crows [Corvus corone] to associate a series of arbitrary visual signs, colored geometric images displayed on a touch screen, with different reward probabilities. One sign might yield a food reward 90% of the time, another 70%, another 50%, and so on down to 10%. Importantly, the signs themselves carried no inherent meaning; the birds had to learn these probabilities through experience.

Once the birds had learned these sign-probability associations, we presented them with pairs of signs and asked them to choose one. To maximize their rewards, they should select the sign associated with the higher reward probability. The crows did exactly that. Even when confronted with many novel pairings, they reliably chose the statistically more favorable option.

This does not mean that crows perform formal statistics in the human sense. They are not calculating percentages or solving probability equations. However, the results show that they can extract probabilistic regularities from experience, store this information in memory, and use it flexibly to make reward-maximizing decisions under uncertainty. These are fundamental ingredients of statistical reasoning and are highly valuable in natural environments, where animals constantly have to make decisions based on incomplete information.

KHC: Have researchers tried similar tests on babies or young humans, and if so, how do we stack up?

AN: Yes. Developmental psychologists have conducted many related studies with infants and young children. Even before learning language, infants show sensitivity to quantities, numerical differences and simple probabilistic information. By around 4 years of age, children also display an intuitive understanding of empty sets.

What is striking is that the behavioral signatures observed in crows resemble those seen in preverbal human infants and nonhuman primates. Of course, human children eventually develop symbolic mathematics through language, education and culture, which takes them far beyond the abilities observed in animals.

KHC: Can these findings tell us anything about how the human understanding of math evolved?

AN: They suggest that some foundations of mathematics may predate humans by a very long evolutionary timescale. Humans did not invent numerical intuition from scratch. Rather, we appear to have inherited ancient cognitive systems that allow brains to estimate quantities, compare numbers, and represent concepts such as zero approximately.

The fact that crows and primates — two distantly related groups — show similar numerical abilities suggests that these capacities may emerge whenever evolution favors flexible intelligence. Human mathematics likely built upon these ancient cognitive foundations and then expanded dramatically through language, symbols and culture.

KHC: What's something a general audience might be surprised to learn about crows?

Many people are surprised to learn that crows are songbirds. Most people associate songbirds with melodic singers such as nightingales or blackbirds, not with the harsh cawing of a crow. Yet crows do learn a significant part of their vocal repertoire and are even known as apt imitators, even of human speech sounds — the internet is full of funny videos in which crows imitate human speech.

What makes this particularly interesting is that their vocalizations are not merely reflexive calls. In our experiments, we found that crows can exert volitional control over their vocal behavior. They can learn to produce vocalizations in response to arbitrary cues and withhold them when required, demonstrating a level of cognitive control over vocal output that is considered an important prerequisite for complex communication and, ultimately, language.

More recently, we showed that crows can even use their vocalizations to count. In a recent study published in [the journal] Science, we trained crows to produce a specific number of calls — between one and four — in response to visual or auditory cues. Remarkably, they not only generated the correct number of vocalizations but also appeared to prepare the intended number before they started calling. This suggests that they can represent numerical information and use it to guide a self-generated sequence of vocal actions.

Taken together, these findings show that crow vocalizations are far more sophisticated than most people assume. Their characteristic "caw" is not just a simple call — it can be brought under deliberate cognitive control and even used to express numerical information. For a bird, that is a remarkably advanced ability.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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A newly discovered feathered dinosaur with four wing-like limbs may have prowled the lakeside forests of what is now northwestern China, gliding between trees like a flying squirrel and snatching some of the earliest birds out of the Cretaceous sky.

The predator, named Jian changmaensis, was a close cousin of Velociraptor and belonged to a strange group of small birdlike dinosaurs called microraptors. Unlike the large and scaly "Jurassic Park" version of raptors, these animals were feathered, lightweight and glided to get around. Based on fossil evidence, J. changmaensis had long feathers on both its arms and legs, giving it the look of a tiny dragon with four wings.

The fossil, described Thursday (June 4) in the journal Annals of Carnegie Museum, is only a partial left shoulder and forelimb. But those bones were enough to reveal a new dinosaur species, and possibly solve a longstanding mystery at China’s Changma Basin, a site packed with ancient bird fossils and broken bird bones that look a lot like the pellets coughed up by modern owls.

"Our team has recovered more than one hundred bird fossils at Changma, but only this single non-avian dinosaur specimen," study co-author Matthew Lamanna, a senior dinosaur researcher and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, in a statement.

"[Microraptors] provide a window into what the closest ancestors of the first birds were probably like," he told Live Science via email. "Studying them yields clues as to how birds got their start and how they learned to fly."

Finding a fossil among the fragments

Paleontologists uncovered the fossil in the Lower Cretaceous Xiagou formation near Changma village in the Gansu province. The rocks there were formed during the early Cretaceous period about 124 million to 120 millions ago, when the region held a large lake teeming with birds, fish, turtles and other ancient animals.

The site is famous for fossils of Gansus yumenesis, one of the first Mesozoic birds ever found in China. Since 2002, researchers have recovered more than 100 partial bird skeletons from Changma, including fossils with preserved soft tissue such as feathers, skin and claw sheaths.

"Our subsequent expeditions throughout the rest of the 2000s and into the 2010s established Changma as one of the world's most important fossil bird localities, Lamanna said. "It was an amazing thing to be a part of."

But until now, no one had found a non-avian dinosaur fossil from the basin.

That's what made J. changmaensis stand out. Amidst the fossil fragments, the specimen consisted of a fused shoulder blade, upper arm, radius and ulna. It was preserved in three dimensions, unlike many flattened microraptor fossils from the same area.

"Jian is one of the biggest microraptor specimens that has ever been found," Jingmai O’Connor, the associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum in Chicago and co-author of the study, said in the statement. "The piece of its upper arm bone that we have is about 4 inches [10 centimeters] long, so the entire dinosaur probably had something like a four-foot [1.2 meter] wingspan, around the size of a barn owl."

Microraptors were not birds. But they were very close relatives of the dinosaur lineage that gave rise to birds. Their bodies have elements that seem to blur the line between bird and dinosaur, including claws, sickle-shaped raptor feet and feathers.

"This is neat, a new fossil of those dinosaurs that were basically on the cusp of becoming true birds," Steve Brusatte, a professor of paleontology and evolution at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the study, told CNN.

The bird hunter

The Changma Basin may have been a buffet for a tree-climbing predator like J. changmaensis. The site was dominated by early birds, as is evidenced by the many pellet-like remains, possibly the dinner remains of the newfound microraptor species.

Researchers can't prove that Jian made those pellets. But it is the only non-bird body fossil found at Changma so far. Jian was also a carnivore, and was much larger than the birds preserved there.

Other microraptor fossils support the idea that these dinosaurs ate from a wide menu. Previous fossilised specimens have been found with remains of fish, lizards, mammals and birds in their guts, suggesting microraptors were opportunistic hunters rather than picky specialists.

For J. changmaensis, birds may have been especially easy targets. If the dinosaur lived partly in trees and could glide, it may have ambushed early birds from branches or moved through the canopy like a sugar glider, according to the researchers.

"We don’t have very much of Jian, just some bones from the shoulder and forelimb," Lamanna said. "It's enough to know that there was this interesting new microraptor living 120 million years ago in what's now northwestern China, but not enough to be able to learn everything we'd like to learn about these dinosaurs. Maybe one of your readers will eventually become a paleontologist and be the one who finds the rest of Jian."

Despite being surrounded by a multitude of people, urban birds may be picky about who can approach them, new research suggests.

After surveying over 37 city bird species in five European countries, experts found that the avians fled sooner when approached by women than by men. The findings, published in December 2025 in the journal People and Nature, suggest that the birds can differentiate between the sex of the person approaching them.

The researchers used each bird's distance from a person before flying away as a metric of fearfulness. But why the birds seem to be more fearful of women remains a mystery.

"As a woman in the field, I was surprised that birds reacted to us differently," study co-author Yanina Benedetti, an ecologist at the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, said in a statement. "This study highlights how animals in cities 'see' humans, which has implications for urban ecology and equality in science. Many behavioural studies assume that a human observer is neutral, but this wasn't the case for urban birds in our study."

Outside experts agree that these findings are puzzling, but also preliminary.

"Until we have a good reason to hypothesize such differences, I remain a bit skeptical," John Marzluff, a professor emeritus in ecology at the University of Washington, told Live Science in an email. "But I am not at all skeptical that birds pay a lot of attention to us and respond to humans in ways that are important. We just need more research here to better understand why this effect was so consistent."

Baffling bird behavior

To understand whether this puzzling response was a bigger pattern rather than a few skittish encounters, the researchers used a standard measure of urban wildlife wariness: flight initiation distance, or how close a person can get before an animal flees.

The team studied the flight initiation distance in 37 species — including the common wood pigeon (Columba palumbus), carrion crows (Corvus corone), house sparrows (Passer domesticus), hooded crows (Corvus cornix), and blackbirds (Turdus merula) — across cities in the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Poland and Spain.

Some types of birds, like pigeons, seem more comfortable with human behavior and fled later or had a shorter flight initiation distance. Others, like magpies, fled early and had a longer flight initiation distance.

During the study, a man and a woman who were of comparable height and were wearing similar clothing tried to approach a bird in a city's green space by walking in a straight line and keeping their eyes on the avian. The researchers measured the distance after the bird fled. Four men and four women, all expert ornithologists, participated in the research, so the birds interacted with different pairs of people.

From 2,701 observations collected between April and July of 2023, the team found that men could get around 3 feet (1 meter) closer to the birds than women could, on average.

"I fully believe our results, that urban birds react differently based on the sex of the person approaching them, but I can't explain them right now," study co-author Daniel Blumstein, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA, said in the statement.

Possible theories

The researchers proposed a few ideas for why the city birds flee faster from women. For example, they suggested that pheromones, body shape or gait could be factors.

"If I had to guess, I would agree with the supposition that gait is am important cue the birds are using," Marzluff said. "What I find puzzling is that one would expect such effects to be learned by a bird’s experience with various humans in their environment. If so, then there would be no reason for birds to have only experienced more threatening women. Some surely would have experienced threatening men and therefore the overall response should be no difference in response to sex."

However, the team noted in their paper that they did not have any female participants collect data while they were menstruating — when specific scent compounds in a woman's body odor intensify — an aspect that could be investigated further.

The researchers cautioned that this study is preliminary and that more data is needed to confirm this behavior isn't just a fluke.

"Follow up studies could focus on individual factors such as movement patterns, scent cues, or physical traits, testing them separately rather than grouping them under observer sex," Benedetti said.

"But how do we test this? Perhaps a study resembling Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks," Blumstein joked.

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Birds have spread their wings the world over, but they first took flight at least 150 million years ago, during the dinosaur age.

In his new book "The Story of Birds: A New History from Their Dinosaur Origins to the Present" (Mariner Books, 2026), Steve Brusatte, who is a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, takes readers on a wild ride from the oldest known bird, Archaeopteryx from Jurassic Germany, through the eras, explaining how two-legged theropod dinosaurs evolved into the more than 10,000 species of birds alive today.

Around 66 million years ago, some of these small, winged creatures survived the asteroid that killed the nonavian dinosaurs. While many birds stayed small, others grew to huge sizes . Brusatte describes a bevy of lost giants, including colossus penguins, which were gorilla-size apex predators who prowled the oceans, elephant birds that stood as high as a basketball hoop and laid watermelon-size eggs, and terror birds that hammered their prey into submission with razor beaks.

Like Brusatte's other books, "The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World" (William Morrow, 2018) — which landed him the role as scientific advisor on the "Jurassic World" movies — and "The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us" (Mariner Books, 2022), he starts each new section with a vignette, drawing readers into past worlds. You can read an excerpt on Live Science, detailing the discovery of the first known fossilized dinosaur feathers.

Live Science sat down with Brusatte to discuss the original purpose of feathers, how bird flight was an evolutionary accident, and why the modern era may present the biggest threat to birds since the dino-killing asteroid wiped out their relatives.

Laura Geggel: Alright, this is the big question: Are birds dinosaurs?

Steve Brusatte: Birds are dinosaurs. Birds are dinosaurs in the same way that a T. rex or a Triceratops is a dinosaur. And that is because birds evolved from other dinosaurs. They are part of the family tree. They are just a peculiar group of flying dinosaurs. Just like bats are a strange group of flying mammals.

LG: It's thought that birds evolved from shrinking, two-legged theropod dinosaurs. How did this come about?

SB: Birds did not evolve by, let's say, a T. rex mutating into a chicken one day. That's not how evolution works. And what we see from the fossil record is a whole series of transitional fossils of dinosaurs that lived tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of years ago, evolving one by one. [They evolved] the keystone features of birds: feathers, wings, wishbones, hollow bones and big chest muscles for flying. But these things didn't all just evolve at once. They did not evolve for flying. Almost all of these things evolve for other reasons.

We see things like feathers first turn up in dinosaurs that were too big to fly that lived on the ground. These feathers are much simpler than the feathers of birds today. So, we can actually tell that a lot of the things that birds need to fly, the things that make birds, are things that actually evolved in dinosaurs. They are dinosaur features that were repurposed later on by evolution to make a flying bird.

LG: What do feathers do for an animal? Why do we think dinosaurs had them in the first place?

SB: There is nothing else alive today that has feathers. They are a bird hallmark, a calling card for birds. But what we see from fossils is that the ancestors of birds first evolved feathers. Lots of dinosaurs had feathers, so they're really a dinosaur feature.

And the incredible thing is that we see that a lot of dinosaurs had feathers. It isn't just one or two dinosaurs. And it's not even just the dinosaurs that are most birdlike or were the immediate ancestors of birds. It's many dinosaurs. There are meat-eating dinosaurs with feathers, there's plant-eating dinosaurs with feathers. There's little dinosaurs with feathers. Some of the raptor dinosaurs like Velociraptor [had feathers]. There are big dinosaurs with feathers. There's a tyrannosaur from China, a cousin of T. rex that was like 30 feet [9 meters] long that weighed something like a ton. Its body is covered in feathers.

So, if you map this onto the dinosaur family tree, really the only conclusion you can draw is that feathers were normal for dinosaurs. The common ancestor of dinosaurs would have had some kind of feather. But most of these feathers were very simple — they were not quill pens. They didn't make up wings. There's no way they could be used for flying. They looked a lot more like hair, just individual little strands similar to our hair.

The direct evidence from the fossil record [is] that feathers evolved in a simpler form. They must have been used for something else. We don't know exactly, but the best idea is that they evolved for the same reason that hair evolved in mammals, and that was to help regulate the temperature, to keep the body warm. We wouldn't really know that without the fossils. To me, as a paleontologist, that's the really cool part of the story. This is the evidence from many millions of years ago of how birds evolved.

LG: You've actually studied a number of fossils with feathers.

SB: I write about this in the story, the first time I saw a dinosaur wing. And I know it sounds hyperbolic, but it really was kind of a transcendent experience. And I'll explain why. So I was a college student at the time. I was in undergrad and I was on a trip with my mentor with Paul Sereno who's a very famous dinosaur hunter who's discovered dinosaurs all around the world. He brought me along as a research assistant and we were in China, and my god this was the first time I'd been to China, so far away from home. I grew up in the middle part of America. It was just sensory overload.

We were at the museum in Beijing and from across the room I saw on a limestone slab of rock, a dinosaur beautifully preserved. All the bones were there and it was surrounded by a halo of feathers and the arms were lined with quill pens that looked just like the feathers of modern birds.

Now, I had studied dinosaurs by this point. I was building a career in paleontology. I'd read all about birds and bird evolution. I knew that a lot of dinosaurs had feathers. But until it was in front of my own eyes, and until I saw just how similar those feathers were to the feathers of modern birds, how they formed a wing — but it wasn't a bird, it was a raptor dinosaur. Until that moment, it didn't really hit home.

So, I completely understand how this idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs or birds are dinosaurs, that can be a bit off-putting to people, a bit confusing. It just makes your head spin. But when you see it, you really see it. And since then, I've been very fortunate to go back to China to work with many great Chinese colleagues. To work at some of the museums where farmers from northeastern China bring in the fossils of these feathered covered dinosaurs. These were fossils that were formed about 125 million years ago. Volcanoes buried these entire ecosystems; they locked the soft tissues, the fine details into stone, and now the farmers in Liaoning province in China find these in abundance and bring them to museums.

It's been an incredible thing to play a small role alongside a lot of my good friends in China in studying some of these astounding animals that really capture evolution in action.

LG: The birds' reptile cousins, the pterosaurs, were already flying around when birds emerged. Did birds face much competition from their cousins?

SB: Yeah, it's a great question. A lot of people, rightly so, by the way, think that pterosaurs or pterodactyls, are dinosaurs. I mean, you often see them in dinosaur movies, you see them on the dinosaur posters and the dinosaur toy sets — but they're not actually dinosaurs. They're a separate group of reptiles that flew. They're close cousins to dinosaurs, but they are not dinosaurs, the same way a crocodile isn't a lizard.

Remarkably though, it was the pterodactyls that were the first animals with bones to ever evolve powered flight. And by that, I mean the type of flying where you have wings and you actively move those wings up and down to generate the lift and the thrust that you need for flying.

Plenty of animals can more passively fly and glide — flying squirrels, flying fish. But it's only been the pterodactyls, then later the birds, and then the bats among animals with bones that have evolved powered flight. And the pterodactyls did it by at least about 230 million years ago.

There are fossils of that age of fully formed pterodactyls with big wings, not wings made out of feathers. They did it differently. Their wings were made out of skin. They were attached to a single long finger like an E.T. finger. It was the fourth finger, the ring finger.

Now, Archaeopteryx is still the oldest bird [from] about 150 million years ago. That means that for about 80 million years, give or take, the pterosaurs were there alone in the air. I mean there would have been insects and other things, but among animals with bones, they were the only flyers.

So when birds came on the scene, when dinosaurs started to properly fly they were really interlopers in a pterodactyl world, and they really mounted an insurgency. They didn't just take over the world right away. For a long time, birds and pterodactyls lived together. And in fact, the pterodactyls only died when the rest of the non-bird dinosaurs died when the asteroid hit at the end of the Cretaceous 66 million years ago.

Again, you can do the math. That means that for more than 80 million years, there were birds and pterodactyls living together. Ultimately, really, it was just that asteroid that made the birds victorious. If not for that quirk of prehistory, who knows what the modern world might be like.

LG: There were multiple bird lineages, but only one survived the mass extinction. What set it apart?

SB: The day the asteroid hit, the 6-mile-wide [10 km] rock fell out of the sky and triggered earthquakes and tsunamis and wildfires and blocked out the sun for many years, plunging the Earth into a long nuclear winter. I mean, this was carnage.

And 75% of all species died. Among the species that died, [were] yes, T. rex and Triceratops and the long-neck dinosaurs and the duck bill dinosaurs, but also all of the more primitive birds — the ones that still had teeth, that still had long tails, that still had big claws on their hands, like raptor dinosaurs. A whole bunch of those birds were living on the day the asteroid hit, and they didn't make it through.

The only birds that survived are the modern-style birds, the ones that we know. But these are the birds that have beaks instead of teeth. They're the birds that have big wings and big chest muscles so they can fly really well. They're the birds that grow really fast. We don't really see baby birds very much in nature. They are there. You can hear them sometimes in the nest, squawking for their parents to bring them food, but they stay babies for maybe a few months at most. So birds grow super quickly.

These are all things that probably would have helped them stare down that asteroid because when the asteroid hit, you had to confront that with whatever features you had, with whatever the reality of your anatomy or biology was. There was no time for natural selection to slowly, gradually, change you generation by generation. You had to deal with the fires and the earthquakes and the acid rain and the nuclear winter. It all came at you.

If you were able to grow fast, that would help you. You could get through childhood more quickly. You could turn over the generations more quickly [to reproduce and evolve]. If you could fly, that could help you. If you were small — and these birds were small — you could hide away more easily [from predators and the hazardous, post-asteroid world]. And if you had a beak, you could eat seeds. And we know a lot of these birds could eat seeds. We find the fossil gut contents, the last meal fossilized sometimes.

Eating seeds is actually quite difficult to do. There's not a whole lot of animals that specialize in seeds, but it would have been very important if you could do it when the asteroid hit, because when the sun was blocked for a few years by all the soot from the fires and the dust and the grime from the collision, the Earth really would have gone into a winter that lasted several years. It was dark. It was cold. There was very little if any sunlight for plants to photosynthesize. And so ecosystems collapsed like houses of cards.

If you were a plant eater and you ate parts of a growing plant like leaves or fruits or flowers, you'd be in trouble. I mean, that stuff would soon be gone. But we know from modern disasters, forest fires and volcanic eruptions and so on, that seeds can last in the soil longer than any other part of a plant. That's how forests regenerate after a natural disaster.

If you could eat seeds, that might have been your ticket to survive a little bit longer. You had food that other animals couldn't get.

LG: If you fast forward to today, birds are facing many challenges. Do you want to talk about a few and why their numbers are dropping?

SB: I think birds today are facing their greatest challenge since they stared down the asteroid. There have been a number of birds that have gone extinct within human history. And many of those birds only lived in one place, often on one island. They're quite quirky birds, idiosyncratic birds, things like dodos, but also things like moas in New Zealand or elephant birds in Madagascar or a huge number of birds in Hawaii.

