BirdNote Daily

Seabirds have no problem drinking sea water. The salt they take in is absorbed and moves through their blood stream into a pair of salt glands above their eyes. The densely salty fluid is excreted from the nostrils and runs down grooves in the bill. As the drop gets larger, the bird shakes its head to send the salt back to the ocean. A seabird's skull has a pair of grooves for the salt glands...

In the UK for years, milk came in bottles with foil caps. Great Tits, a common songbird, learned how to peck through the foil. The skill spread. But how? Researchers trained Great Tits in different ways of opening a box and re-released them. Knowledge of how to open the box spread rapidly, with most birds copying the trained bird in their group. In a follow-up study, the researchers made one...

During migration, Snow Geese gather in the tens of thousands. They coordinate their movements, flying in a big, compact flock, which makes it harder for a predator to pick off a single bird. It is truly something to see.More info and transcript at BirdNote.org.Want more BirdNote? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter. Sign up for BirdNote+ to get ad-free listening and other perks. BirdNote is a...

Related to shearwaters and petrels, the Northern Fulmar will eat just about anything it finds on the surface of the ocean, from fish and squids to dead whales. While some have snow-white bodies and gray wings, others are dark gray all over. That’s because fulmars are polymorphic, which is to say they come in multiple colors or “morphs”. The difference is genetic and doesn’t depend on age, sex, or...

Long, upward slopes called escarpments offer a good chance of seeing some of the many raptor species found in Belize. Shaped like a compact Red-tailed Hawk, White Hawks are white overall with black markings and scan the landscape for reptile prey. Bat Falcons have a darkly barred chest and cinnamon belly, and chase down swifts, dragonflies, and the bats that give them their name. Ornate...

It’s a wistful moment when your backyard birds — like these Black-capped Chickadees — depart their nestboxes. By October, it’s time for one last duty as nestbox landlord: to clean it out. Cleaning will reduce the incidence of parasites in the box and make it more inviting to next spring’s tenants. It will also help you know for sure if it gets used again.More info and transcript at...

Despite their name, Prairie Warblers nest in tree farms of recently planted pines, in fields overgrown with scattered shrubs, and in clearings under power lines. Biologists call these “early successional” habitats. They’re characterized by plants that are the first to return to land altered by clearing or fire. Prairie Warblers and similar birds have declined rapidly during the last 50 years,...

Evolution works with what's at hand. So if you start with a normal bird skull – bill pointing forward, eyes oriented front or sideways, ears behind eyes – and introduce the challenge of seeing behind your head while your bill is pushed deeply into the soil, what do you get? The American Woodcock! With its long bill constantly probing the soil for earthworms, its entire skull has been rearranged....

When Chidi Paige moved from Nigeria to the U.S., she began running a youth STEM program and had to teach lessons on bird identification. She was in for a challenge: she had to learn the local bird species quickly. On a birding trip, she spotted a Northern Yellow Warbler in a pine tree. The beautiful warbler got Chidi hooked on birding. She has designed several games to make learning bird...

Gnatcatchers are tiny, black and gray songbirds native to the Americas. Though they don’t typically catch gnats on the wing, gnatcatchers are often found moving rapidly through the high canopy as they glean insects from leaves. There are four species found in the U.S. and Canada: Blue-gray Gnatcatchers, Black-tailed Gnatcatchers, Black-capped Gnatcatchers, and California Gnatcatchers. It takes...