But extinction, I think, is really only part of the story. I mean, extinction is extinction. It's final. If the last member of a species dies, it's done. But you can have a species endure, but in a very wounded state.

That seems to be what's happening to a lot of birds, just since the time that my parents graduated from high school in the early 70s. There's been a loss of billions of birds in the standing population of North America. A lot of these species of birds, whether they're robins, different types of song birds, different types of owls or hawks or eagles … it's not that they've gone extinct, it's just that their populations have crashed. And it really is because of land use, it's because of fertilizer, it's because of pollution, it's because of climate change.

First of all, we just have to admit it's an issue, and then we have to find ways to try to mitigate against this. And I think that's where the fossil record comes in. If we have information from past extinctions or information from past episodes of environmental change, we can better understand which types of birds are more vulnerable when the climate changes or land use changes.

It is awesome to study T. rex, of course, but we do study fossils because we see them as relevant to understanding what's happening in the world today. They're clues from prehistory that give us insight. So that's where we're with birds. It is worrying, but I choose to be optimistic, for two reasons mainly.

First is that — bald eagles [and] California condors being two great examples — when we've realized that certain birds are in dire straits, we have done things to protect them. Bald eagles were super rare when I was growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, but by the end of the 90s, they were very common in northern Illinois, especially along the Illinois River, where I'm from.

Now they have these tourist packages, especially in the winter, where you go and you just watch the eagles. There's so many of them fishing on the river. So, that's a great success story, and that gives me optimism.

The other thing that gives me optimism is [that] birds are survivors. If they got through the asteroid, they're survivors. If they've survived the gauntlet of climate change and volcanic eruptions and drifting continents and rising and falling seas and all the other things that have befallen the Earth over the last 150 million years, then at least some birds, I think, will be able to face whatever humans throw at them.

That's not an excuse for us to be completely disrespectful to the environment, but it does mean that in many ways I'm more hopeful that birds can endure than maybe even our own species. We might think it's the age of mammals. We're a mammal, of course. But at least in that way, we're still in the age of dinosaurs.

Editor's note: This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

In the 1970s, paleontologist John Ostrom revived the theory that modern birds are evolved from theropod dinosaurs, a group that includes Tyrannosaurus rex. But a key piece of evidence was missing: feathered fossils. Then, a chance discovery in China upended our understanding of bird evolution.

In this excerpt from "The Story of Birds: An Evolutionary History of the Dinosaurs That Live Among Us" (Mariner Books, 2026), author and paleontologist Steve Brusatte looks at the monumental shift in dinosaur research after the first feathered dinosaur was discovered.

For well over a century, since its discovery in the Bavarian lithographic mines in 1861, the fossil bird Archaeopteryx was the oldest and most primitive creature known to have feathers. Then, in the autumn of 1996, this understanding was upended. Some revolutions start with a single shot; this one began with a chance encounter and a handful of photographs.

As the trees in Central Park dropped their leaves, paleontologists from around the world converged across the street, at the American Museum of Natural History, in mid-October for the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. A few weeks earlier, the Canadian dinosaur hunter Phil Currie had been in China, leading a group of tourists to dinosaur dig sites. While there, he spied something peculiar in the backroom of a Beijing museum, discovered by a farmer named Yumin Li two months prior. It was the skeleton of a small dinosaur, about the size of a chicken, fossilized as if frozen in time, in a muddy rock imbued with volcanic ash, a sign it was overcome by a sudden cataclysm.

Rapid burial had locked in the dainty details of the skeleton, but it was the stuff surrounding the bones that caught Currie's attention. The dinosaur's body was encircled by a halo of fluff. Thin, tufty, delicate strands ran along the dinosaur's back, from the top of its head to the tip of its tail. Some of the strands looked like they branched at their base. For all the world, the fuzz looked like the downfeathers of a bird.

But this wasn't a bird; it didn’t have wings, and obviously couldn't fly. It was a bona fide dinosaur — a small coelurosaur theropod, very similar to the German Compsognathus, which Huxley had held up in the 1860s as the type of transitional reptilian species birds might have evolved from.

Currie and his Chinese colleague Pei-ji Chen snapped photographs, which they printed out at the size of index cards and brought to the conference in New York. Once there, word spread fast; the rumors of a fluffy dinosaur billowed through the hallways and meeting rooms. Somebody tracked down John Ostrom, then in the twilight of his career, three decades after his discovery of the raptor Deinonychus had reignited the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Currie and Chen handed him the photos. Ostrom looked shell-shocked. He began to cry, and almost fell to the floor. "I need to sit down," he stuttered, delirium taking hold.

Here it was, finally: a dinosaur with feathers. Just as Ostrom had predicted. Just as the doubters had demanded. The final piece of the puzzle, the strongest evidence that birds have dinosaur ancestry.

A crafty journalist from The New York Times caught wind of the excitement, and the next day, the front page of the Saturday edition blared with the headline "Feathery Fossil Hints Dinosaur-Bird Link," along-side articles about Bill Clinton's reelection campaign and a Yankees World Series preview. Above the bold print was a drawing of a small meat-eating dinosaur, running on its hind legs, small arms curled up, its tail a long seesaw for balance, its neck, back, and chest covered with bushy fuzz.

The artwork was needed, because the Chinese authorities barred publication of the photos. Before the year was out, Chinese scientists published a formal description of the fossil and gave it a name: Sinosauropteryx, the "Chinese reptilian wing," in honor of its transitional status between dinosaurs and birds.

Sinosauropteryx was the firing gun for a fossil rush, as farmers across Liaoning Province — a bucolic region of fields and rolling hills along the Chinese border with North Korea — fanned out in search of more feathered dinosaurs.

They knew the land better than anyone, and they knew museums would pay top money for such precious fossils. Soon, they were finding feather-covered dinosaurs in droves. The whole area, it turned out, had been bombarded by volcanic eruptions in the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods, which quickly entombed entire ecosystems.

This was the key to the fine preservation: Normally soft bits like skin and feathers decay before a skeleton can harden into a fossil, but in this one remarkable place, feathers could easily fossilize. It was a dinosaurian Pompeii. As the new millennium dawned, the mounting Chinese discoveries transformed our image of dinosaurs.

One feathered dinosaur became ten, then hundreds, then thousands of skeletons, belonging to several dozen distinct species. Some, like the ostrich-size Beipiaosaurus, were adorned with simple filaments that looked like oversize versions of the bristle feathers of modern birds. Others, like the original Sinosauropteryx, had more complex feathers that resembled little paintbrushes, with many individual bristles branching from a root in an untidy tuft.

Much more extravagant were the feathers of the turkey-size Caudipteryx and dromaeosaurid "raptors" like Sinornithosaurus, which had true quill pens with a central shaft and many barbs extending off the sides to form vanes. Sometimes, these pennaceous feathers lined up along the hand and arm, making what could only be described as a wing, like in the crow-size Microraptor.

The roster of feathered dinosaurs got richer and richer. Even tyrannosaurs were in on the makeover: two early cousins of T. rex called Dilong and Yutyrannus were found coated in bristle and tufty feathers. Most of these plumose dinosaurs were theropods, members of the great group of meat-eaters on the family tree, but a few plant-eaters like Psittacosaurus, a primitive cousin of Triceratops with tiny horns on its head, had mohawks of bristles along their tails.

And most of these feathery fossils were from China, but soon they started to turn up elsewhere, like in Siberia, where a herd of hundreds of dog-size, duck-billed dinosaur cousins called Kulindadromeus were overwhelmed by their own volcano. This herbivore was resplendent with bristles on its head and body, branching downy tassels on its arms and legs, and curi-ous ribbonlike streamers on its knees — while meanwhile there were also scales on the lower legs and tail. Although Kulindadromeus was a vegetarian distantly related to theropods, its branching tufts — each formed by six or seven short filaments arising from a common anchor — look like they could be plucked from Sinosauropteryx or another meat-eater.

Initially, there was some skepticism that these wispy fossilized structures on the backs, tails, and arms of dinosaurs were true feathers. It was a legitimate question when Sinosauropteryx was first unveiled: Could its little strands and bristles have been something else, like degraded skin, or a freak by-product of decay and fossilization?

The discovery of full-on pennaceous quills — with shafts, barbs, and vanes — in species like Caudipteryx and Microraptor proved that many of these were genuine feathers. But what of those simpler filaments in other dinosaurs? We can be confident they are real. They not only look like the bristles and down feathers of birds today, but they share the same structure: They are hollow, chemical analysis shows they are formed of those rare CBP proteins, and when you look at them under powerful microscopes, you see they are full of melanosomes, the minuscule bubbles that hold pigments and give modern feathers their colors.

Still doubt it? Then gander at one of the most improbable fossils ever discovered, from Myanmar, announced in 2016. It's a tail of a juvenile theropod embedded in amber, shrouded in feathers, their details preserved in stunning 3D. Suspended in yellow resin, like a bug frozen into an ice cube, the feathers seem almost alive.

They may as well be bundles of down that slipped out of a pillow and stuck onto your sofa. They have a small central shaft, which branches into barbs, which further branch into barbules. And they are clearly observed growing from follicles in the skin. They are absolutely feathers, and fulfill every definition we use to characterize feathers in modern birds — but they are plastered to a dinosaur.

This bounty of feathered dinosaurs, fundamentally, was that final piece of evidence to verify what has now become paleontological consensus: Today's birds evolved from dinosaurs.

Excerpted from the book THE STORY OF BIRDS: A New History from Their Dinosaur Origins to the Present by Steve Brusatte. Copyright © 2026 by Stephen (Steve) Brusatte. From Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

A New Zealand parrot that's missing the entire top half of its beak has developed a unique jousting technique to attain top social status, researchers report in a new study.

The parrot, named Bruce, thrusts with his exposed lower beak during jousts, targeting the head, wings, beak and legs of his opponent, although he usually doesn't make contact, Alex Grabham, a biologist at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury in New Zealand and first author of the study, told Live Science. Instead, the moves are competitive posturing meant to spook the opponent. Bruce extends his neck to use more force at close range, or runs and jumps from farther away to drive his beak at other males.

It's the first known case of a physically impaired animal reaching alpha male status on its own, the researchers said.

"It's no surprise that a bird like Bruce, that has this impairment, has had to innovate and get on with his life," Grabham said.

Remarkable innovation

Bruce is a kea (Nestor notabilis), an endangered parrot native to New Zealand. These parrots are known for their remarkable adaptability and intelligence, as they have been documented using tools, solving problems and even making predictions.

Bruce has lived in captivity in Willowbank Wildlife Reserve in Christchurch for about 12 years, after being discovered as a juvenile in the mountains of New Zealand's South Island with his entire upper beak missing. Researchers suspect he lost this part of his beak in an accident, but they aren't sure exactly what happened, Grabham said.

Bruce has adapted to his disability by developing never-before-seen techniques to perform everyday tasks. For example, he uses different-sized pebbles instead of his beak to preen himself, in the first recorded case of self-care tool use in a kea parrot.

"That work really showed that he has had to innovate," Grabham said.

In the study, published April 20 in the journal Current Biology, researchers described Bruce's novel technique for jousting, which has earned him the undefeated alpha-male position in his group. He's the only kea who's been recorded engaging in this jousting technique, Grabham said, and the researchers suspect he's the only one; parrots' upper beak protrudes over their lower beak, so it would be impossible to replicate the moves with an intact beak.

Bruce's jousting moves immediately displaced opponents 73% of the time. Bruce won all 36 of the observed jousts he was part of, confirming him as the dominant alpha parrot of the group. "We know his jousting is a huge part of his success," Grabham said.

Being the alpha has benefits for Bruce's health. He has the lowest stress hormone levels of the group, which the researchers tested by analyzing the parrots' fecal samples. He also enjoys priority access to feeders and is the only male in the group to be preened and have his beak cleaned by other males.

Bruce's behavioral innovation enabled him to exert dominance over the group, marking the first time a disabled animal has achieved alpha status alone, the researchers said. In other recorded cases of physically impaired animals reaching top social status, alliances were essential to dominance. For example, one alpha male chimpanzee (Pan troglodyte) that lost the use of his arm due to polio rose in rank through new charging displays and an alliance with his brother. In another example, an older male Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata) that had lost his ability to walk attained alpha status through an alliance with the group's alpha female.

The new findings emphasize kea's intelligence and flexibility, the researchers said. Kea are endangered, with fewer than 7,000 left in the wild, so their conservation is crucial, Grabham said.

"All of the kea are unique and have their own ways and personalities," Grabham said. "They're incredible creatures, and Bruce is one of many." Willowbank Wildlife Reserve advocates for kea conservation through breeding programs and education.

The new findings show what's possible for animals with physical disabilities, the researchers said.

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Many chickens meet their end with a swift blow to the neck. But there's lore that chickens can run around headless, and there were even news reports of a chicken nicknamed Miracle Mike who reportedly lived 18 months after a farmer tried ‪—‬ and failed ‪—‬ to kill it by cutting off its head.

So can chickens really survive without their heads?

The reality is that they can't live long that way ‪—‬ less than a minute, experts told Live Science.

After decapitation, chickens commonly flap their wings and move their legs, said Dr. Marcie Logsdon, a veterinarian in the Exotics and Wildlife Department at Washington State University's Veterinary Teaching Hospital in Pullman, Washington. However, "I think the actual running around is fairly uncommon," Logsdon said. "It's usually just going to be strong muscle contractions of both the wings and the legs, and that's a very common thing," she said. Those movements typically last a minute or less, she added.

However, the answer to whether a chicken is alive or dead in the seconds following decapitation depends on how death is defined. In the case of a decapitated chicken, brain death occurs first, while cardiac death happens a few seconds later. So, in those moments after brain death and before cardiac death, one could view the chicken as either alive or dead, depending on the definition of death used.

Brain death is a state of unconsciousness in which the entire brain is permanently damaged and an individual cannot breathe on their own. Brain electrical activity in chickens stops within 30 seconds after cervical dislocation (breaking the neck), according to a 2019 study published in the journal Animals. Decapitation includes breaking the neck, so according to the framework of brain death or loss of brain activity, chickens survive a few seconds after decapitation.

"That is not to say that the animals are consciously aware of anything happening for those seconds, but there is residual electrical activity occurring," Andrew Iwaniuk, a comparative neuroscientist at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, who specializes in bird brains, told Live Science.

Cardiac death, which happens when the heart permanently stops beating, tends to occur a few seconds after brain death, Iwaniuk said. "The time difference would be in the order of less than 10 seconds," he said.

As a result of these different definitions of death, Logsdon considers a chicken's post-decapitation movements "post-mortem reflexes," whereas Iwaniuk views the chicken as alive during those last stirrings.

Chickens move after decapitation because "there'll be some residual neural activity in the spinal cord," Iwaniuk said. Continued breathing is also due to residual neural activity, he said. The heart muscles, on the other hand, can continue to contract and release without neural input — until they run out of energy and oxygen, he said.

Further, the brain normally sends signals telling the muscles to relax when they aren't needed, Logsdon said. Decapitating a chicken stops those signals, and when that happens, "we sometimes get some jerking," Logsdon said. "That does seem to be very exaggerated in chickens."

Miracle Mike

Something very different happened in the case of Miracle Mike. In September 1945, the BBC reported in 2015, Wisconsin farmer Lloyd Olsen decapitated a group of chickens to take to market, but one of them didn't die. For 18 months, the rooster, who came to be known as Miracle Mike, toured the U.S. in sideshows. Olsen and his wife fed the rooster through its esophagus and cleared its airway to try to keep it from choking, but it did eventually choke to death in 1947, after the Olsens misplaced the throat-clearing syringe, the BBC reported.

This story may seem to illustrate that a chicken can live without its head. But the reality is that there's only one widely known case of a chicken living without some of its head. Instead of beheading Mike by cutting straight across the neck, Logsdon explained, the farmer "cut off a chunk of the brain and essentially most of the face."

Mike's decapitation left him with the back of his brain as well as one ear, the BBC noted. He likely retained the brainstem, located at the back of the brain, which controls basic physiological functions like breathing and heart-rate regulation, Iwaniuk said. Mike probably also had his cerebellum, which helps coordinate movements, Logsdon said.

"It's probably why he was able to actually stand up and walk, as opposed to just running around and flailing," Logsdon said.

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A critically endangered bird that almost went extinct 30 years ago just recorded a major milestone: The kākāpō recovery program in New Zealand has celebrated the 105th kākāpō egg to hatch ‪—‬ the largest number since records began 30 years ago, according to the New Zealand broadcaster RNZ.

In an updated chick count released April 3, representatives from the New Zealand Department of Conservation said 105 kākāpō chicks had hatched from 256 eggs laid. Of these, 98 chicks are still alive. One egg remains in an incubator.

The achievement hints that the species, which reproduces only every two to four years, may be making a comeback. The kākāpō (Strigops habroptilus) is a critically endangered, flightless parrot that is found only in New Zealand. They are the world's fattest and heaviest parrots, with males weighing up to 8.8 pounds (4 kilograms).

Hunting, habitat destruction and the introduction of new predators have led kākāpō populations to plummet, and the species almost went extinct in the 1990s.

These birds reproduce only every two to four years, and most females hatch only one chick per breeding season, compounding their vulnerability. Today there are an estimated 235 kākāpōs remaining in the wild.

Not all of the newly hatched chicks will survive, however. Sarah Manktelow, Kākāpō Recovery Programme ranger told RNZ's Kākāpō Files podcast that seven chicks have died so far and four have been transported to Dunedin Wildlife Hospital for treatment. Kākāpō chicks are classified as adults when they reach 150 days old, which will be in mid-July.

The official chick count for this breeding season will be confirmed at this point. The oldest chick is now over 50 days old.

"Every new chick brings the species further from the brink of extinction," Deidre Vercoe, the Department of Conservation's operations manager for kakapo told Mongabay. "There's always a sense of hope and optimism for the future."

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Around 1,000 years ago, a pre-Inca culture acquired wild parrots from hundreds of miles away in the Amazon rainforest and then kept them captive in what is now coastal Peru, all so people could access the birds' vibrant feathers, which were "prestigious symbols of status," a new study finds.

Researchers found some of these feathers in a 1,000-year-old tomb about 20 years ago. Now, a new analysis reveals the "complete journey of these feathers," including where the birds originated, what they ate, and which routes the live birds were likely carried on before being traded to the Yschma, a pre-Inca society that flourished from about A.D. 1000 to 1470.

While it's long been known that the Inca and other pre-Hispanic cultures traded and valued parrot feathers, the new study is one of the first to reveal that the "Ychsma culture, long before the Inca Empire, participated in a sophisticated trade network that spanned the Andes," the authors wrote in the study.

Researchers first discovered the burial in 2005 after a survey with ground-penetrating radar and a later excavation revealed two large, stone-lined tombs near the Temple of Pachacamac, 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Lima. In one of the two Yschma tombs, the archaeologists found parrot feather ornaments with vivid colors that had been preserved for centuries.

Now, an international team of researchers has analyzed the feathers' DNA and chemical composition, and concluded that the feathers came from live Amazonian parrots that had been transported, and likely traded, across the mountains, before being kept in captivity on the Peruvian coast. Their new study was published Tuesday (March 10) in the journal Nature Communications.

"Our study proves that centuries before the Inca, societies like the Ychsma, the Chimú, and others were already managing sophisticated, organised, long-distance trade networks," study co-author Izumi Shimada, co-director of the Pachacamac Archaeological Project that originally found the tombs and a professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University, told Live Science in an email. "They possessed profound ecological knowledge and negotiated trade agreements that connected the Amazon with the coastal deserts, revealing that these states [were] more interconnected."

The discovery shows how much effort these societies invested in what they deemed prestigious objects. At Pachacamac, these feathers were found adorning false heads — cloths filled with reeds and other plants — attached to 34 funerary bundles of deceased individuals who were also decorated with small cinnabar masks, suggesting that the feathers were used in ceremonial activities such as burial rites.

However, it appears that the captive birds weren't living at the temple.

"Our research actually suggests that the large-scale rearing of these captive birds may not have happened at Pachacamac itself (no parrot skeletons, eggshells, or signs of breeding houses were found), but further north maybe in the Chimú Empire, who then traded the harvested feathers south to the Ychsma," study first author George Olah, a research fellow at The Australian National University, told Live Science in an email. The proposed Chimú breeding site is based on the new paper's computer models, he added.

A sacred site

The Pachacamac temple and its oracle served as the heart of the Yschma society, which controlled the valleys around Lima before the Inca conquest around 1470. "Because of the widespread and longstanding reputation of Pachacamac, elites of diverse cultures in ancient Peru sought the privilege of being buried close to the temple," Shimada said. "It is believed that the site contained tens of thousands of burials of elites of different cultures and regions."

After the Spanish conquest in 1533, looters ransacked graves at Pachacamac for centuries, stealing and destroying countless Yschma artifacts. By the time the Pachacamac Archaeological Project began its work in the early 2000s, many researchers believed no intact elite tombs were left by the temple — so the discovery of the two tombs was an "exceptional event," the researchers wrote in the study.

Feather quest

In their investigation, the team looked at the mitochondrial DNA of 25 feathers found in the tombs and determined that the ornaments attached to the funeral bundles came from at least four tropical parrot species: scarlet macaws (Ara macao), red-and-green macaws (Ara chloropterus), blue-and-yellow macaws (Ara ararauna) and mealy Amazons (Amazona farinosa). All of these birds are native to lowland tropical forests east of the Andes, not to the Peruvian coast.

These birds lived hundreds of miles from the Ychsma, which suggests the society traded with others to acquire the birds.

"The fact that they ended up more than 500 kilometres [310 miles] away, on the other side of South America's highest mountain range, proves human intervention," Olah said in a statement. "They do not naturally fly over the Andes."

An analysis of the feathers' isotopes (variations of elements with varying numbers of neutrons in their nuclei) shed light on the birds' diets.

Unlike modern wild parrots' diets, which are rich in fruits and seeds, the ancient feathers from Pachacamac showed diets rich in plants like maize and possibly food linked to coastal agriculture enriched by seabird feces.

"Because they showed a coastal diet, it proves the birds were brought to somewhere along the coast alive and kept in captivity long enough to moult and grow new feathers with the isotopic signature we detected," Olah told Live Science in an email.

The macaw feathers also showed a higher genetic diversity in their DNA, unlike the low diversity expected from a small captive breeding colony. This suggested that local breeding was happening near Pachacamac and birds were being repeatedly sourced from Amazonian populations and moved through trade routes in the mountains.

"While it is tempting to think of them as pets, the archaeological evidence suggests they were maintained primarily for their feathers, which were valuable prestige items used in elite tunics, headdresses, and funerary bundles," Olah said.

Finding the routes across the Andes

To determine how these birds moved across the Andes, the team turned to computational models. They plugged in ancient topography, river systems and ocean conditions, and then ran a "least cost" path analysis to determine which routes would have demanded the least energy from human caravans.

The more efficient routes pointed to two likely corridors: one through northern networks tied to coastal regions where the Chimú Empire was located and another through central Andean passages connecting the coast to eastern lowlands.

"The recommended best paths actually made good sense and also aligned well with historical and archaeological evidence," Olah said.

Bird quiz: How much do you know about our feathered friends?

Bird populations are in free fall across North America. And in some hotspots their decline is accelerating, a new study reveals.

Wild bird numbers declined at an accelerating rate in California, the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic between 1987 and 2021. Across these hotspots, losses were associated with high-intensity agriculture, according to the study.

Although the study, published Feb. 26 in the journal Science, shows a correlation between declining bird populations and intense agriculture, it doesn't definitively prove that agriculture is driving the increased decline or identify which agricultural activities might be responsible.

However, signs of intense agricultural activity consistently proved to be the best predictor of increased bird decline, which mirrors similar research conducted in Europe. The researchers also found that declines were stronger in warming areas, suggesting that rising temperatures due to climate change were driving some bird disappearances.

Birds perform important roles in the ecosystem, including spreading plant seeds and keeping insect populations under control. For decades, scientists have been concerned that bird populations are falling due to human activities, both in North America and globally — a plight shared by many other animals. What's special about the new research is that it reveals how the decline in North America has accelerated since the late 1980s.

"We are not talking about the decline but the acceleration of the decline," study lead author François Leroy, a postdoctoral researcher in macroecology at The Ohio State University, told Live Science. "We see that this decline is getting faster and faster with the intensification of human activities."

Leroy and his colleagues mapped bird decline by studying data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey, which is an annual surveying effort by professional biologists and skilled amateurs to monitor bird populations across North America. As a part of the survey, participants walk along specific routes and record the birds they find.

The researchers focused on specific routes with enough data to measure the rate of decline over 35 years. These routes were primarily in the U.S. and included 261 bird species. Across all of the species surveyed, the overall abundance of birds fell by at least 15%, with significant drops documented in about half (122) of the species and accelerating declines reported in about a quarter (63) of the species. Common birds ‪—‬ like red-winged blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus), house finches (Haemorhous mexicanus) and American crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) ‪—‬ were among the native species found to have suffered an accelerated decline.

The study focused on the rate of decline in specific routes, so it's unclear how many individual birds were lost across the entire continent during the study period. However, previous research has found that billions of birds have disappeared in recent decades.

A 2019 study published in the journal Science estimated that the North American bird population decreased by 2.9 billion individual birds between 1970 and 2017. That estimate equated to a drop of 29%, which is almost double the 15% decline documented in the new study. However, the 2019 study also covered an earlier and longer time period when there may have been more severe losses.

People only started surveying North American birds in the second half of the 20th century, but we've been killing them directly and indirectly for much longer than that. For example, commercial hunting by humans forced passenger pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius), a species estimated to have once had a population of 3 billion to 5 billion, to extinction in 1914.

What caused the "birdemic"?

The new study demonstrated that birds were incurring losses not just at the species level but across whole families of species and across different habitats. To better understand the worrying trend, the researchers compared the bird data to potential contributing factors, such as temperature change, rainfall and land-cover changes.

The acceleration of bird decline coincided with large areas of croplands and high usage of fertilizers and pesticides, which are signs of intense agriculture. This tracks with research in Europe that has found that agricultural intensification has negatively impacted bird diversity.

Intense agriculture can destroy, change and break up traditional bird habitat. The amount of land used for farming in the U.S. hasn't changed that much since the 1980s. Agriculture has become more consolidated in that time, with a decline in midsize farms and a shift to larger farming operations, but there's slightly less land being used for farming overall. Thus, the bird losses can't be blamed solely on the amount of farmland. However, they could be the result of changes in farming practices.

Leroy said that from the new study, it's not really possible to say which specific practice in agriculture is the worst for bird losses. However, he noted that from previously published studies, it seems like pesticide use is one of the main suspects.

A 2023 study published in the journal PNAS found that the use of pesticides and fertilizers was the key to agricultural intensification being the main pressure behind most bird population drops, particularly in birds that feed on invertebrates. Most disappearing bird species depend on insects for food, and insects are in steep decline as they are killed through the use of pesticides. Birds also consume pesticides directly.

Leroy said he would like to see what farmers think about the correlation between agricultural intensification and bird losses. He and his co-authors also noted in the study that agriculture warms landscapes by reducing the amount of vegetation and altering its properties, which may then amplify warming impacts on birds.

While the findings were mostly bad news for birds, there were some bright spots. For example, the researchers found some local increases in forest bird populations, which likely benefited from the reforesting of old farmland. There was also a small pocket of land just north of the U.S.-Canada border where the overall abundance of birds increased — the only region in which this occurred. However, Leroy said he had "no clue" why this was the case.

"It doesn't mean that Canada is doing better because if you look at other regions in Canada, there were also some significant declines," he added.

This amorous astronaut snap, first released by NASA on Valentine's Day 2025, highlights a pink, heart-shaped salt lake in Argentina.

Salinas Las Barrancas, sometimes known as Laguna de Salinas Chicas, is a shallow salt lake in the lowland plains of Argentina's Buenos Aires province, roughly 33 miles (53 kilometers) west of the port city of Bahía Blanca.

The lake bed is around 6 miles (10 km) across at its widest point and regularly fills with water after heavy rainfall. However, this liquid quickly evaporates due to the region's intense sunlight, exposing crystal-rich salt flats that are mined by local people, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

In this photo, the lake appears to be close to empty because of its lighter-pink hue, which is most likely the result of an imbalance between Dunaliella salina — a species of dark-red algae that thrives in most of Earth's salt lakes — and other microorganisms in the water, according to a 2022 Smithsonian magazine article about similarly colored salt lakes.

"We have rainy seasons, when the salinity levels decrease [because there's more water in the ponds]. When there's less salt, the Dunaliella survives and the ponds look brownish-red," Lilliam Casillas Martinez, a microbiologist at the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao, told Smithsonian magazine while explaining the colors of similar salt ponds in Puerto Rico. "During the dry season, it gets really salty. The Dunaliella dies and the archaea and bacteria take over. Then it becomes pink, pink, pink."

Locals mine up to 330,000 U.S. tons (300,000 metric tons) of salt from the flats of Salinas Las Barrancas twice a year, between the region's rainy seasons, according to a 2019 feature on the lake by Argentine news site La Nación. Most of this salt is replenished by the next major rainfall, and experts predict that mining will remain viable there for 5,000 years.

Mining is largely carried out using traditional processes, including scraping salt from the flats' surface with handheld tools. Workers must take precautions to protect their eyes and skin from intense sunlight that reflects off the pure white crystals. "The salt becomes part of your life," local worker Chepo told La Nación (translated from Spanish). "For someone else, it's a hellish place, but for me, the salt flats are my home; you get used to not being able to see."

Salinas Las Barrancas' high salinity means that not much can survive there. However, some salt-resistant vegetation does grow around the lake's edges, according to the Earth Observatory.

It is also home to colorful birds, including vibrant yellow cardinals (Gubernatrix cristata) and bright-pink Chilean flamingos (Phoenicopterus chilensis). These birds feed on tiny crustaceans that are rich in carotenoids — organic pigments synthesized by plants, algae and bacteria.

These specific carotenoids come from the Dunaliella algae, which the tiny crustaceans feed on, and naturally produce both red and yellow pigments. Without these pigments in their diets from birth, both bird species would be different colors; yellow cardinals are naturally red, while flamingos are born grayish-white.

See more Earth from space

A wildlife researcher has made a historic sighting of a Siberian peregrine falcon in central Australia, a region where this subspecies has never been recorded before, the Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC) announced Tuesday (Feb. 3).

The falcon's appearance in the region may be linked to a large and unusual rainfall event in 2024, which created temporary wetlands that attracted congregations of prey bird species, as well as predators, the AWC said in a statement.

AWC wildlife ecologist Tim Henderson spotted the bird of prey in the skies above the Newhaven Wildlife Sanctuary near the remote town of Alice Springs in February 2025 and managed to capture a photo of it. Experts have since analyzed the image and confirmed that it is a Siberian peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus calidus).

This arid region of Australia is a far cry from where the Siberian subspecies breeds — in the Arctic tundra of Eurasia thousands of miles away.

But in 2024, Australia experienced a relatively high amount of rainfall. The national average was 596 millimeters (23 inches) — 28% above the 1961-1990 average — making it the eighth-wettest year since national records began in 1900, according to the government’s Bureau of Meteorology Annual Climate Statement 2024. Several regions experienced above average rainfall, including the Northern Territory — the federal territory in which the wildlife sanctuary is located — which recorded its fourth-wettest year since 1900.

The Newhaven Wildlife Sanctuary, in particular, experienced a significant rainfall event in 2024, with 316 mm (12 inches) falling in March alone, and 637 mm (25 inches) recorded in total for the year, according to a study published in the journal Pacific Conservation Biology authored by Henderson that documents the impacts on the local ecosystem and the falcon sighting.

This rainfall was "the most we've had in a year since 2001, and the 5th wettest year on record," Henderson said in the statement. "This filled the wetlands and created temporary water sources that were able to support large congregations of prey species, resulting in high raptor diversity including the Falcon, the Goshawk and more."

The peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) is widely considered the world's fastest airborne animal, with speeds reaching more than 199 mph (320 km/h) during dives. It is found worldwide, except in Antarctica, and is capable of traveling long distances, sometimes migrating between continents. The Siberian subspecies tends to travel south following the Northern Hemisphere summer, but these birds are considered "rare migrants or vagrants" to Australia, Henderson told Live Science in an email.

"The Siberian subspecies will sometimes turn up along the coastlines of northern and eastern Australia and will usually generate some buzz within local birding communities," he said.

Up to a dozen sightings may be reported in Australia per year across social media, online bird observation databases and other platforms, according to Henderson.

"They are detected even less frequently the further inland you go," he said. However, this could be because coastal areas are more populous, so more bird-watchers are likely to spot one, he added.The latest sighting represents the farthest inland the Siberian subspecies has been documented in Australia to date, according to Henderson.

Given the high speeds that peregrine falcons are capable of reaching — they are sometimes referred to as the world's fastest animal — the ecologist was surprised to capture the bird on camera.

"I'm honestly amazed that the image didn't come out blurry," Henderson said in the statement. "The bird was moving far too quickly to identify in the field, but it looked different to the usual peregrine falcons we see in Australia and I've made a habit of snapping photos to review later. Especially with peregrines, there's always that chance a rare subspecies might appear — as was the case here!"

People who hunt for honey in Mozambique use distinct dialects when communicating with birds to find bees, and the coordination benefits both species, new research shows.

The interaction is one of the few known examples of human-wildlife cooperation, researchers reported in a study published in the journal People and Nature.

Greater honeyguides (Indicator indicator) are small, brown birds found throughout southern Africa. They get their name because they lead people to honeybees' nests:

The human hunter summons the bird with a call, and the bird responds with a signal of its own and guides the hunter to the honey.

The relationship works for both species. Humans discover the honey nest, subdue the bees with fire, and break their nest open to access the honey. Meanwhile, the birds eat the leftover wax and larvae — and do not get stung to death by the bees.

"There is active coordination to mutually benefit humans and a wild animal," lead author Jessica van der Wal, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, told Live Science.

Honey hunters in different parts of Africa have distinct ways of communicating with honeyguides, and van der Wal and colleagues wanted to find out whether their signals also varied within the same area.

The international team recorded calls from 131 honey hunters across 13 villages in northern Mozambique's Niassa Special Reserve, where the Yao people depend on wild honey and honeyguides for their livelihoods.

They found that the hunters' trills, grunts, whoops and whistles varied with distance between the villages, irrespective of the habitat. Interestingly, honey hunters who moved into a village adopted the local dialect.

It's "like a different pronunciation," van der Wal. "There is one language that they use with the birds, but there are different dialects."

The study highlights how cultural we are as a species, van der Wal said. "There are a lot of animals that have culture, but humans are really driven by culture, even in the way that we communicate with wild, untrained animals," she added.

Diego Gil, a behavioral ecologist at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Spain who was not involved in the research, told Live Science he was surprised that the calls did not vary among habitats.

"From a human perspective, it is interesting that human immigrants to a new community learn the way that humans of that community interact with the local birds," he said.

The birds may also be reinforcing the local dialects, said Philipp Heeb, a senior researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research who was not involved in the study.

"Once honeyguides learn to respond preferentially to local signals, reciprocally this preference should reinforce local consistency in human signals," he said.

The two species have likely been cooperating for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and by discriminating against unfamiliar honey-hunter calls, the birds could reinforce regional dialects and limit how much they can drift, he said. "The 'selection' pressure exerted by honeyguides might help explain the stability of the mosaic of dialects in human populations."

Honeyguides do not learn the behavior from their parents, van der Wal said. They are brood parasites, which means that they lay their eggs in other birds' nests.

"We think that honeyguides learn from other honeyguides interacting with humans," she said, and her group is investigating whether humans and birds are influencing each other's culture.

Van der wal plans to expand upon this research. She currently leads the Pan-African Honeyguide Research Network, which is documenting honeyguide behavior in different countries.

"We're currently combining all the data and expanding into new places," she said. "There's so much variation in the human culture, not only in the signals or the calls being used, but in their practices and interactions with honeyguides."

A critically endangered, flightless parrot species is breeding for the first time in four years in New Zealand, officials announced Jan. 6.

Kākāpō (Strigops habroptilus) are large, flightless, nocturnal parrots with mottled green and yellow plumage that only breed every two to four years. Their breeding seasons are triggered by the mass fruiting of the rimu tree (Dacrydium cupressinum), a native conifer that can live for more than 600 years.

"It's always exciting when the breeding season officially begins, but this year it feels especially long-awaited after such a big gap since the last season in 2022," Deidre Vercoe, operations manager for kākāpō recovery at New Zealand's Department of Conservation, said in a statement.

The birds became critically endangered by the mid-1900s due to human expansion across New Zealand. Intensive management has raised kākāpō numbers from just 51 individuals over the last 30 years, but only 236 kākāpōs remain in the wild today, including 83 breeding females. All of them wear backpack radio transmitters to monitor their location and activities. Most kākāpō females raise one chick each breeding season.

The 2026 breeding season could produce the most chicks since records began 30 years ago, according to the statement. But the kākāpō recovery program is focusing on ensuring the birds can sustain themselves — not just the number of chicks they produce.

"Kākāpō are still critically endangered, so we'll keep working hard to increase numbers, but looking ahead, chick numbers are not our only measure of success," Vercoe said. "We want to create healthy, self-sustaining populations of kākāpō that are thriving, not just surviving. This means with each successful breeding season, we're aiming to reduce the level of intensive, hands-on management to return to a more natural state."

In previous years, being hand-raised by humans has led some kākāpō to imprint on people rather than other members of their own species. One, named Sirocco, made headlines when he attempted to mate with the head of a zoologist filming a documentary on the birds in 2009. That prompted creative rangers to develop a latex "kākāpō ejaculation helmet," Stuff reported in 2018.

This season, to reduce interference, the team plans to leave more eggs to hatch in kākāpō nests rather than in incubators, and limit how much they interact with the nests that hold more than one chick.

During the breeding season, male kākāpō come together to build networks of paths and depressions that amplify their booming mating calls. Each night, for weeks or months, their calls attract females to this communal area, called a lek. After mating, the female kākāpō incubates the eggs and raises the chicks alone.

Officials expect the first chicks of the season to hatch around mid-February.

Bird quiz: How much do you know about our feathered friends?

One of the closest living relatives of the dodo has been spotted multiple times in Samoa — raising hopes that this critically endangered creature can be saved from the brink of extinction.

The Samoa Conservation Society's (SCS) latest field survey, which took place from Oct. 17-Nov. 13, reported five sightings of the manumea (Didunculus strigirostris). Previous surveys only yielded a single sighting, if any. The last photograph of the cryptic species in the wild was taken in 2013.

In the early 1990s, there were around 7,000 of these dodo-like birds, which are only found in Samoa. But habitat destruction, hunting and invasive species decimated the population to an estimated 50 to 150 as of 2024. Before setting out, team members were concerned they wouldn't find the bird alive, potentially signalling its impending extinction.

"That was our worry," said Moeumu Uili, a project coordinator focusing on manumea with SCS. "What happens if we can't find the bird? Does that mean the manumea is no more?"

Despite confirming the manumea's existence, the team found it difficult to photograph due to their distance from the bird, its quick movement and rainy conditions. "All of a sudden, it appears out of nowhere," Uili told Live Science. "When we see it through the binoculars, we can see the bird."

But by the time researchers lower their binoculars to get a camera, the bird is gone, she said.

Last of its kind

The manumea is the only living species of its Didunculus genus, which will end if the bird goes extinct. The chicken-size manumea's scientific name, Didunculus strigirostris, means "little dodo." Both the dodo and manumea are classified as island ground pigeons.

The dodo went extinct due to habitat loss, hunting and predators — the same threats to the manumea's survival. Hunting has been outlawed and subject to fines, so it's imperative to focus on the current main threat — invasive species, particularly feral cats and rats, experts said. Cats hunt living birds and chicks, while rats eat the eggs and chicks.

"The impact on manumea is certainly catastrophic," Joe Wood, the manager of International Conservation Programs at the Toledo Zoo, told Live Science. "It seems very likely that feral cats are a major cause of decline," said Wood, who also co-chairs a group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature that works on manumea conservation efforts. "There has to be some kind of control program."

Saving manumea

In this fall's latest survey, Uili's team focused on the remote coastal rainforest of Uafato, but manumea potentially live in six additional forests in Samoa. A current invasive species management program already exists in one of those forests, Samoa's Malololelei Recreation Reserve, Uili said. If there's funding, SCS wants to expand the invasive species management to areas like Uafato.

If a manumea is secured, the partners working to save it said they can use biobanking to preserve biological samples to establish cultured cell lines for the bird. These cell lines will allow them to study the manumea's genetic material and learn more about it. With more information, they can determine the best measures to take, such as potential captive breeding, to repopulate the species, experts said.

The nonprofit conservation arm of Colossal Biosciences is also supporting some manumea conservation efforts, for instance, by building an app to distinguish the manumea's call from another bird's in hopes of getting a more accurate estimate of the manumea's prevalence.

Colossal has said they have plans to bring dodos back from extinction. It recently made headlines for "de-extincting" dire wolves — essentially gene editing gray wolves to include a handful of traits that make them look more like dire wolves.

But there's a need to be wary of efforts to bring extinct species back into ecosystems that have changed since they were alive, Nic Rawlence, an associate professor and director of the Otago Palaeogenetics Laboratory in the Department of Zoology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, told Live Science.

Rawlence also said you must bring back enough species to ensure genetic diversity so they can adapt and survive, which is known as the 500-rule in conservation.

To save the manumea, Rawlence echoed Wood and stressed it's crucial to stop invasive species and other threats to the manumea's survival without many left.

"I think it's still going to come down to the grunt work of predator control, habitat restoration, translocation," he said.

Manumea conservation work in Samoa is supported by SCS, the Samoa Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, BirdLife International, the Colossal Foundation, the Toledo Zoo, and the Waddesdon Foundation through the Zoological Society of London.

Editor's Note: This story was produced in partnership with the Fellowship in Journalism and Health Impact through the University of Toronto Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

Vultures are often portrayed as an ominous sign of imminent death, circling high above as they wait for an injured individual below to die. But in reality, that's not the case, experts say.

"I've never heard of an actual instance of them circling a dying human. There probably aren't that many dying humans out there to get anyway," said Chris McClure at The Peregrine Fund, who leads the Global Raptor Impact Network (GRIN), a tool to gather data on birds of prey.

Instead, "vultures are soaring animals and so they ride what are called thermals," he told Live Science.

These thermals are columns of rising air caused by the sun unevenly heating Earth's surface. Warmer air is less dense than cooler air, so above heated ground, pockets of air become lighter and rise, creating an updraft.

Typically, the thermals are tornado shaped: They are small and weak near the ground, forcing vultures to turn in small circles when low down, but as the air gets warmer higher up, the thermals get larger, and the birds move in larger circles, a 2017 study revealed.

Vultures, and other raptors like eagles, buzzards and kites, use these thermals as invisible elevators to gain altitude, and then as highways to travel around while expending little energy. The birds can either stay circling the same thermal, or use some extra energy to flap off in search of another free ride.

So most of the time when you see a vulture circling, it is just staying up there where the thermals are best, saving energy and looking for carrion, or a dead animal, to eat, McClure said, or perhaps sniffing it out — some species, such as turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) have an excellent sense of smell and pick up the scent of a chemical called ethyl mercaptan released as a dead body decays to find carrion in dense forests without seeing visual cues.

Once the birds have located potential food, they may circle to check that the animal is indeed dead and whether any large carnivores have already opened up the carcass — which makes it easier for a vulture to eat — and that the coast is now clear so the birds can safely descend.

The biggest misconception about vultures, however, is that they spread disease, said McClure. The birds eat dead and decaying animal carcasses including roadkill, but they are preventing disease rather than spreading it. "We call them nature's cleanup crew," he said.

This is because vulture stomachs contain a mix of strong acid and lethal bacteria, and if they feed on an animal carcass infected with anthrax, rabies, salmonella or cholera, for example, the pathogens are killed off in their stomachs and can no longer spread.

"Vultures are incredibly important for ecosystems," McClure said. "They eat carrion, and they eat lots of it."

One key example of this was when the number of Indian vultures declined precipitously, McClure said. The birds were once ubiquitous there, but more than two decades ago, they began dying because of the use of diclofenac, a non-steroidal painkiller for cattle.

Vultures that fed on carcasses of animals treated with the drug got kidney failure and died. By the mid-1990s, the vulture population had plummeted to near-zero. This meant bacteria and infections, including rabies, spread from infected carcasses that the vultures would otherwise have eaten, leading to the deaths of about half a million people between 2000 and 2005.

Tracking vultures with GPS units also provides people with another benefit, McClure said, by helping identify where poaching is happening. "There are maybe thousands of vultures out there with GPS units on them, transmitting their whereabouts. A really cool thing we are doing in Africa is using GPS-tagged vultures to catch poachers," he said. This is because vultures find carcasses before the authorities do and congregate around it. If there are a lot of vultures, it means there's a big carcass, so it might be poaching, he said.

Three million years ago, an extinct relative of todays's great penguins — emperors and kings — lived in Aotearoa New Zealand.

We know this because our new study describes a spectacular fossilized skull of a great penguin found on the Taranaki coast.

Overall, it is 31% longer than the skull of an emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri), which can be more than a meter tall and weigh upwards of 35 kilograms.

Compared to emperor penguins, however, the Taranaki great penguin had a much stronger and longer beak. It probably looked more like a king penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus), only much bigger.

At the time, the world was warmer than today. But when the climate cooled, this penguin vanished.

We argue the cold wasn't to blame because crested and little penguins in New Zealand weathered the same change and remained. Great penguins shifted south and today live in the frozen wastes of Antarctica. So what drove their ancient relative to extinction?

The sediments that now form beach-side cliffs in South Taranaki were deposited at a time when global temperatures were about 3°C above those of the pre-industrial era. Fossils from this period are transforming our understanding of how biodiversity might respond to rising temperatures.

For example, Aotearoa was home to box fish and monk seals, both of which are still (sub)tropical species today. In a strange contradiction, they coexisted with great penguins — now only found in much colder climates — in ancient New Zealand.

The northernmost breeding colonies of king penguins today are around latitude 46.1°S in the subantarctic Crozet Islands, where seawater temperatures reach 3-10°C. From there, it only gets colder towards the higher latitudes where emperor penguins live.

Three million years ago, Aotearoa's great penguins extended as far north as 40.5°S, where South Taranaki was located then. They foraged in waters that were 20°C, much warmer than their relatives experience today.

This balmy existence ended with the Pleistocene ice ages around 2.58 million years ago. Ice extent and sea level shifted back and forward as temperatures fluctuated and ultimately ratcheted downwards. But why would such cooling eradicate giant penguins, which thrive under polar conditions today, from New Zealand?

Giant aerial predators

Fossil evidence for giant penguins in Aotearoa is limited and the exact reasons for their demise remain unclear. Even so, their sheer presence suggests they were less constrained by sea surface temperatures than previously thought. Another mechanism must be at play.

Up until about 500 years ago, Aotearoa was the hunting ground of the giant Haast's eagle and the huge Forbes' harrier. These were big raptors. They included large birds like moa in their diet. Their ancestors arrived from Australia inside the last three million years.

Based on what we see with living great penguins, the Taranaki great penguin almost certainly formed large exposed colonies along the coast. These could have been easy targets for a giant eagle or harrier hunting from the air.

By contrast, the smaller penguins still found in Aotearoa today have more cryptic breeding behavior. They nest in burrows, natural crevices and dense vegetation, and tend to cross beaches at night, which may have helped them avoid aerial predators.

Predation on land is just one hypothesis, though, to help explain why these penguins became extinct in the region while others survived. Other possibilities include changes in the marine environment.

We know that reduced food availability can be devastating for penguins, but it is challenging to see why this would single out the great penguins.

Importantly, our study provides new insight into the habitat tolerances of great penguins. Both king and emperor penguins today can withstand temperatures up to 20°C higher than those they usually forage in.

Three million years ago, their relative experienced such warmth. As the world continues to warm, we need to remember that the geographic range of a species can change as circumstances change.

The marine ecosystem of Aotearoa will move into the habitable zone of many new species, making investigations of the last warm period more important than ever before.

We would like to acknowledge our research co-author Dan Ksepka from The Bruce Museum, Kerr Sharpe-Young for discovering the fossil, and Ngāti Ruanui and Ngāruahine for supporting the collection and research of fossils from their rohe.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For the first time, scientists have observed the wild hybrid offspring of a blue jay and a green jay during a study near San Antonio, Texas.

The hybrid bird is the product of two species whose habitat ranges began to overlap a few decades ago, according to a study published Sept. 10 in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

"We think it's the first observed vertebrate that's hybridized as a result of two species both expanding their ranges due, at least in part, to climate change," study co-author Brian Stokes, an ecologist at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), said in a statement.

Blue jays (Cyanocitta cristata) and green jays (Cyanocorax yncas) are both types of corvids, a family of birds that also includes crows and ravens. Despite their similar names, blue jays and green jays aren't very closely related. They don't share a genus, and their lineages split about 7 million years ago.

Green jays have historically lived in warm, tropical areas of Mexico, Central America and southern Texas, while blue jays can be found across much of the eastern U.S. as far west as Houston. Over the last several decades, warming temperatures have enabled green jays to expand their range farther north, while both climate change and human developments have pushed blue jays farther west. The two species now coexist in part of Texas near San Antonio.

Stokes, who studies green jays at UT Austin, found the hybrid jay through social media in 2023. A birder from the San Antonio area had posted a photo of the unusual bird from her backyard, and she invited Stokes to her house to observe the bird more closely over two days.

"The first day, we tried to catch it, but it was really uncooperative," Stokes said. "But the second day, we got lucky."

Stokes managed to catch the jay in a mist net — a thin mesh suspended between two poles that's hard for birds to see. The bird had blue plumage but similar facial markings to green jays, and it could produce calls of both species. Stokes took a blood sample from the bird and placed a band on its leg to help identify it in the future, then released it back into the wild.

A genetic analysis of the blood sample showed that the bird was probably the offspring of a female green jay and a male blue jay. The hybrid bird is the first known crossing of these two species in the wild, but in the 1970s, scientists bred a green jay and a blue jay in captivity. The wild hybrid's appearance is similar to the taxidermied captive-bred bird, which is now part of the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History's collections.

Despite this being the first reported sighting of a hybrid of the two species, the jay was at least a year old when Stokes tagged it. Over the next two years, no one else reported spotting the jay, but it returned to the same San Antonio-area backyard in June 2025.

If there are other hybrid jays, they might be difficult to detect — outside of San Antonio, few people live in the region where the two species overlap, so the odds of someone spotting a hybrid are low.

"Hybridization is probably way more common in the natural world than researchers know about because there's just so much inability to report these things happening," Stokes said.

Ostriches, emus, rheas and other large, flightless birds are found on six landmasses separated by oceans, but how they reached such far-apart places without the ability to fly has remained an enduring mystery.

One idea was that the ancestors of this group of birds, known as paleognaths, just walked to those locations when most of the planet was harnessed together as the supercontinent Pangaea (320 million to 195 million years ago) and that, when this giant landmass split up, the birds were already in those locations.

The trouble is, the timing for that hypothesis is wrong. Pangaea had broken up by about 195 million years ago, creating the continents we know today. However, genetic studies have indicated that the last common ancestor of these paleognaths lived about 79.6 million years ago and that they divided into the main lineages we know today between about 70 million and 62 million years ago.

To work out what happened, Klara Widrig, a vertebrate zoologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and her colleagues analyzed a specimen of the ancient paleognath Lithornis promiscuous. Although it lived around 59 to 56 million years ago, it is the oldest fossil palaeognath found in such pristine condition.

"We can't tell for sure if Lithornis was the direct ancestor of our living paleognaths — it is entirely possible that the true ancestor is yet to be discovered — but it represents our best guess as to what the ancestor would have looked like," Widrig told Live Science.

Previous investigation of preserved feathers of a slightly more distantly related lithornithid called Calciavis grandei indicated that it could have flown, but it wasn't clear how far. No one had done a quantitative analysis of the shape of lithornithid bones to try to answer that question.

Related: Do ostriches really bury their heads in the sand?

So, in the new study, published Wednesday (Sept. 17) in the journal Biology Letters, Widrig and her colleagues compared the shape of the sternum, or breastbone, of L. promiscuous to those of living birds and used a three-dimensional geometric dataset to work out how well the animal could have flown.

"The sternum is very important for flight because that's where the big pectoral flight muscles anchor," Widrig said.

The shape of the sternum indicated it could have handled a range of aerobic, flapping flight styles, which would have enabled lengthy flights.

"We found that the shape of the breastbone was really similar to that of living birds that are capable of flying very long distances across oceans, like great egrets and herons," Widrig said.

"This is very interesting because the great egret is a cosmopolitan species in that it travels from continent to continent," said Peter Hosner, curator of birds at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, who wasn't involved in the work.

"Such species are actually quite rare in birds," he told Live Science. "We get biased in the Northern Hemisphere, where many birds are migratory and cover long distances. But globally, most birds are residents found in one continent, island or small area, and don't really move that much."

The finding suggests that ancient paleognaths may have flown to the distant landmasses and established populations that later independently evolved into the large and generally flightless birds we know today.

"It seems to be a spectacular case of convergent evolution," Hosner said.

Today, there are about 60 species of living paleognaths. They include about 45 species of tinamou (which can fly in short bursts much like pheasants do), up to five species of kiwi, one species of emu, three species of cassowary, two species of ostrich, and either one or two species of rhea, Widrig said.

"In order for a bird to become flightless, two conditions have to be met," she said. "It has to be able to get all of its food on the ground, so it can't be relying on food that's up in trees, for example. And there can't be any predators that it would need flight to escape from."

In more recent times, that would have happened only in predatorless island environments, Widrig said, such as with the dodo (Raphus cucullatus). But after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event some 66 million years ago wiped out the nonavian dinosaurs, it was very different.

"The world was cleared of predators generally, and mammalian predators had not evolved yet — so any ground-feeding bird had a free pass essentially to become flightless," Widrig said. "Flight is hard work, and it's a lot easier to be flightless if you don't have to get away from anything.

When bigger predators did emerge, she said, the flightless birds would have had time to adapt either by becoming big and intimidating, like the cassowary, or by becoming swift runners, like the ostrich.

But all these similar changes evolved independently. "It's not as if they got on a conference call with each other and said, 'Okay, you go to Africa and you're going to evolve into an ostrich. I'm gonna go to South America. I'm gonna evolve into a rhea,'" Widrig said.

Whether you're a keen birder or just starting out, using one of the best bird identification apps can enhance your birdspotting experiences. Bird identification apps can help you learn and distinguish between the different species, much the same as a traditional field guide book, but can interactively provide suggestions through submitted images or audio recordings.

Our expert, Alli Smith, Merlin Project Manager, highlights how useful bird identification apps can be: "Field guide apps are so helpful for learning about what birds can be found in specific places at specific times of the year. There are 11,000+ species of birds in the world, and they all have their own distributions and migratory patterns, if they migrate. Having a quick reference guide with range maps for each species can really help you narrow down what you might be seeing."

While you can spot birds with the naked eye, a bird identification app like one of the options listed here can enhance your experience. Similarly, so can a pair of birdwatching binoculars, or a monocular for spotting distant species.

Additionally, you may be seeking something to help you with both bird-watching and astronomy; in that instance, we'd encourage you to look at our general best binoculars page with many more options fully reviewed and tested by our experts.

We've put together this guide, outlining the differences and similarities between the various bird identification apps out there. This list isn't exhaustive but these are our top picks.

The quick list

Here's an overview of the best bird identification apps. We give you some details here but, if one grabs your eye, you can find more detailed information further down the page.

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The best bird identification apps we recommend in 2025

Best overall

Designed and developed by Cornell University, the Merlin Bird ID app is a thorough and expert app to help you identify over 10,000 species of birds worldwide. Lots of thought has gone into the design and features within this app — you can identify birds via sounds, images or even through description. The description identification process is so simple, with the app only asking three simple questions before presenting you with a list of options to help you identify the bird you've spotted. It's super easy to use when you're out on a walk, just hit the 'Sound ID' button to capture the bird sounds. Within seconds, the app suggests possible matches, with it being able to identify multiple birds through one recording. It is capable of picking up bird sounds from far away, even through your phone speaker. However, using a parabolic microphone can enhance the app's ability to pick up further afield bird sounds.

Once the app has identified your bird, you can either cancel the recording or save it. If you opt to save it, the recording, along with your location, will be stored. This is a handy feature for bird enthusiasts who may want to locate the same bird species again and can't quite remember where they heard it. The app stores all the information for you. Not only this, but for serious birders, you can save your birds to your life list which allows you to log the birds you've seen or heard. The photo ID function works just as well, allowing you to upload a picture from your phone (if you're able to snap one before the bird flies away).

Merlin Bird ID is an AI-suggestion tool that appears to be pretty accurate most of the time — the only time it gets confused is when a bird mimics another sound or another bird. This can lead to incorrect matches. As it is an AI-suggestion tool, every sound you record or photo you upload helps the tool to learn. This means the knowledge gained from this app is a community effort, allowing data to be collected to understand bird numbers in specific regions.

This app has extra features, including 'bird of the day' where information is supplied on a particular bird that is likely to be seen or heard within your local area. There are also maps to show the distribution of birds and when they are most likely to be in those areas. But perhaps one of its biggest and best features is its ability to link with the Swarovski Optik AX Visio 10x32 smart binoculars. These binoculars use Merlin Bird ID's database to identify birds when you view them through the binoculars, so birders can identify bird in real-time. This is clever and one of the first times this has been done.

Available on both Apple and Google Play.

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Best for learning

Smart Bird ID is an app built by a birdwatcher, meaning it has everything a keen twitcher will need. With this app, you use your phone's camera and microphone to capture the bird's call or an image of the bird. You can also capture a video of the bird for the app to then identify — this isn't something offered on all bird identification apps and is a well-thought-out additional feature. This app also has a journal you can add your own observation notes to. Not only this, but you can also link the photos or sounds you've captured of the bird to this journal. This allows you to keep a thorough record of your bird spotting experiences.

One of the best things about this app is its ability to educate you about birds beyond the experiences you have when out birdspotting. You can share your identified birds with others, listen to bird calls and see images and videos of other birds to improve your knowledge as well as take quizzes to improve your identification skills. While it's good to identify a bird call while out for a walk, it can be hard to learn these calls and remember which bird it was without the help of extra learning materials such as quizzes. This is a great bonus of this app.

As with most bird identification apps, it works offline so you can ID birds wherever you are. However, this app does cost money to install. The free version has ads whereas there is an option to remove ads for a small fee of $2.99. After this, there are upgrades you can purchase to be able to use more features on the app so do bear this in mind.

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Best for conscientious birders

Chirpomatic is a great beginner's app for bird identification. Unlike the other apps, it can only identify birds via audio. However, this makes it easy for beginners to press the button, record the sound and learn that specific call and bird species — there is no faff. Plus, once a bird has been identified, you get a picture of the bird to then also learn what it looks like. Further information on the bird is also provided allowing you to learn a little about that species, too. The app is so simple to use, making it beginner-friendly.

The best feature of this app is its consideration of the human impact on natural environments. While other apps play back the recording quite loudly (depending on your phone volume, of course), Chirpomatic has a bird-safe mode. When using this bird-safe mode, the app won't allow playback to happen unless the device is against an ear. There is also a night-time mode which stops light from disturbing the birds you may be listening to. While the bird-safe mode can be switched on and off by the user, the night-time mode is automatic. We think this is a great additional feature that makes this app perfect for those who are very conscious of the natural world around them and want to have as minimal an impact on it as possible.

While you can download and install this app for free, there is a pro version which gives the user a few more features and is ideal for those interested in getting more from their bird identification app. With the pro version, you can organize, rename and export your recordings. When you export the recordings, they will save to your phone so you can see where and when you took the recording. This means you can revisit the same spot to find the same bird if you're keen to monitor a bird species within your area. You can also share these recordings with your friends and fellow birders. There is an extensive reference section available to pro users where you can access images, descriptions, bird calls and song descriptions to enhance in your birding knowledge. Finally, the pro version offers bird quizzes for you to test your knowledge. You can choose which birds you want to be tested on or move through the built-in levels. This is a fun addition.

While Chirpomatic is a great option, it does only identify around 100 bird species and only within North America so for those outside of that area, another app within this guide may be more suitable.

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Best for beginners

As with the previous apps discussed, Picture Bird uses sound and image to help you identify birds. It uses machine deep learning technology aka AI to identify birds through the images or sounds you capture. When you submit a sound or image to the app, it compares it to training sets of millions of photos and sounds in the database to give you an exact match. Along with the identity of the bird, you also get further information including their feeding habits and habitat amongst many more things. These simple yet effective functions make it an appropriate app for beginners — there is plenty of information without feeling overwhelming or complicated to use.

The app boasts a collection function allowing you to store the images or sounds you've captured of the observed birds. This collection function makes it easy to find your IDs and you can even share these with friends via bird cards.

Picture Bird can successfully ID over 1000 species of birds worldwide. While this isn't as high as some of the other apps, such as Merlin Bird ID, this is more than sufficient for beginner birdwatchers who want to learn the most common birds in their local area. For those with more experience, and who may be keen to see less common birds, this app will not suffice.

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Best for North America

Unlike the other apps in this guide, Audubon focuses on users offering descriptions of the birds they spot to get an ID. While it is arguably easier to capture a bird call or photo and have an app ID the bird from there, the Audubon app encourages users to actively engage with nature, which isn't a bad thing. By having to offer descriptions of the bird you wish to identify, users have to pay attention to what is going on around them. This is a great experience for novices to experienced birdwatchers to get closer to nature. Furthermore, the app narrows down the options of possible matches using your location and real-time — this is quite impressive. This means you won't get a bird suggested to you that isn't likely to be in your area at that specific time.

The Audubon app only covers bird species found in North America, being able to ID an impressive 800 bird species. While this is a good number, it would improve the app if it could identify more birds but we won't grumble too much. Regardless, this app is a great option for those in North America looking for a location-specific bird ID app. Using this app can help you engage with the birds that come and go from your own yard as well as to monitor how often you see them and when. This can be a wonderful experience in building your connection to your local nature.

The Sightings feature allows you to capture all your birdspotting experiences in one place. You can record every bird you observe, providing you with a life list of birds you've spotted. The app is also clever in that if you want to visit a location with lots of birds, this app can help you identify birding hotspots and real-time sightings. This means that you don't have to wait for the birds to come to you — you can go and find them.

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Best for citizen science

If you're a keen citizen scientist, you'll love this bird identification app. BirdNET was developed as part of a research project to help AI learn how to detect and classify bird sounds. Their aim in developing this platform is to support conservation efforts by assisting experts and citizen scientists in their monitoring of bird species. The developers themselves call BirdNET "a citizen science platform". As with many of the other bird identification apps, you simply press record to capture the bird sound and stop the recording when you're ready. The app can then identify what calls it heard. However, with BirdNET, when you pick up multiple sounds during a recording, you can select portions of the recording to identify the individual bird calls. With some of the other apps, the birds that have been identified pop up during the recording, and for this reason, are more beginner-friendly. BirdNET is a little different in that it uses your brain more to decipher the individual calls you've heard and allows you to analyse these independently. For this reason, it's better suited for experienced birders rather than novices.

Once you've selected the portion of the recording you're interested in, you press 'analyze' and the app uses your time and location (from your phone's GPS) as well as comparing to a database of bird sounds to identify which bird it is likely to be. It does all of this within seconds which is very impressive. It also gives you a confidence rating which shows how confident the app is that it's that bird it's heard. This is a really useful extra step that experienced birders will appreciate if they're looking for certainty to improve their knowledge.

For birders to gain even more knowledge about the bird they've heard, you simply click the blue arrow that appears next to the identified bird and it takes you to three different webpage options which provide a wealth of information about the bird, including recordings for you to compare what you heard against what the bird sounds like so you can be sure it's a match.

By using BirdNET, you are helping to aid conservation efforts as the more developed the app becomes, the better idea citizen scientists and experts will have about what birds are in which location and when. This can help aid conversation efforts and help protect their habitat. We think that's a win-win.

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Best bird identification apps: comparison

Our expert

Best bird identification apps: Frequently asked questions

How to choose the best bird identification app for you

Our expert, Alli Smith, Merlin Project Manager, gives some advice on how to choose the best bird identification app, "If you’re looking for a field guide app to replace your paper field guide books, I’d think about whether you prefer photos or illustrations. Some apps, like Merlin, use photos in their guide. Seeing a real bird in different postures can be useful — it’s an honest look at what you might actually see in the field. But, a downside is that no photo can fully capture every field mark perfectly. There might be a branch obscuring part of the bird or maybe it’s standing in water and you can’t see the color of its legs. For that reason, some people prefer illustrations.

A huge advantage of illustrated guides is that the artist can intentionally include every field mark in the illustrations, so you might get a more complete idea of what the bird looks like. Some very beloved paper bird guides, like the Sibley Guide to Birds or the Collins Bird Guide, have app versions that include all the illustrations and information from the book."

When it comes to apps that use AI to help identify birds, Alli Smith suggests looking at reputable apps, "If you’re considering apps that use AI to identify birds, I’d recommend looking at who publishes the app and how it was developed. AI models are only as good as their training data. If the app is produced by a scientific institution or a conservation organization, you can expect it to be reasonably accurate."

The first thing that you'll notice about kākāpō — a type of large, flightless parrot found only in New Zealand — is how rotund they are.

They have endearingly round heads and bodies, owl-like faces and sturdy legs, and they are the biggest of all modern parrots; males measure up to 25 inches (64 centimeters) long and can weigh nearly 9 pounds (4 kilograms). Kākāpō are also one of the longest-lived birds in the world, estimated to reach 90 years.

The name "kākāpō" means "night parrot" in the Māori language, a reference to the birds' nocturnal habits. Though kākāpō cannot fly, they can walk for long distances and are agile climbers, clambering and leaping from trees using their shortened wings for balance.

When they sense danger, kākāpō freeze in place, and their mottled emerald-green plumage renders the birds nearly invisible against the leafy forest backdrop. The feathers of the male kākāpō have a distinctive odor that scientists have described as "sweet and vegetative," and this powerful scent may play a role in males' mating success.

Mating in kākāpō is also unique, as they are the only parrot species to exhibit a behavior called lekking. Males create a stage of sorts, shaping a shallow bowl-shaped depression in the ground. They then crouch in their bowl and call for females using two different sounds: a series of low-frequency "booms" that sound like a tuba, punctuated by a high-pitched "ching." Males may boom and ching for eight hours at a stretch, continuing nightly for two or three months.

However, in the absence of female attention some males have been known to direct their affections elsewhere. In 1990, author Douglas Adams wrote about an unusual encounter with an amorous kākāpō, describing it in his book "Last Chance to See" (Penguin Random House, 1992). The incident took place while Adams was recording a segment for a BBC radio programme about endangered species.

"When one of the rangers who was working in an area where kākāpōs were booming happened to leave his hat on the ground," Adams wrote, "he came back later to find a kākāpō attempting to ravish it."

Scientists who work with kākāpōs even built a rubber "ejaculation helmet" to accommodate a kākāpō named Sirocco, who was notorious for trying to mate with people's heads. The helmet had a dimpled surface, suitable for collecting sperm for use in artificial insemination.

The birds breed once every two to four years, when local rimu trees produce an abundant crop of berries. These fruits are rich in calcium and vitamin D, essential nutrients for egg laying and for nourishing growing chicks.

Kākāpō thrived for tens of millions of years across New Zealand, where they had no natural predators. But with the arrival of Polynesian people around 700 years ago, the birds' numbers began to drop. Their decline accelerated when Europeans colonized New Zealand in the early 1800s. Deforestation and the introduction of mammalian predators, such as rats, cats and stoats, brought kākāpō to the brink of extinction, and by the 1900s, they had all but vanished.

But in the 1970s, conservationists discovered a breeding population of about 200 birds. For decades they worked to protect kākāpō and secure their future, moving them to the three islands where they live today (and where all invasive carnivores have since been eradicated). Currently there are about 242 kākāpō in the wild, and they are recognized as critically endangered with a high risk of extinction.

Japanese quail are small relatives of chickens and turkeys with one very unusual trait — males produce a unique seminal foam that resembles meringue.

The foam is unusual among birds but turkeys produce a similar substance.

Japanese quails were bred in captivity as early as the 11th century and were initially kept for their melodic songs. But they were later exploited for their meat and eggs.

The tiny birds, which weigh between 3.5 and 10.5 ounces (100 and 300 grams), reach sexual maturity by around 6 weeks and females are prolific egg layers, producing between 250 and 300 per year. Because of this, they're also very popular for scientific research. And in 1990, they became the first birds to be incubated and hatched in space.

Scientists first noticed Japanese quails had unusual foamy semen in the 1950s, and it has been the subject of research ever since. Their unique seminal foam is produced during mating by the proctodeal gland in the cloaca — the cavity containing both the excretory and reproductive organs — and is thought to enhance the chances of successful fertilization of a female's egg.

The foam joins seminal fluid and the sperm itself upon ejaculation. Its bubbly consistency is created by contractions of the muscles in the cloaca that amplify the effects of gases released by microorganisms in the cavity.

The foam is believed to help sperm cells mature after they enter the female reproductive tract, where they are stored for 8 to 11 days before fertilization occurs. It may also enhance the motility of the sperm and protect it from bacteria.

After a successful insemination, males do a little strut.

Every year, billions of birds migrate in and out of the United States. And across the world, birds fly thousands of miles to reach their seasonal destinations. Some birds, like the Arctic tern (Sterna paradisaea), even rack up enough miles over their lifetime to fly to the moon and back.

But when birds embark on these epic journeys, how do they know where they're going?

Birds have an arsenal of senses they use to orient themselves — some we're familiar with, and some are still beyond human comprehension.

"We know that birds use a variety of cues to keep their migratory direction," Miriam Liedvogel, director of the Institute of Avian Research in Germany, told Live Science in an email.

Sight and smell are two basic cues that birds use to find their way. If birds have already migrated once, they'll likely remember familiar landmarks, such as rivers and mountain ranges. Birds that migrate over water, on the other hand, have fewer landmarks to guide them. In these circumstances, they might rely more on their sense of smell; one study found that when researchers blocked the nasal passageways of seabirds called Scopoli's shearwaters (Calonectris diomedea), they could still fly over land but became disoriented when flying over water.

Birds also can use the sun and stars as guides. To do this, birds that fly during the day use a "sun compass," which combines birds' view of where the sun is in the sky with their internal perception of what time of day it is based on their circadian rhythm. By integrating these two inputs, birds can determine the direction they're heading, like a living sundial. Research shows that disrupting a bird's circadian rhythm with artificial light prevents them from navigating accurately, showing the importance of the sun compass.

However, most birds actually migrate at night, meaning the position of the sun is of little use to them. In this case, birds rely on the position and rotation of the stars to find their way. They use this star compass by learning the position of the stars around the celestial pole, which is roughly marked by Polaris (the North Star) — the same star humans have used to navigate for millennia.

Related: Why don't all birds fly?

Magnetic fields

But what if the sky is cloudy, and birds can't see the sun, stars or any landmarks? That's when birds' more fantastic senses come into play. Birds can find their way even with no sun or stars, partly thanks to a sense called magnetoreception. This sense allows birds to perceive Earth's magnetic fields, which are generated by the rippling molten metals in our planet's core. This feat may sound like science fiction, but research shows that messing with magnetic fields has a big effect on birds; for example, one study found that altering the magnetic fields around pigeons disrupted their homing abilities.

While it's clear that birds are capable of magnetoreception, exactly how they do it is less certain. Peter Hore, a professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford, said birds must utilize some sort of chemical reaction whose outcome depends on the strength and direction of Earth's magnetic field. There are a couple of candidate theories for how this reaction happens, but Hore's bet is on a molecule called cryptochrome, which is present in birds' retinas.

Researchers have confirmed in the lab that isolated cryptochrome responds to magnetic fields and that this reaction requires blue light, which has also been shown to be necessary for bird magnetoreception. Still, researchers aren't exactly sure how cryptochrome is sensitive enough to pick up on tiny variations in Earth's magnetic field.

"We know so little about the details of how this compass might operate," Hore said. "I mean, we don't even know how many cryptochrome molecules there are in the birds' retinas."

Some research also points to a magnetoreception mechanism inside birds' beaks. Studies have found receptors that interact with magnetite, an iron-based mineral, in the upper portion of birds' beaks. These receptors connect to the brain via important nerve pathways, suggesting they could be another technique birds use to gauge the intensity of the magnetic field.

On top of magnetoreception, birds can gain information about their direction by detecting polarized light — a type of light in which the waves oscillate in a specific, aligned plane. Sunlight becomes polarized in predictable ways when light scatters through Earth's atmosphere. Using special cells in their retinas, birds can sense these patterns, which give them information about where the sun is in the sky, even when it's overcast.

Putting the pieces together

Just as we rely on our vision during the day but may use our hands to guide ourselves around a dimly lit room at night, birds employ different senses at different times.

"Birds likely integrate their compass cues to navigate — and we are pretty sure that different cues are of varying importance during their journey," Liedvogel said. Hore pointed this out as well; magnetoreception, for example, is less useful during thunderstorms or periods of high solar activity, both of which can disrupt Earth's magnetic fields, he said.

Ultimately, all of these strategies are underpinned by birds' genetic drive to migrate. Birds inherit the propensity to migrate from their parents, Liedvogel explained, and the distance and direction in which they fly are primarily based on genetics. Researchers like Liedvogel are still investigating exactly which genes are responsible and how they work.

Both scientists said understanding these systems will be essential to the future of bird conservation. Relocating or rewilding bird species has become a major focus of wildlife conservation efforts, but so far, outcomes have been mixed; one analysis found that in 45% of studies, the birds left their new location.

"Human efforts to relocate those birds have not been very successful," Hore said. "That's partly because they are such good navigators that if you displace them, they simply fly back."

Bird quiz: How much do you know about our feathered friends?

Name: Southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius)

Where it lives: Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and northeastern Australia

What it eats: Fruit, seeds, fungi, insects, snails, fish, frogs, small birds, small mammals and carrion

Why it's awesome: The southern cassowary is one of the most prehistoric-looking birds on Earth. They are often likened to a modern-day dinosaur due to their massive size, vivid colouration and powerful, raptor-like feet, earning them the title of the "world’s most dangerous birds."

Native to tropical rainforests, the southern cassowary is the heaviest flightless bird in Australia and the second-heaviest in the world, after the common ostrich (Struthio camelus). These birds can grow up to 5.6 feet (1.7 meters) tall and belong to the ratite group, which includes ostriches, emus and kiwis, according to the San Diego Zoo Fossil evidence and genetic studies suggest that cassowaries have existed in some form for tens of millions of years.

One of the cassowary's most prehistoric-looking features is its feet. Each foot has three toes, with the inner toe bearing a dagger-like claw that can grow up to 5 inches (12 centimeters) long. These claws aren't just for show; they're capable of delivering powerful, slashing kicks that can injure or even kill potential threats, including humans. Their legs are extremely muscular and adapted for quick, forceful movements, which helps them lash out at predators, such as crocodiles and pythons.

Cassowaries also have a striking and unusual appearance. Their heads and necks are bare and vividly colored in shades of blue and red, but their bodies are covered in coarse, black feathers that look more like hair than typical bird plumage. This coat provides protection from sharp thorns and branches as they move through dense vegetation.

The giant birds also have brightly-coloured pouches of flesh, called wattles, that dangle down from their necks. These are thought to help cassowaries relay social cues to others: For example, if they shake their heads and clap their wattles it may be a sign of territorial aggression.

They also have large, helmet-like structures called 'casques' on top of their heads. The exact function of the casque is still debated among biologists, but research suggests these structures act as "thermal windows," or radiators, allowing the bird to release excess heat in hot weather and conserve it in cooler conditions. It may also amplify and direct the birds' low-frequency calls, helping them communicate over long distances.

Unlike many animal species, male cassowaries are the primary caregivers for their offspring. They sit on their eggs for about 50 days and once the eggs have hatched, they tend to their chicks for around nine months.

Despite their fearsome nickname, cassowaries are generally shy and elusive and prefer to avoid confrontation and people when possible. However, attacks can occasionally happen if cassowaries are approached by humans.

In 2019, a man in Florida was killed by a cassowary that he was keeping as a pet. This was the first reported fatality in almost 100 years.

Songbirds were on the menu 2,000 years ago on the Roman island of Mallorca, archaeological evidence reveals. Bones of the small thrushes were discovered in a trash pit near the ancient ruins of a fast-food shop, giving researchers new clues about Roman-era street food.

"Based on local culinary traditions here in Mallorca — where song thrushes (Turdus philomelos) are still occasionally consumed — I can say from personal experience that their flavor is more akin to small game birds like quail than to chicken," Alejandro Valenzuela, a researcher at the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies in Mallorca, Spain, told Live Science in an email.

In a new study published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, Valenzuela detailed his analysis of a collection of animal bones discovered in the ancient city of Pollentia , which was established after the Romans conquered the Balearic Islands in 123 B.C. Pollentia quickly became an active Roman port, and the city expanded to include a forum, temples, cemeteries and a network of shops.

One of these shops likely functioned as a "popina" — a small establishment where locals could gather and grab a snack or some wine — as archaeologists found six large amphorae embedded in a countertop. Nearby, a roughly 13-foot-deep (4 meters) cesspit had been filled with garbage, including broken ceramics that helped date the pit's use to between 10 B.C. and A.D. 30, along with a variety of mammal, fish and bird bones.

But Valenzuela was interested in investigating the role of small birds in the ancient Mallorcan diet, since their fragile bones are often poorly preserved at archaeological sites. In the Pollentia pit, though, there were more bones from song thrushes than from any other kind of bird.

By looking closely at the specific thrush bones found in the cesspit, Valenzuela found a pattern: While there were numerous skulls and breastbones (sterna) from the small birds, there were almost no arm and leg bones or bones of the upper chest, which are associated with the meatiest parts of the bird.

Related: Mass grave of Roman-era soldiers discovered beneath soccer field in Vienna

The absence of the fleshy portions of the bird carcasses "suggests that thrushes were widely consumed, forming part of the everyday diet and urban food economy" at Pollentia, Valenzuela wrote in the study.

Historical records show that Roman game hunters often caught song birds in large groups using nets or pit traps, and then sold them to retail establishments that cooked and distributed them as food.

Based on the bone evidence, Valenzuela thinks the birds were prepared by removing the sternum to flatten the breasts. This technique would have allowed the food vendor to rapidly cook the bird — either on a grill or pan-fried in oil — while retaining moisture.

The broken ceramics found in the cesspit could suggest that the thrushes were served on plates just as they would have been in a home dining context. "However, given their small size and the street food context, it's also entirely plausible that they were presented on skewers or sticks for easier handling — both options are possible," Valenzuela said.

Along with thrush bones, Valenzuela found that the Romans ate domestic chickens (Gallus gallus) and European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) in large quantities, suggesting they were also on the menu at this ancient fast-food joint.

Roman cities had a dynamic approach to food, Valenzuela wrote in the study, as seasonal products like thrushes were easily integrated into everyday diets, and "street food was a fundamental component of the urban experience."

Roman emperor quiz: Test your knowledge on the rulers of the ancient empire

​​From the striking rainbow colors of parrots in the rainforest to the brilliant flashes of yellows, oranges and blues in coral reefs, vibrantly colorful wildlife abounds in tropical ecosystems. But what is it about these environments that has driven their animal inhabitants to evolve such eye-catching hues?

Broadly speaking, animals tend to use color to communicate, said Oscar Puebla, a fish ecologist at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research in Germany. "It could be communication with members of your species — for example, to attract a mate," he told Live Science. "It could be communication to predators to make the point that you're venomous. It could be camouflage to escape predators."

The reasons and methods of this color communication vary massively among species and environments. Birds tend to acquire colored pigments — like red, orange and yellow carotenoids — through their diet and use the resulting strong coloration to attract a partner or establish dominance. Meanwhile, fish and mollusks use complex microscopic structures within their cells to bend and diffract light and thus change their color to camouflage them from predators. But whether it's on land or under the sea, tropical conditions have played a huge part in this evolved adaptation.

"There's a correlation between the diversity of a certain community and the amount of color or diversity in color that the different species display," said Roberto Arbore, an evolutionary biologist at the Research Center in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources in Portugal who specializes in parrots. "If you live in a very diverse community, such as a rainforest, you need to recognize individuals of the same species because interacting with individuals of different species can be very costly in terms, for example, of mating."

Birds, in particular, rely on their sense of sight to perceive the world. The sheer number of avian species in the forest environment therefore drives up this competition to stand out, leading to the extraordinary variety of colors and patterns exhibited by parrots, hummingbirds, toucans and other birds that call the tropics home.

However, "we have to be careful always with these colors and color patterns," Puebla cautioned. "The way we perceive colors could be very different from the way other animals perceive it."

Related: Why are animals so colorful?

This is especially true in marine systems. Because of the way light travels through water, red is absorbed extremely quickly, counterintuitively making it the ideal color for camouflage. Similarly, bright patterns that appear ostentatious to human eyes help many small fish hide from predators in the clear waters of coral reefs.

"Reef fishes have a lot of blue and yellow, but many fish do not see that," Puebla said. "These are colors with a very strong contrast, so they use that to break their silhouette as a way of camouflaging."

The high diversity and good visibility within tropical environments provide strong evolutionary pressures for colorful appearance, but there's also a physiological explanation for this abundance of color in animals that live near the equator, Arbore said. The production of color, whether through pigments or microstructural features, requires an investment of energy — something in short supply in harsher environments such as the tundra or desert.

"Normally, tropical habitats are more rich," Arbore told Live Science. "The conditions are more generous in terms of energy, the availability of food, a milder climate, which has a strong impact on the physiology of animals in tropical environments. Different species can actually invest more energy in color because there is more abundance and the physiological cost of being very colorful is reduced."

Whatever the evolutionary advantage, animals' color is inextricably intertwined with their environment, be it the bright birds of the rainforest or the dull silver fish of the deep sea. And the complex and diverse tropical ecosystem provides the perfect blend of competition and natural resources to support a fantastic explosion of vibrant color.

Lake Natron has a chemical makeup that is so harsh, it is uninhabitable for most creatures. It is a "soda" lake, meaning it has high levels of dissolved sodium and carbonate. Due to this high concentration of salts and minerals, the lake's pH can reach 10.5, which is almost as caustic as ammonia solution — and animals that die on the shores of Lake Natron are preserved as calcified mummies as a result.

Lake Natron sits along the East African Rift System, a divergent tectonic plate boundary that is tearing apart the African Plate. This geology means that Lake Natron is shaped by volcanic processes, which produce large amounts of sodium carbonate and calcium carbonate. These salts and other minerals trickle down into the lake from surrounding hills and enter the water from below via hot springs, Live Science previously reported. The lake does not drain into any river or sea, so the chemical concentration stays high year-round.

Few animals can survive a salt level and pH as high as Lake Natron's, and the water can severely burn the skin and eyes of creatures that try to take a sip or dip. But animals that have adapted to the conditions, including lesser flamingos (Phoeniconaias minor) and tilapia, thrive in and around the lake.

In fact, Lake Natron is the world's most important breeding site for lesser flamingos, with most of East Africa's 1.5 million to 2.5 million lesser flamingos — which represent around 75% of the global population of the species — hatching at the lake, according to the Tanzania Wildlife Management Authority. Lesser flamingos' legs have tough skin and scales that prevent burns from the water. These birds build nests on islands that form in the lake during the dry season, Live Science previously reported, and their babies are safe from most predators thanks to the deadly conditions.

Related: Kilimanjaro's giant groundsels: The strange plants that thrive on Africa's tallest mountain

In addition to being extremely alkaline, Lake Natron is so shallow that its water temperature can reach a scalding 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius) during the hottest times of the year, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. The lake is 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) deep and 9 miles (15 kilometers) wide, but it shrinks and expands depending on the weather, with less rainfall and river input during the dry season leading it to contract (and vice versa).

When the lake shrinks, microorganisms that feast on its salts multiply. Haloarchaea (salt-loving organisms that lack a nucleus) and cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) can color the lake different shades of red thanks to pigments in their cells. The same pigments give lesser flamingos their pink hue, according to NASA's Earth Observatory, because these flamingos almost exclusively eat blue-green algae.

Lake Natron made headlines in 2013, when photographer Nick Brandt's images of "stone" animals on the lake's shores were published in the book "Across the Ravaged Land" (Abrams Books, 2013). The pictures showed carcasses of birds and bats that had died on the shores of the lake and were preserved by its sodium carbonate. Brandt positioned them on branches and on the water to look "alive again in death," he wrote in the book.

"I unexpectedly found the creatures — all manner of birds and bats — washed up along the shoreline of Lake Natron," Brandt wrote. "No one knows for certain exactly how they die."

Birds pictured in the book include a dove and a fish eagle. These birds do not feed and breed at Lake Natron, but they live in the salt marshes and freshwater wetlands that make up the surrounding landscape. These ecosystems also host greater flamingos, pelicans, ostriches, buffalo, wildebeest and many other creatures, according to the Tanzania Wildlife Management Authority.

Discover more incredible places, where we highlight the fantastic history and science behind some of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth.

Wild cockatoos in Sydney, Australia have learned to drink from twist-handle water fountains, turning the knob with their feet and using their body weight to keep it open. They even queue to have a drink, waiting to take turns on the fountain, footage shows.

The behavior qualifies as a new local tradition, according to a study published Wednesday (June 4) in the journal Biology Letters that analyzed videos of these cockatoos showing off their fountain-manipulating skills.

City animals are remarkably flexible. Fast-changing urban environments can push animals to solve new problems. Some urban birds adapt their songs to be audible over noise pollution, or use human-made structures as substitutes for their natural nesting habitats. Studies have linked bigger brain size and more innovativeness to bird species that live in cities, meaning species that innovate and problem solve tend to adapt better in cities.

Cockatoos are particularly intelligent birds, able to use tools, solve puzzles, and even play golf. Sulphur-crested cockatoos (Cacatua galerita) are native to Australia, and in Sydney they have learned to open trash bins, earning them the nickname "trash parrots." They even manage to outwit humans trying to deter them in what scientists describe as an "innovation arms race."

"[Cockatoos] have a playful curiosity," Alice Auersperg, cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna in Austria who was not involved in the new study, told Live Science in an email. "They are highly persistent in their object manipulation, and easily reinforced if a behavior turns out to be rewarding."

Related: Do parrots actually understand what they're saying?

One researcher walking in Western Sydney in 2018 came across sulphur-crested cockatoos queuing up to use a drinking fountain. "When she reported this to the lab group, we all got very excited, and started planning how to best further study this unusual behavior," study co-author Lucy Aplin, a cognitive ecologist at Australian National University, told Live Science in an email.

The research team installed two motion-triggered cameras surrounding one drinking fountain with a rubber top with embedded spout, and a spring-loaded twist handle. Analyzing the videos showed that operating these water fountains is not easy to stumble upon by accident: it requires fine motor skills and a coordinated sequence of actions. The cockatoos use both feet to manipulate the twist handle, then lower their weight to turn the handle clockwise and keep it from springing back. Around 50% of the cockatoos' attempts to open the fountain in the videos ended in success.

"I was not surprised to see that cockatoos in Sydney had learned how to use water fountains," Berenika Mioduszewska, animal cognition researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna who was not involved in the new study, told Live Science in an email. "These birds are highly curious and manipulative. If the design of a fountain incidentally allows for cockatoo manipulation, it may only be a matter of time before an inquisitive individual starts playing with it and discovers a new source of water."

Aplin said the behavior probably began as an individual innovation, then spread in the local population through observing other birds. But individual cockatoos do have distinct styles in the way they operate the fountain, so while they may have gotten the idea to use the fountain from other birds, they likely worked out the fine details individually through trial and error.

"Altogether, this tells us that this behavior is widespread and well established within the local population of birds, with some birds fully knowledgeable, and others still in the process of learning," Aplin said. "That suggests that it has spread to form a local 'drinking tradition' in the area."

It's not completely clear why these birds choose to solve this complex puzzle to drink from water fountains, when other water sources are available. The cockatoos appear to use the drinking fountains as their main source of water, regardless of whether there's a queue. The researchers theorize the birds prefer the taste of the water, or they feel safer from predators at a fountain in an open area with better visibility of potential threats.

The research is part of a larger project, the "Clever Cockie Project," which studies how behavioral flexibility could enable cognitively complex species like cockatoos to adapt in cities.

"The paper also highlights the importance of persistence and focus: longer attempts at the water fountains, and those made when fewer other cockatoos were present, were significantly more likely to succeed," Mioduszewska said. "It offers a valuable lesson from the cockatoos — when mastering a skill, it is important to keep trying and to minimize distractions whenever possible."

Bird quiz: How much do you know about our feathered friends?

With its large, forward-facing eyes and head tufts that look like ears, the great eared nightjar resembles a dragon more than a bird. Often nicknamed the "baby dragon," this otherworldly-looking creature has several distinctive traits, including an eerie, haunting call.

Great eared nightjars, which reach between 12 and 16 inches (30 to 40 centimeters) in length, live in dense, low-lying woodlands across South and Southeast Asia. These elusive, nocturnal birds are masters of camouflage and blend into the forest floor, thanks to their mottled brown, gray and black plumage. By day, they remain motionless among leaf litter or tree stumps, with their coloring protecting them from predators.

Rather than building a traditional nest, the great eared nightjar lays a single egg directly on the forest floor or in a shallow bed of leaves. While the exact reason they avoid nesting in trees like many other birds remains uncertain, it's likely that their natural camouflage offers effective protection for both egg and chick against predators.

Their habitat is often dense with vegetation and trees, making it difficult for predators to find the birds and their eggs. Both parents incubate the egg until it hatches. Once the chick has emerged, it remains camouflaged on the forest floor where it is fed by its parents until it can fend for itself.

Despite their dragon-like appearance, great eared nightjars feed primarily on moths and other flying insects, which they catch mid-air in the twilight hours using their wide, gaping mouths. Their flight is silent and smooth, allowing them to hunt quickly and efficiently without alerting predators, such as owls and other birds of prey.

The call of the great eared nightjar is a deep, haunting sound that echoes through the forest at dusk and dawn. This distinctive call includes a sharp "tsiik" noise followed by a pause and a longer, whistle-like call. Nightjars rely on these vocalizations to breed. Males often use their calls to mark their territories, attract mates or warn others of dangers.

Birds have been nesting in rugged Arctic environments for almost 73 million years, new research finds — more than 25 million years longer than was previously thought.

A collection of more than 50 fossils found in northern Alaska, which include embryos and hatchlings, suggest some of the early ancestors of modern birds either migrated or adapted to the harsh polar environment in the Mesozoic era, the age of dinosaurs.

"The common conception is they're too primitive to be exhibiting this advanced behavior," Lauren Wilson, lead author of the study and a doctoral student of paleontology at Princeton University, told Live Science. "So you're either dealing with [Arctic winters] as an itty-bitty, freshly hatched bird, or you're 3 months old, and having to fly about 2,000 kilometers [1,240 miles] to get to a point where it makes sense to even migrate," Wilson explained. "I don't think we would expect either of those things from these birds that don't belong to that modern lineage of birds."

Whether the birds migrated south or hunkered down for the winter, the research provides the earliest known evidence of either behavior in birds. And while some modern birds, like the ivory gull (Pagophila eburnea) and snowy owl (Bubo scandiacus) are known to nest in the frigid Arctic, there is now evidence that this behavior started millions of years before the meteor that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs crashed into Earth, if not earlier.

"Many birds nest in the Arctic today, and they are key parts of Arctic communities and ecosystems and food webs," Steve Brusatte, a professor of paleontology and evolution at the University of Edinburgh who peer-reviewed the study but was not involved in it, told Live Science in an email. "These fossils show that birds were already integral parts of these high latitude communities many tens of millions of years ago, and thus that these communities are a long-term norm of Earth history, not a recent ecological innovation of modern times."

The fossils in the collection come from at least three different families of bird: the extinct, loon-like hesperornithes; ichthyornithes, an extinct bird that resembled seagulls; and several species resembling ducks that are within or very similar to neornithes, the group containing all modern birds.

Related: Hoatzin: The strange 'stinkbird' born with clawed wings that appears to be an evolutionary 'orphan'

Notably, the researchers did not find any fossils of the dominant bird group of the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago) — enantiornithes, now-extinct birds that typically had teeth in their beaks and claws on their wings. But a few factors reveal why they likely didn't live in the Arctic. They likely took longer than other birds to incubate their eggs, they took several years to reach full adult size (where most modern birds grow to adult size within weeks) and they "may have had a period where they're almost naked because they molted their feathers simultaneously," which is not helpful during an Arctic winter, said study co-author Daniel Ksepka, a paleontologist and curator of the Bruce Museum in Connecticut.

The world was warmer in the Late Cretaceous than it is today, but the region the birds were found in likely experienced freezing temperatures, snow and roughly four straight months of winter darkness. Growing to adulthood so quickly allowed modern birds to practice long-range migration and prosper during those ancient Arctic summers, which boasted around six months of 24-hour daylight and a burst in insect populations.

But the weather wasn't the only challenge. They lived alongside "probably about 12 or 13 different kinds of typical dinosaurs," like the Pachyrhinosaurus, a relative of Triceratops that was about 16 feet (5 meters) long and weighed 2 tons (1,800 kilograms). Other dinosaurs like Troodon, an 11-foot tall meat-eater with short, serrated teeth, "would have happily taken advantage of a bunch of these little cute little chicks for dinner," said Patrick Druckenmiller, director of the University of Alaska Museum of the North and advising author of the study.

To get to the fossil sites in the Prince Creek Formation in Northern Alaska, the researchers drove 500 miles (800 km) from Fairbanks, chartered a small aircraft to fly to the Colville River, then took inflatable motorboats up the river before setting up camp, Druckenmiller said. There they would look for an "orangey, pebbly, sandy" layer of sediment that contains small bones and teeth, and often lay on the permafrost to "excavate with little dental picks and small tools" from the layer itself.

Now that the Prince Creek Formation is "one of the major North American Cretaceous bird sites," according to the researchers, Wilson says the next step is simply to find more fossils.

"The more bones we find, the more confident we can be in exactly what types of birds we have," she said. "We might even still find a random bone that's from a bird we didn't know was there."

Bird quiz: How much do you know about our feathered friends?

In the wild, parrots squeak, squawk, whistle and trill to communicate with their flockmates. These highly social birds rely on their complex communication systems to get food and warn of potential dangers, and research even suggests parrots use "signature contact calls" to refer to each other, similar to how humans call each other by name.

But when parrots live with people, they don't have any flockmates to learn "parrot" from. Instead, they use their highly specialized brains to pick up on human speech. So when parrots talk, do they really understand what they're saying, or are they just masters of mimicry?

The answer depends on the individual parrot and how it's trained — though research points toward parrots having a surprising ability to understand human speech and use words and phrases appropriately.

"Birds that are trained appropriately can learn amazing amounts of speech," Irene Pepperberg, a research professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University, told Live Science. Pepperberg has spent her career training parrots to use human language. Her most famous study participant, Alex the African gray parrot, was known for his prolific communication skills.

Alex understood more than 100 words for different objects, actions and colors. He could count up to six and had a basic understanding of the concept of zero. When given an object, Alex could identify its color, shape and material, as well as accurately compare multiple objects using terms like "bigger" or "smaller" and "same" or "different."

Alex was trained using a careful methodology that ensured he understood that specific words applied to certain objects or concepts. But experts say that even everyday pet parrots can pick up on certain features of human language.

Related: Why do parrots live so long?

Learning words and phrases

Erin Colbert-White, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Puget Sound, said parrots can definitely learn words that refer to real-world objects.

"If you say 'peanut' enough times and you hand them a peanut, just like with a kid, they're going to learn that word label," Colbert-White said.

To test whether parrots really understand that the word "peanut" refers to a peanut — and not that they just want to be fed any type of food — Colbert-White said you can wait until the bird requests a peanut and then hand them a different food. If the parrot knows exactly what "peanut" means, there's a good chance they'll drop the unrequested food and ask for a peanut again.

Colbert-White said this type of learning applies more to concrete, real-world objects than to abstract words or phrases. However, parrots can pick up on contextual cues related to more abstract words.

"Sometimes they'll use these words or phrases in appropriate ways, because they're smart," Pepperberg said.

For example, a parrot might learn that people say "hello" when they walk into a room and then start saying "hello" to greet people. They may not understand the deeper conceptual meaning of the word, but their owner will probably find the behavior entertaining and reward it by giving them more attention. Parrots form strong bonds with their owners and are very responsive to their feedback, so this creates a cycle of reinforcement where the parrot learns to use words in the correct context.

In another example, Pepperberg describes Alex learning how to say "I'm sorry." African gray parrots are notoriously mischievous, and Alex would often break or chew objects around the lab. When he shredded an important stack of papers, Pepperberg wrote in her book "Alex & Me" (Harper, 2008), she became upset and started yelling at him.

Alex responded with the words "I'm sorry," a phrase Pepperberg believes he picked up from her. Shortly before the paper shredding incident, Pepperberg had caught Alex with a broken coffee mug. She was angry at first and reprimanded him, but quickly realized Alex could have been hurt, and told him "I'm sorry" while making sure he was okay. After that, Alex continued to say "I'm sorry" after getting into trouble and whenever Pepperberg threatened him with a time out.

"He made the connection between the phrase and defusing a fraught situation," Pepperberg said in an email. "There was no contrition (I know a lot of people like that!), but he knew the appropriate context."

The same goes for a phrase like "I love you." To a parrot, "what 'I love you' means isn't this abstract concept of love," Colbert-White said, "but rather, 'I have learned that when I say this, I get showered with attention; I get physical affection; I get to connect with my pair-bonded individual.'

"I don't know that there's anything particularly fascinating about the fact that they don't understand it, because there are people that say it and don't understand it," she added. "You know, it just serves a function."

Ultimately, each parrot has its own unique capacity to understand human speech. Some parrots never talk at all, especially if they have a fellow parrot to chirp with, Colbert-White said.

On that note, Pepperberg thinks it's time that people give parrots more credit for their innate communication abilities — of which researchers are only scratching the surface — rather than just making them learn our languages.

"We treat animals as less intelligent than we are in general, but we expect them to learn our systems," Pepperberg said. "We've spent the last 50-plus years trying to crack their systems, without much success."

Birds have run, swum and flown around Earth since the dinosaur age, and they've hunted for food and raised their fuzzy chicks for generation after generation.

These feathery creatures now live on every continent, sometimes migrating thousands of miles to seasonal destinations. You can often hear their birdsong as they trill, chirp and whistle, thanks to the syrinx, a vocal organ that has two independent sound sources, unlike the single one found in humans.

Science has proved that some bird species are extraordinarily smart. For example, crows understand the concept of zero, and an African gray parrot named Alex had a vocabulary of over 100 words. Birds can also dance to a beat and use tools.

But how much do you actually know about birds? Take our quiz to find out.

Remember to log in to put your name on the leaderboard; hints are available if you click the yellow button!

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Name: Hoatzin (Opisthocomus hoazin)

Where it lives: Amazon and Orinoco river basins in South America

What it eats: Leaves, fruits and flowers

Why it's awesome: The hoatzin is often regarded as one of the world's strangest birds. Hatchlings are born with clawed wings — a rare, prehistoric trait — and adults give off a strong, unpleasant smell due to their cow-like, fermenting digestive system, earning them the nickname "stinkbird."

Hoatzin have some pretty weird traits, with mohican crests, blue facial skin, red eyes and large, fan-shaped tails, which they used to maintain balance while navigating dense vegetation.

But these tropical birds are most notable for their pungent odor, which is commonly compared to manure or rotting vegetation. This unpleasant smell is the result of a highly unusual digestive process that sets them apart from almost every other bird species.

Unlike most birds, the hoatzin has a foregut fermentation system, similar to the one found in cows. It primarily feeds on leaves, which it stores and ferments in a large, chambered crop — a temporary food storage pouch located in the esophagus. Then, the food is passed to the stomach for fermentation, where bacteria break down the tough plant material, releasing gases via burps that produce the bird's distinctive manure-like odor.

This digestive process is highly efficient for breaking down the high levels of cellulose found in leaves. But, it makes the hoatzin both smelly and clumsy, as its enlarged gut makes it difficult to fly. However, the hoatzin's unusual smell acts as a natural defence mechanism, as predators tend to avoid the bird because they think it is rotten or poisonous.

Researchers are uncertain about the evolution of hoatzins. In 2015, a genetic study in the journal Nature suggested that the hoatzin is the last surviving member of a bird line that branched off the evolutionary tree in its own direction 64 million years ago, shortly after the extinction event that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs.

However, a separate 2024 study in PNAS suggested that hoatzins are not as ancient as previously thought. Although the wing claws of juveniles seem prehistoric, they may have evolved more recently to help these birds survive in the Amazon jungle. As young hoatzins can't fly, their claws allow them to climb trees to escape predators.

In 2024, biologists analyzed and mapped the genomes of more than 360 bird species to create a family tree of major bird groups, but where hoatzin fit into the picture is unclear. The researchers added hoatzins to a category called "orphans" along with shorebirds and cranes — because it’s unclear where hoatzins sit within the avian family tree.

This bird is also the national bird of Guyana, where the local name for this bird is Canje pheasant.

"Secrets of the Penguins," a three-part documentary executive produced by James Cameron, is set to release this weekend, and according to the famed filmmaker, it takes observations of the charismatic birds "to another level."

The documentary, made by National Geographic, is hosted by wildlife filmmaker Bertie Gregory and narrated by Blake Lively.

The series presents a number of never-before-seen moments, including one teased in a viral clip of emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) chicks hurling themselves from a 50-foot (15 meters) cliff into the Southern Ocean.

"I don't think they wanted to be doing that, but that's how it worked out for them," Cameron told Live Science during a Thursday (April 17) roundtable interview. "They took a wrong turn somewhere along the coast and wound up having to base jump to get their first swim."

Related: Meet 'small diver': One of the tiniest penguins ever discovered

Capturing the series' footage was a monumental, globe-spanning undertaking involving over 70 scientists and filmmakers on a two-year trip. The stops along the way include the beaches of Cape Town, South Africa; the Galápagos Islands; Namibia's desert caves; and a 274-day stint on Antarctica's bitterly cold Ekström Ice Shelf, which is home to a colony of 20,000 emperor penguins.

It's not just penguins' remarkable hardiness that fascinates Cameron, but the social inventiveness needed to survive such inhospitable habitats. Another new behavior documented by the series shows a mated pair of emperor penguins moving an egg-sized chunk of ice between them in an apparent rehearsal for the real thing. (If eggs and young chicks leave the warmth of their parents' brood pouches for more than one or two minutes, they will die.)

"They didn't get an egg that season or it died, and so now they're doing training behavior to improve their odds," Cameron said. "Are we seeing what works strategically over millions of years for these guys to have adapted to being there on the ice?"

For many of the flightless, coastal birds, this resilience is being pushed to its breaking point. More than half of the 18 penguin species are endangered or vulnerable to extinction. The situation is especially bleak in Antarctica, where quickening climate change is melting the sea ice upon which emperor penguins and Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) live and outbreaks of the H5N1 bird flu virus decimate flocks.

This places penguins, in spite of their apparent remoteness, on the front lines of two global existential threats. If current trends continue up to 70% of emperor penguin colonies could disappear by 2050, with the species being doomed to extinction by 2100 — making it even more important to document them now.

"You can't study penguins without bumping up against climate change," Cameron said. But he added that "we try not to be too Cassandra about all that."

The goal of the series is to give a new generation of viewers a sense of wonder at nature, Cameron added

"And if we respect nature and we respect its wisdom about how these animals have learned to adapt and survive, maybe that will influence our behavior when push comes to shove," Cameron said. "I'd like to think that's the case."

As for the love of nature, what's Cameron's favorite penguin?

"The rock hoppers are great with their amazing hairstyles, but I'm fond of the emperors only because I've observed them personally," he said. "I was underwater with them, saw them rocketing around, saw their huddling behavior at 40 [degrees Celsius] below [freezing]. I guess I'm just drawn to the ones that I know."

"Secrets of the Penguins" premieres April 20 at 8 p.m. EDT/7 p.m. CDT on National Geographic. All episodes stream April 21 on Disney+ and Hulu. Disney Channel will also air the first episode on Earth Day, April 22, at 8 p.m. EDT.

Name: Dracula parrot (Psittrichas fulgidus)

Where it lives: New Guinea

What it eats: Figs, flowers and nectar

Why it's awesome: The Pesquet's parrot is more famously known as the Dracula parrot — and with its mix of jet-black and blood-red feathers, it's easy to see why. They also sound terrifying, as their piercing screams echo through the rainforests of New Guinea.

Dracula parrots grow to around 18 inches (46 centimeters) long and weigh between 1.3 and 1.8 lbs (600 and 800 grams). They can live for around 20 to 40 years. Their plumage is mostly black and dark grey, but they sport red feathers around the belly, tail and wings. Adult males have red patches behind their eyes, which distinguishes them from females.

The species' guttural, rasping screams are very distinct. Unlike the chirps or squawks of typical parrots, the call of the Dracula parrot is a harsh screech that sounds more like a mythical predator than a fruit-eating bird. This unusual sound likely evolved as a way for the birds to communicate across the dense forests of New Guinea, and possibly to deter potential threats.

Related: Great potoo: The 'tree stump' bird with a haunting growl and can see with its eyes closed

Dracula parrots often make the unusual noises during flight. This may be to help individuals stay in contact with their flock mates on the wing, especially in areas with thick foliage, where the birds can easily lose sight of one another. Their screams may also serve as territorial signs or warning calls that alert other animals to their presence or assert dominance over feeding areas.

With their long, hooked beaks and semi-bald heads, Dracula parrots resemble vultures. But unlike the meat-eating birds of prey, the parrots aren't as bloodthirsty as their nickname suggests. Instead, they're keen fruit-eaters with a particular taste for figs and, occasionally, flowers or nectar. The birds lack feathers on their faces, and this localized baldness is thought to help prevent matting when they're eating messy fruits.

Although little is known about the breeding habits of Dracula parrots, it's thought that they nest in large, hollow trees. They typically mate once a year and lay one or two eggs at a time.

Because of their highly prized feathers and the market for captive exotic birds, Dracula parrots have been hunted and are now classed as "vulnerable" on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

Birds are often associated with flight, but not all of them take to the skies. Around 60 species — fewer than 1% of all bird species — are flightless, including ostriches, penguins and kiwis. These birds evolved from flying ancestors but lost their ability to fly, instead adapting to life on land or in the water.

But why did they give up flight? Why don't all birds fly?

The ability to fly is especially useful for escaping predators and traveling long distances in search of food and favorable living conditions. However, flight requires a lot of energy; birds burn about 75% more energy per day than similarly sized mammals do.

"If flight isn't necessary, birds can better survive and reproduce if they divert that energetic investment elsewhere," Natalie Wright, an associate professor of biology at Kenyon College in Ohio, told Live Science in an email.

In a 2016 paper published in the journal PNAS, Wright and her colleagues noted that island-dwelling birds, facing few to no predators and less competition for food and habitat, tend to evolve toward flightlessness.

"When living on an island without predators and without the need to migrate or travel long distances, for many kinds of birds the costs of flight outweigh the benefits," Wright said.

Related: Why do parrots live so long?

The shift to flightlessness leads to physical changes in birds. Over evolutionary time, their pectoral flight muscles shrink. The sternum (breastbone) with its central ridge (keel) — where flight muscles attach — also becomes smaller, Wright said. Wing bones — the humerus, ulna and carpometacarpus — become shorter and less robust, while their legs grow longer and sturdier as an adaptation to a more terrestrial lifestyle, she added.

Some birds have traded flight for superior swimming abilities. Penguins, for instance, retained their flight muscles and keel but repurposed them for swimming. "They use their wings to fly underwater," Peter Ryan, a professor emeritus of ornithology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, told Live Science in an email. The flightless auk (Pinguinus impennis) also uses its wings to propel itself through water.

In birds that have been flightless for a long time, the long, stiff feathers needed for flight (flight feathers) disappear too, Ryan said. In some species, like kiwis and the Inaccessible Island rail (Atlantisia rogersi), the body feathers lose barbules — the tiny, hook-like structures that normally keep them aerodynamic — giving them a fluffier, fur-like appearance, Ryan added.

A 2025 study published in the journal Evolution found that flightless birds lose feather features in the reverse order of how they first evolved. The research also concluded that skeletal changes occur before changes in plumage, as it takes significantly more energy to grow and maintain bones than it does to maintain feathers.

Although flightless birds are uncommon today, fossils reveal that they were far more prevalent and diverse a few thousand years ago, Tim Blackburn, a professor of invasion biology at University College London, told Live Science in an email. However, the arrival of humans and animals like rats and dogs exposed these birds to predators.

"Having sacrificed their capacity to take to the air, there was no time for them to re-evolve this useful ability," Blackburn said. This led to the rapid extinction of iconic birds like the dodo (Raphus cucullatus) on Mauritius, the moa in New Zealand, and many others.

A 2020 study co-authored by Blackburn and published in the journal Science Advances found that there would be four times as many flightless bird species on Earth today were it not for human-driven extinctions.

The loss of flight happened at least 150 times in different groups of birds throughout evolutionary history, Ferran Sayol, first author of the study and a researcher at Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF) in Barcelona, Spain, told Live Science in an email.

"Many of these species thrived on islands without predators but disappeared shortly after when humans arrived (due to direct hunting or introduced predators), making flightlessness seem rarer than it actually was," Sayol said.

By disrupting a key gene, scientists made chicken feathers more dinosaur-like — but the results didn't last.

In a new study, researchers inhibited a gene during embryonic development to make chicken feathers more primitive, like the kind of simple tube-shaped proto-feathers that likely first emerged in the ancestors of dinosaurs in the Early Triassic 250 million years ago.

They succeeded — but only temporarily. The chickens showed delayed feather development and naked spots at hatching, but within a few weeks, their plumage looked like any other fowl's.

The study is part of a broader effort to learn how and why feathers first evolved. Researchers had previously altered the same gene to turn scaly chicken feet feathery, but turning back the clock on feather evolution proved harder.

"Our experiments show that while a transient disturbance in the development of foot scales can permanently turn them into feathers, it is much harder to permanently disrupt feather development itself," study senior author Michel Milinkovitch, a professor of genetics and evolution at the University of Geneva, said in a statement. "Clearly, over the course of evolution, the network of interacting genes has become extremely robust, ensuring the proper development of feathers even under substantial genetic or environmental perturbations."

Related: Dark regions of the genome may drive the evolution of new species

Just because the researchers didn't make permanently dino-feathered chickens, it doesn't mean the study was a failure. Milinkovitch and his co-author Rory Cooper, now a research fellow at the University of Sheffield in the U.K., showed how a particular gene, the whimsically named "Sonic Hedgehog" gene, is important in feather evolution. By disturbing this gene, the researchers were able to temporarily disrupt feather formation.

The first feathers were not the complicated, branching features seen on birds today. They were single tubules, shaped like tiny drinking straws. To find out how evolution built everything from soft down to gaudy peacock feathers from these simple tubes, Milinkovitch and Cooper first used a technique called light sheet fluorescence microscopy to examine chicken feather development in the egg. This method uses lasers to image thin slices of a sample.

Feathers start to develop in embryonic chickens nine days after the egg is laid. First, thick spots called placodes pop up all over the developing chicken, the researchers observed. Next, these placodes grow feather buds, which gradually develop into the familiar branching feather form with the help of keratin, the same protein found in human hair and fingernails. The Sonic Hedgehog gene, which is well known to guide embryonic development in animal species, plays a role in all of these steps.

Next, the researchers injected an inhibitor of the Sonic Hedgehog gene into eggs on the ninth day of development to see what would happen. Within days, feather bud growth was stunted. The inhibitor also reduced the complex branching pattern that develops as feathers mature on the embryo.

By day 17 of development, however, the feather growth had partially recovered as the inhibition of the Sonic Hedgehog gene wore off. Chickens that were allowed to hatch had patchy feathers, with some naked spots and other places where soft, down-like feathers had formed, but they did not have outer feathers with a central "rachis," the distinctive quill structure in feathers. By the 49th day of life, however, these chickens molted, and the new feathers that came in developed normally.

The studies show that the Sonic Hedgehog gene has been involved both in the evolution of proto-feathers into today's feathers, as well as in the diversification of feathers into different shapes and sizes across species, the researchers reported March 19 in the journal PLOS Biology.

"The big challenge now," Milinkovitch said, "is to understand how these genetic interactions have changed to allow for the emergence of protofeathers early in the evolution of dinosaurs."

Every year, we learn more about how animals communicate with each other. Research shows that elephants greet each other by flapping their ears and making rumbling noises, sperm whales alter their clicking noises based on the context of their conversation, and naked mole rat colonies even have their own "accents."

It's clear that communication in the animal kingdom is complex. But with all of these unique ways to communicate, is it possible for an animal to learn the "language" of another species?

It turns out, there are examples of animals learning to understand — and even use — vocalizations or signals from species other than their own. But there's still a lot of questions about what's going on inside those animals' heads.

First off, it's important to note that, although "language" is a useful metaphor when we're thinking about one species understanding another, animals don't actually have languages in the way humans do.

"Language is kind of a species-specific communication system to humans," Simon W. Townsend, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Zurich, told Live Science. When studying animals, scientists instead examine specific features of communication, like a certain sound having a certain meaning, rather than using human-centered terms like "language."

Related: What's the chattiest animal?

When it comes to picking up on sounds from other species, birds are one of the best-studied animals. One study on songbird migration suggested that solitary birds could understand the calls of other bird species on their migration pathway, perhaps helping them to stay safe and navigate the long journey.

"We essentially looked for non-randomness, looked for patterns in the vocalizations," Benjamin Van Doren, first author of the study and an assistant professor of natural resources and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told Live Science. By seeing if different species of birds were recorded nearby each other making vocalizations, the researchers gathered data that supported the notion of cross-species communication.

The research dispels the notion that songbird migration is a lonely journey, as was once thought. However, their data still isn't able to decode exactly what the birds are "saying."

"It's logical to wonder if there are social connections among species," Van Doren said. "I think these calls could contain more information than we currently understand."

But learning a "language" is about more than just understanding what you hear; it's about being able to speak it, too. That's where the fork-tailed drongo (Dicrurus adsimilis) — a small, black bird found across Africa — excels.

Drongos have a habit of following other animals around in the hope of stealing some of their food. Thomas Flower, a biology instructor at Capilano University in Canada, studied these birds in the field as they followed a mob of meerkats. He found that the drongos would use their own alarm calls — a squawk that indicates a predator is approaching — to scare the meerkats into their holes, allowing the drongos to swoop in and grab any food scraps.

But that strategy eventually leads to a "boy who cried wolf" situation, Flower said. The meerkats realize the drongo-specific alarm calls are a ruse, so they stop dropping their food and hiding when they hear one.

This is where the drongos' special talents come in. Fork-tailed drongos not only recognize the warning calls of the other animals around them, but they also learn to replicate those calls to their own advantage. When the birds realize their own alarm call is no longer working, they start mimicking the alarm calls of other birds — or even replicating the meerkats' own alarm call. By regularly swapping out alarm calls from different species, the drongos keep the meerkats on edge and keep the food flowing.

"They know to mimic the species they're following," Flower said. "By doing that, they can keep their deception racket going." Drongos also follow other birds and mimic their alarm calls to steal food from them.

He explained that this strategy shows that fork-tailed drongos are capable of flexibly learning a sound from another species and using it to their advantage. When one sound stops working, they know to pivot to a new one that will.

"It shows that animals can be open-ended learners," Flower said.

Flower is still determining exactly what's going on in a drongo's mind when it uses those false alarm calls to its advantage. It's unclear whether drongos intend to trick other animals — which would imply more complex cognitive processes — or whether they've just learned that repeating certain sounds results in a meal.

"Providing clear experimental evidence of intentional deception, or not, is very tricky," he told Live Science in an email.

Flower said he still hasn't seen evidence that young drongos understand that they're deceiving other animals when they start mimicking alarm calls. But he pointed out that young humans also repeat noises they don't understand and eventually learn meaning through trial and error. For now, drongos do show some of the hallmarks of "language" learning, but much remains a mystery.

Scientists in Antarctica have discovered what may be the oldest modern bird ever found. The 69 million-year-old fossil could finally put a longstanding debate about the origin of modern birds to rest.

The nearly complete skull belongs to Vegavis iaai, a waterfowl species believed to be the ancient relative of modern-day ducks and geese. The species lived at the same time as dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex and may have survived the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, the new study suggests.

Study co-author Julia Clarke, a paleontologist at the University of Texas, Austin reported the first V. iaai fossil found on Vega Island in Antarctica in 1992. The fossil was around 66 million to 68 million years old. She proposed that the species is linked to modern birds, especially waterfowl. But not everyone was convinced as scientists were missing a key piece of the puzzle — the creature's skull.

"[The initial fossil] was just a completely different part of the skeleton. And when it comes to birds, the skull has a lot of phylogenetic or informative characteristics that tell you what it is," study co-author Patrick O' Connor, an evolutionary biologist at Ohio University, told Live Science.

Related: How did birds survive the dinosaur-killing asteroid?

The new V.iaai fossil, estimated to be 68 million to 69 million years old, was found during an expedition in 2011, but has only now been analyzed. The study was published Wednesday (Feb. 5) in the journal Nature.

The discovery of the new skull enabled scientists to learn more about this species and how it fits in the bird family tree. They found that, unlike pre-modern birds that existed during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods (201.3 million to 66 million years ago), V. iaai has features that are similar to birds that exist today — including a brain shape typical of modern birds, and a unique bone in the upper beak. The upper beak of most pre-modern birds is made of a single bone, called the maxilla, with a little bit of another type of bone, pre-maxilla, at the tip.

"When we looked at the Vegavis, it's the pre-maxilla all the way. The maxilla is tiny, which is exactly what we expect from modern birds," study co-author Christopher Torres, a paleontologist at The University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, told Live Science.

Using a 3D reconstruction, the scientists showed that the bird had a long, narrow beak enhanced with powerful jaw muscles, much like modern diving birds use to catch fish.

"Seeing how specialized the skull was, for me, the most impactful," Juan Benito Moreno, a paleontologist at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. "It was surprising to see an incredibly niche ecological feature so early in the evolution."

The giant asteroid that hit Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago) drove all nonavian dinosaurs to extinction. Landfowls (Galliformes) and waterfowls (Anseriformes) were among the earliest modern birds that existed in the age of dinosaurs.

While rapid evolution took place after the mass extinction, "studies that look at genomic comparisons of modern birds predict that the earliest divergence happened prior to that mass extinction," Torres said. "But their fossil record is extraordinarily scarce."

While the evidence pointing to V. iaai being associated with modern birds is strong, it's still not clear whether it really is a relative of modern ducks and geese, he said.

Daniel Ksepka, a paleontologist at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut who was not involved in the study, agreed. "Vegavis seems to have been a bit of an odd duck," he told Live Science in an email. "Provided the phylogeny is correct, a duck-like bill must have either evolved during the Cretaceous Period but been lost by Vegavis, or evolved multiple times independently. It will be interesting to see if future fossils confirm one of these scenarios."

V. iaai existed when global temperatures were far higher than they are today, and when Antarctica had a temperate climate and was covered in vegetation. Its distance from the asteroid impact may have provided the species with some protection from the devastation that followed.

For O' Connor, this study is the beginning of more discoveries to be found in the Cretaceous rocks of Antarctica. "The bird story is great, but we have other group[s] of animals, and, importantly, plants, that we can track through that mass extinction event that really let us get a better handle on ecosystem response to a global environmental perturbation," he said.

Anyone who has watched a rooster stalking around a farmyard might agree that there is something very dinosaur-like about birds. That may come as no surprise, given that birds are dinosaurs. But in terms of classification, this raises a question: Since dinosaurs are reptiles, does that mean that birds are reptiles, too?

"I would say that any modern biologist would, or should, say that birds are reptiles," Martin Stervander, an evolutionary biologist and senior curator of birds at National Museums Scotland, told Live Science.

It wasn't always this way. Before the 1940s, biologists relied on a system called the Linnaean method to classify all life on Earth. This approach was developed by Carl Linnaeus in the 1730s, and it works by grouping animals that have similar physical characteristics. Linnaeus determined that all reptiles share two key features: They have scales, and they are ectothermic, or "cold-blooded," meaning they must rely on external sources of heat to regulate their body temperature.

Because warm-blooded, abundantly feathered birds lack these features, "birds were considered their own branch on the tree of life" under the Linnaean system, said Klara Widrig, a postdoctoral fellow in the Vertebrate Zoology Department at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Linnaean classification accurately describes many relationships and helped to establish the broad branches of the tree of life we use today. Yet this classification system overlooks something that can reveal a lot more about an organism: its genes.

From the 1940s, the ability to examine genetic material gave rise to a new type of classification, called phylogeny. The phylogenetic method groups or separates organisms based on how much of their DNA they have in common. It also allows scientists to compare organisms' DNA to trace their evolutionary history and find shared ancestors.

Phylogeny for birds

Under this system, organisms are grouped into "clades," which are distinct branches on the phylogenetic tree that include all the descendants of a most recent shared ancestor. For example, modern birds are grouped into the Neornithes clade, because they all emerged from a common Neornithine ancestor that emerged 80 million years ago, before the nonavian dinosaurs went extinct. "Clades are a nested hierarchy," Widrig explained. So "if you go further back along the branches of the tree of life, you find that [Neornithes] also belong to the more inclusive clade Theropoda," a group of two-legged and mostly meat-eating dinosaurs that itself is descended from the clade Dinosauria.

Even in the dinosaur age, the defining features of scaly reptiles and birds weren't so distinct. Research suggests that some dinosaurs were warm-blooded and some nonavian dinosaurs sported feathers. Meanwhile, later on we know that birds that looked exactly like modern birds were already stalking the Earth alongside their dinosaur kin 66 million years ago. One of these was the "Wonderchicken" (Asteriornis), a fossil that was described in 2020 by a team that included Widrig. "Say if I got into a time machine and scooped up an Asteriornis and brought it back, everybody would be like, 'Oh yeah, that's just a normal-looking bird.'"

But back to the tree of life: birds' descent from Theropods and Dinosauria is what makes them dinosaurs. Meanwhile, Dinosauria, along with crocodilians, and other lineages like the pterosaurs, are contained within another clade, called Archosauria. This clade, in turn, shares an ancestor with a group called Lepidosauria, which gave rise to all modern lizards, snakes and the tuatara. That shared ancestor was a creature called a sauropsid that emerged about 315 million years ago, and launched the clade by the same name.

Sauropsida was one of two lineages that branched off from the amniotes (vertebrate animals that lay shelled eggs or carry fertilized eggs), the other being the group that evolved into the class Mammalia. Sauropsida, meanwhile, has become synonymous with the class "Reptilia," because within its network of clades upon clades, all reptiles — both living and extinct — are contained.

Related: If birds are dinosaurs, why aren't they cold-blooded?

"All of these guys — snakes and turtles and crocodiles and birds, and the dinosaurs when they were around — they all come back to one common ancestor," Stervander explained, and so under the phylogenetic grouping system, "that simply means that since birds are in [that clade], they are, per definition, reptiles." This is why phylogeny is valuable, because it can reveal that organisms that look very different are, in fact, very close to one another genetically and belong in the same group.

Why don't birds look like other reptiles?

The connections between birds and their scalier kin might have been easier to grasp if there hadn't been a mass extinction event 66 million years ago. "The reason why birds seem so strange compared to the rest of the reptiles that we have alive today is because all the evolutionary intermediate stages are extinct, so we don't have that to compare to," Widrig said. When the asteroid wiped out swathes of life on Earth, it obliterated whole sections of the Archosauria lineage of reptiles, leaving only crocodiles and some avian dinosaurs behind.

Without this void in the once-intricate tree of life, evolution might have ushered relatives into the modern age that would have made birds' reptilian roots more immediately clear. Instead, today crocodiles are birds' closest living relatives, even though they sit far apart on the phylogenetic tree.

To put it into human terms, "if all non-human primates were to suddenly go extinct today, our closest living relatives would actually be rodents and rabbits," Widrig said. They would be closest to us on the remaining branches of the tree of life, and our shared mammalian ancestry might be harder to accept.

If it still seems strange to think of birds as reptiles, it might partly be because of those Linnaean roots, which continue to shape our colloquial understanding of what a reptile is. "It's not until around the [19]40s where genetic evidence actually clarified where birds sit [on the tree of life]," Stervander said. "People had been referring to reptiles for almost two centuries before that. I think that's why there's been some unwillingness to redefine what we call the reptile."

But modern science is changing that, revealing unexpected connections in the tree of life — and opening our eyes to skies filled with modern feathered, flying reptiles.

For the many wondrous things humans can do, we can't fly on our own. But if we could, how big would our wings be?

Of course, the answer depends on the person's size. But someone who's about 155 pounds (70 kilograms) and at least 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall would have a wingspan of about 20 feet (6 m), said Ty Hedrick, a professor of biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, "which I thought was surprisingly small."

Hedrick arrived at this figure using an equation developed by Robert Nudds, a senior lecturer in biological sciences at the University of Manchester. Nudds described this equation in a 2007 paper published in the Journal of Avian Biology, in which he describes the scaling of bird wing parameters with respect to body mass.

But in this hypothetical scenario, we can't simply slap on a pair of wings and call it a day. It requires a complete reimagining of our anatomy. If we want to fly, we need other features in addition to wings.

First, we must consider what kind of wings we'll have. The classic angel look portrays a flying human with a huge pair of feathered wings protruding from the back. Anatomically, that would require a separate shoulder blade, Michael Habib, a research associate at the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, told Live Science. Those wings would also need flight muscles wrapping around from the chest to the back.

Related: What if humans had tails?

According to Habib, bat-like wings would make more sense on humans. In this setup, the entire arm and hand would stretch out, creating that 20-foot wingspan. A fleshy membrane wing would cover these limbs.

But to actually fly, the rest of our body would have to produce enough power, which would require strong muscles. In birds, an average of 16% to 18% of their muscle mass comes from muscles used for flying. In some, up to 30% of their muscle mass comes from the chest. This is also true in bats, though the mass is distributed across more muscles. "It's what sets them apart from the build of a nonflying animal," Habib said.

The corollary in humans creates a funny visual. "You're going to have a chest sticking way on out," Habib said, "and a back that's super, super ripped."

The type of flyers humans would be also factors into this question. "Not everything flies in exactly the same way," Habib said. "How you fly will be determined by your anatomy." There are a few types of flight, and all flying creatures specialize in different kinds, like flapping, gliding, hovering and soaring. Each of these specialties involves different types of wings. For example, Habib said that a bird that flaps throughout a journey has shorter, stouter wings. On the other hand, a soaring bird like an albatross has much longer wings relative to its size. Humans, with their relatively large size, would likely soar.

There's also the question of takeoff, especially with 20-foot-long, bat-like wings. With wings this large, we would not be able to flap our way up. "You can't flap very much when you're close to the ground," Hedrick told Live Science.

Habib suggested what's known as a quadrupedal launch, or a launch from a position where all four limbs start out on the ground. Pterosaurs, which were some of the first vertebrates to evolve the ability to fly more than 200 million years ago, likely walked and took off this way too, according to a 2010 paper co-authored by Habib and published in the journal PLOS One. Some bats, like vampire bats, walk and run on all fours as well.

Of course, humans are at an evolutionary disadvantage. Flying animals have been perfecting their anatomy for flight for millennia. "We'd need a lot of the other adaptations birds have acquired over the years," Hedrick said.

Little penguins "divorce" their partners to search for better mates, but they waste so much time wooing their new love interests that the colony suffers, a new study has found.

There's a common misconception that penguins mate for life — their breeding behaviors are more complicated than that and vary between species. Little penguins (Eudyptula minor) often return to the same mate every breeding season, but some ditch their partners to seek new mates, which scientists call a "penguin divorce."

The new study, published Jan. 11 in the journal Ecology and Evolution, found that these divorce rates are a good indicator of the colony's overall health. The team led by researchers from Monash University in Australia looked at how environmental and social factors, including divorce, influenced reproductive success over 13 breeding seasons on Phillip Island in Australia, which is home to 37,000 little penguins — the world's largest colony.

Divorce (or lack thereof) was the best predictor of reproductive success, with more offspring produced during seasons with low divorce rates, according to the study. But that's not to say committed couples were faithful.

"In good times, they largely stick with their partners, although there's often a bit of hanky-panky happening on the side," study co-author Richard Reina, head of the ecophysiology and conservation research group at Monash University in Australia, said in a statement. "However, after a poor reproductive season they may try to find a new partner for the next season to increase their breeding success."

Related: Meet 'small diver': One of the tiniest penguins ever discovered

Researchers believe penguins divorce for various reasons, including reproductive failure and environmental stress, which can all make penguin pairs less stable. In the long-term, separation can enhance reproductive success by allowing the penguins to find more compatible or "higher quality" mates, the study authors wrote.

However, problems arise for the colony when lots of penguins get divorced during the same season. Separated penguins must spend time searching for mates and engaging in courtship displays, which delays breeding. The study authors also wrote that there's a risk of "no breeding familiarity" and "reduced reproductive efficiency" during the early stages of a new coupling. In other words, new couples aren't as good at breeding and producing offspring as couples that have spent more time together.

Hundreds of divorces

For the new study, Reina and colleagues monitored a site called "Penguin Parade" on the west side of Phillip Island, where visitors can watch penguins waddle back from the ocean to their nests. The team documented almost 250 penguin divorces out of about 1,000 pairs included in the study, with higher divorce rates during less productive breeding seasons and lower rates during more productive breeding seasons.

The team found that other factors weren't as good or consistent at predicting reproductive success. The time penguins spent feeding impacted breeding, but in contrasting ways depending on whether the eggs had hatched, while environmental factors such as sea surface temperature had no significant effect during the study period. The authors noted that their results emphasize the need for an integrated approach to studying seabird reproductive success that considers individual behavior and social dynamics alongside environmental cues.

"Our results also suggest that monitoring divorce rates could offer a valuable, noninvasive tool for tracking reproductive trends in seabirds, particularly in populations facing fluctuating environmental conditions," the study authors wrote.

Name: Turkey vulture (Cathartes aura)

Where it lives: Southern Canada to southernmost South America

What it eats: The carcasses of dead animals

Why it's awesome: These scavenger birds have an unexpected way of keeping predators away — by projectile vomiting stomach acid and semi-digested meat at their attackers.

Turkey vultures live in a range of habitats, including subtropical forests, shrublands and deserts. They have bald heads so that when they feast on carcasses, blood and guts don't get trapped in their feathers.

Like many other species of vulture, these birds feed on the remains of already dead animals, rather than killing prey themselves.

Despite their large size — with wingspans reaching around 5.5 feet (1.7 meters) — they're also preyed upon by other birds, including eagles, owls and hawks. But these vultures have a nifty escape mechanism. When they're threatened or scared, turkey vultures regurgitate a foul, acidic substance that can sting a predator's eyes and skin. Their gastric acid is as strong as battery acid and 100 times stronger than the acid found in human stomachs, which helps the birds neutralize the toxins found in their diet of decaying meat, such as anthrax and botulism.

They can propel this vomit up to 10 feet (3 m) away to distract and deter attackers. However, vomiting also enables these birds to quickly lighten their body weight, so they can take flight and escape more easily.

These birds also use their bodily fluids in other ways. Turkey vultures defecate and urinate on their own feet to cool them down in hot weather. Because the vultures' digestive juices kill bacteria, pooping on their legs also works as an antiseptic wash after standing on carcasses.

These scavengers find food using their sight and keen sense of smell. They fly low so they can detect the gasses produced by the early stages of decay in dead animals. According to a study published in the journal Ecosystem Services in 2022, vultures prevent tens of millions of metric tons of carbon emissions each year by eating carcasses before they decompose and release greenhouse gases.

Unlike other birds, turkey vultures lay their eggs on the ground and hide them in vegetation, caves or hollowed-out trees. Although they are social birds that live in groups, they lack a syrinx — the vocal organ of birds. So instead of birdsong, they communicate in grunts and hisses.

Scientists have uncovered the biggest mass die-off of a single species in the modern era, with 4 million common murre (Uria aalge) being wiped out by a brutal marine heat wave known as "the Blob" that lasted for about two years between 2014 and 2016.

These seabirds, often likened to flying penguins because of their striking black-and-white plumage, once crowded rocky shores, dived into frigid waters for fish, and nested in bustling colonies. But now, their vibrant presence has faded, revealing a stark vulnerability.

In the wake of the Blob, these iconic colonies have seen a drastic decline, with some populations now just a quarter of their former size.

The devastation began in late 2014, when the Blob took hold in the northeast Pacific. Ocean temperatures soared by 7 degrees Fahrenheit (around 4 degrees Celsius), disrupting the entire ecosystem. Phytoplankton, the foundation of the marine food web, dwindled, which, in turn, triggered a catastrophic collapse in forage fish, the murres' primary food source.

By 2015 and 2016, starvation swept through common murre populations, and beaches from Alaska to California became littered with their carcasses. Researchers with the University of Washington's Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team documented 62,000 dead murres in a single year. In some areas, strandings exceeded 1,000 times the usual rate — a staggering figure that hinted at the scale of the crisis.

Still, the true scale of the disaster remained unclear until a recent study led by Heather Renner, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In their research, published Dec. 12 in the journal Science, the team used decades of colony-based surveys to paint a grim picture: The Blob killed an estimated 4 million murres — half of Alaska's murre population.

Related: More than 10 billion snow crabs starved to death off the coast of Alaska. But why?

In the Gulf of Alaska, murre colony sizes dropped by 50%, while in the eastern Bering Sea, losses reached a devastating 75%, the team found. "We knew right away this was a big, unprecedented die-off," Renner said in a statement. "We just didn't know how big."

The die-off was four to eight times larger than initial estimates, making it one of the largest single-species wildlife mortality events ever documented.

"To put this in perspective,” Renner said, "the common murre die-off was approximately 15 times larger than the number of seabirds killed during the Exxon Valdez oil spill, an environmental disaster of epic proportions."

Seven years after the heat wave, there is still no sign of recovery. Renner's team continues to monitor seabird colonies, but the outlook remains grim. Images accompanying the study offer stark visual evidence: One pair of images shows a colony of murre on South Island in the Semidi Islands, photographed in 2014 and again in 2021, with a dramatic reduction in individuals.

"We hoped to see more of a recovery to previous population numbers by now," Renner notes. The ecosystem, she suggested, may no longer be able to sustain such large murre populations. Smaller colonies face heightened vulnerability to predators and environmental stress, further complicating recovery efforts.

"Whether the warming comes from a heat wave, El Niño, Arctic sea ice loss or other forces, the message is clear: Warmer water means massive ecosystem change and widespread impacts on seabirds," study co-author Julia Parrish, a biologist at the University of Washington, said in a statement. "The frequency and intensity of marine bird mortality events is ticking up in lockstep with ocean warming."

A bizarre photograph captures the moment a secretary bird (Sagittarius serpentarius) closes its third eyelid as it catches a locust midflight. The image is one of the winners of the 2024 Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition, which is run in collaboration with the Royal Photographic Society, and recognizes images showing hidden scientific phenomena in the natural world.

The secretary bird was captured by biologist and photographer Peter Hudson, who was named winner of the ecology and environmental science category.

"Secretary birds are closely related to falcons but have evolved a stork-like mode of life, where they stalk around the savannah and feed on locusts, lizards and amphibians by punching them on the ground," Hudson said in a statement emailed to Live Science. "This bird has just caught a locust, and as it swallows its prey, it synchronously closes its third eyelid, the nictitating membrane, across its eyes to protect them from damage."

Related: Shoebill: The human-sized African bird that eats baby crocodiles and kills its siblings

Secretary birds are large birds of prey — reaching around 4 feet (1.2 meters) in height — with an eagle-like body that sits on long, crane-like legs. They're native to sub-Saharan Africa and, while they can fly, they spend most of their time walking through long grasses looking for food.

Hudson's image reveals the bird's third eyelid, which looks like a blue ball sitting in the eye socket. According to the National Audubon Society, the third eyelid sits beneath the upper and lower lids. It's hinged at the inner side of the eye and moves horizontally across the eyeball to keep it free of dust, wind and hazards — giving the eyelids the nickname "nature's goggles."

An aerial image of four sharks hunting in a school of fish was named overall winner of the competition. It was taken by Angela Albi, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany who studies interactions between sharks and fish.

"Just after sunrise or before sundown, the shallow waters of the Maldives become a clear, see-through surface," she said in the statement. "These are also the moments when we best observe the interactions between reef sharks and their prey. In this frame, captured during a research trip in 2024, a shark on the far left shifts suddenly from swimming calmly within the school to initiating a hunt, its body posture standing out from the others. While we still don't know what triggers these attacks, we analyze videos to study how sharks hunt and how their prey responds collectively."

The winners from the astronomy, earth science and microimaging categories can be seen below.

For centuries, people have claimed that, when faced with danger, ostriches (Struthio species) stick their heads in the sand to hide. This vivid image led to the popular phrase "bury your head in the sand" to describe when someone refuses to face their problems head-on.

This belief about ostriches may have been created by the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, also known as Gaius Plinius Secundus, who completed one of the earliest collections of encyclopedias, according to ABC science. In Book 10 of "The Natural History," he describes an ostrich hiding its head in the bushes to appear invisible.

"They have the marvellous property of being able to digest every substance without distinction, but their stupidity is no less remarkable; for although the rest of their body is so large, they imagine, when they have thrust their head and neck into a bush, that the whole of the body is concealed," he wrote, according to one translation of the text.

But do ostriches really bury their heads? No, they do not, but they sometimes look like they are.

Ostriches are found in Africa and live in a variety of habitats, including grasslands, savannas and deserts. They are the world's largest birds, weighing up to 287 pounds (130 kilograms), and they can grow up to 9 feet (2.7 meters) tall, according to San Diego Zoo. However, their heads are relatively small, and they do have a few behaviors that, from a distance, may look like they are burying their heads.

Related: 12 of the biggest birds on Earth

Unlike nest-building birds, ostriches dig shallow holes in the sand or dirt to lay their eggs. Both parents rotate the eggs several times a day to ensure they are kept warm. This behavior may, from afar, look like they have their heads buried.

Ostriches also spend most of their time with their heads close to the ground as they look for food, including grasses and, occasionally, small animals, such as mice, frogs and insects.

They are the fastest-running birds in the world, with a maximum speed of 43 mph (70 km/h) according to Smithsonian's National Zoo. In the wild, ostriches have many natural predators — including cheetahs, lions and leopards — and if they're in danger, ostriches often run away.

If they cannot escape, they sometimes lie extremely flat on the ground, with their necks extended, to blend in with the terrain. Some reports suggest that adult ostriches use their wings to disturb the dust underneath them, creating a cloud to distract nearby predators away from their chicks. They can even deliver a kick strong enough to kill a lion.

So, in reality, ostriches rely on their speed and keen senses to detect and escape predators; they have no need to bury their heads.

The rapid evolution of cicadas' flight ability may have been spurred by the emergence of predatory birds, new research suggests.

These insects' bodies and wing shapes changed dramatically over the course of 160 million years, at the same time birds began to dominate the skies as aerial predators, according to the research, published Friday (Oct. 25) in the journal Science Advances.

The study analyzed changes in giant cicadas in the Dunstaniidae and Palaeontinidae families during the Mesozoic era (252 million to 66 million years ago). They found that cicadas in the early Cretaceous may have become 39% faster — and had 19% more flight muscle mass — than their ancestors in the late Jurassic, 60 million years before.

The research suggests predation by birds drove this rapid development in an evolutionary "air race," culminating in cicadas that more closely resembled modern species.

Overall, the research aimed to shed light on the evolution of wings. Wings have evolved independently four times: in insects, flying reptiles called pterosaurs, birds and other dinosaurs with wings, and bats. But the evolution of these traits is hard to study. Wings often don't fossilize well, and "to calculate the flight ability of extinct insects is really challenging," Chunpeng Xu, a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology and lead author of the study, told Live Science in an email.

But ancient giant cicadas offer a solution. There are over 80 well-documented giant cicada species in the fossil record over the late Mesozoic. Their large, well-preserved wings — some of which span nearly 6 inches (15 centimeters) — make them perfect for studying wing evolution.

For the new research, the team analyzed each species, mapping 300 data points on the wing to track changes over time. They concluded that the giant cicadas' body and wing shape evolved to help them become faster and more efficient flyers. Longer, slimmer wings and an increase in flight muscle mass over 60 million years helped the cicadas soar faster, the researchers said.

Related: Are birds dinosaurs?

But this evolution had to be driven by some outside force. "Most species of early birds probably fed regularly, or even exclusively, on insects," Xu said. "They were as small as sparrows, with short, toothed jaws and wide gaping mouths that were well suited for catching insects in the trees."

The emergence of birds that could catch insects midflight around 150 million years ago could have caused cicadas to rapidly evolve adaptations to outmaneuver their new predators, the research suggests.

The work is "very, very cool," Michael Habib, a paleobiologist at UCLA who was not affiliated with the study, told Live Science. But he cautioned that, although the research on increased flight speed is strong, he's less convinced that the cicadas also became more maneuverable. "Fast things tend not to be as good at making sharp turns," he noted.

However, Habib praised the authors' attempts at such complex calculations. "Modeling aerodynamics of fossil animals is hard," he said. "It requires that you really, really understand the relationships between the materials, the anatomy and the flow of these animals … And that has a lot of utility in things like robotics."

Invasive mice are devouring albatrosses alive on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, so conservationists have come up with an explosive solution — "bombing" the mice.

Mice have been wreaking havoc on Marion Island, between South Africa and Antarctica, for decades. Humans accidentally introduced the mice in the 19th century, and the rodents have since developed a taste for wandering albatrosses (Diomedea exulans) and other threatened seabirds.

The Mouse-Free Marion Project, a collaboration between the South African government and BirdLife South Africa, is trying to raise $29 million to drop 660 tons (600 metric tons) of rodenticide-laced pellets onto the island in winter 2027, AFP news agency reported on Saturday (Aug. 24).

The project plans to send a squad of helicopters to drop the pellets. By striking in winter when the mice are most hungry, the conservationists hope to eradicate the entire mouse population of up to 1 million individuals.

"We have to get rid of every last mouse," Mark Anderson, CEO of BirdLife South Africa, told AFP news agency. "If there was a male and female remaining, they could breed and eventually get back to where we are now."

Related: Adult albatrosses found gnawed to death by mice on 3rd remote island

House mice (Mus musculus) first arrived on Marion Island via sealing ships. They began their reign of terror by decimating the island's invertebrates and feasting on seabird eggs. By 2003, the mice were eating seabird chicks alive, and now, a decade later, the mice have figured out they can take on adults, too.

Researchers discovered the carcasses of eight adult wandering albatrosses in April 2023. The birds had deep wounds indicative of mice attacks on their elbows and likely died of secondary infection or starvation. Since then, further reports of adult seabird fatalities show that mouse attacks are escalating.

"Mice just climb onto them and just slowly eat them until they succumb," Anderson said. "We are losing hundreds of thousands of seabirds every year through the mice."

Albatrosses are defenseless against mice because they didn't evolve alongside terrestrial predators. They spend most of their lives at sea, and nesting sites like Marion Island are so isolated that mice and other non-marine mammals couldn't reach them until humans came along. Because the birds evolved to live in an environment where they didn't encounter any terrestrial predators, they don't possess any mechanisms by which they might defend themselves.

A previous attempt to control Marion Island's invasive mice population with cats had dire consequences. Researchers took five cats to the island's meteorological station in 1948, but the offspring of these cats went feral and hunted seabirds as well as mice.

The feral cats bred and spread across the island until they were killing an estimated 455,000 birds a year in the 1970s. Researchers successfully eradicated the cats in 1991.

The rodenticide at the heart of the new eradication strategy, in contrast, should only kill mice because it doesn't affect Marion Island's native invertebrates and the seabirds usually feed at sea.

The dodo, a bird that humans hunted to extinction in the 1600s, wasn't the slow, clueless ball of feathers that has been depicted in popular culture.

By poring through early records and descriptions of the dodo and a related species called the solitaire, researchers cleared up misconceptions about the iconic creatures. It turns out, the vanished birds were powerful and speedy, according to a study published Aug. 14 in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

"Was the Dodo really the dumb, slow animal we've been brought up to believe it was? The few written accounts of live Dodos say it was a fast-moving animal that loved the forest," study author Mark Young, a researcher and professor at the University of Southampton in the U.K., said in a statement.

The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) was the first recorded extinction directly caused by humans and witnessed in real time. When Dutch sailors arrived on Mauritius in 1598, it was teeming with adorably chubby, flightless birds that stood about 3 feet tall (1 meter) and weighed about 45 pounds (20 kilograms), according to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH) in the U.K. As the Dutch colonized the island, they introduced predatory invasive species, chopped down forests, destroyed the dodos' nests and hunted the birds rapaciously. Less than 70 years later, the species was extinct; the last known sighting was in 1662, according to the OUMNH.

For centuries, the dodo has been used as an evolutionary cautionary tale, its name synonymous with ineptness. With no known predators on Mauritius, the story went, the dodo grew large and lost its ability to fly. Its lack of predators also made it too trusting of the new human hunters that had arrived on the island.

Part of the problem is that scientists weren't actually clear about which dodo species actually existed, with several mythological birds being described in early literature, according to the statement. Records of the birds were confusing, inconsistent and unreliable.

To clear that up, the study authors tracked down early specimens, reports of seeing live creatures and early taxonomic descriptions of the species, and sorted fact from fiction. They found that while many species, such as the Nazarene dodo, were fictional, the solitaire (Pezophaps solitaria) — a species that's closely related to the dodo and that some thought was mythological — actually existed and lived on the Mauritian island of Rodrigues.

They also identified an iconic "type specimen" for the dodo — meaning the single preserved specimen that serves as the reference for the species. Using that, they determined that both the dodo and the solitaire were members of the family that includes pigeons and doves.

Using that type specimen, the team also looked at what dodos were actually like, clearing up popular misconceptions about the iconic birds.

"Evidence from bone specimens suggests that the Dodo's tendon which closed its toes was exceptionally powerful, analogous to [those of] climbing and running birds alive today," study co-author Neil Gostling, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Southampton in the U.K., said in the statement. "These creatures were perfectly adapted to their environment."

Understanding the dodo's characteristics and behavior may clarify the role it played in its ecosystem and could even help protect existing endangered birds, the study authors said in the statement.

While the dodo is currently extinct, that may not be true for long. Scientists with Colossal Biosciences are trying to bring back the iconic flightless birds, which they hope to reintroduce to Mauritius to stabilize the ecosystem. The same company is trying to bring back the woolly mammoth.