Two Stories about Birds by Ed Yong

I'm always on the lookout for bits about the physiology or anatomy of a bird that helps explain some unique behavior. Here are a couple of pieces by Ed Yong that fit that bill (sorry).

In this first story, Ed reports on some new thinking about why the New Caledonian crows are even better at innovative tool use than other corvids (crows, ravens, jays, etc.). You've probably seen some of the videos of New Caledonian crows using tools to get morsels of food, even using one tool to get another and using that second tool to get the food. (If you haven't seen the videos, Ed's piece has links to those, too.)

Smarter than the average crow, or just equipped with a face for fishing?

"Our intelligence clearly surpasses those of our primate relatives, even though other apes and monkeys also rank within the highest tiers of animal smarts. Likewise, the corvids – the group of birds that includes crows, ravens, rooks, magpies and jays – have very sophisticated brains for birds, but one species reputedly outclasses the rest. It’s the New Caledonian crow.

"Found in a Pacific island, this crow wields tools in a way that none of its relatives can match. It uses sticks to “fish” for grubs buried in dead wood, and can chosen the right tool for different jobs,combine tools together, and improvise from unusual materials. These abilities have fuelled the New Caledonian crow’s reputation as the top of the corvid class – an unusually intelligent member of an already intelligent family.

"But what if it just has the right face?" ...

And in a second story mentioned in the first one, Ed did a nice job of explaining why vultures, so sharp-sighted, are so very bad at avoiding the blades of the turbines in big wind farms.


Vulture blind spots lead to collisions with wind turbines

"Vultures have such large blind spots in their visual field that they cannot see objects directly in front of them when they fly. This discovery explains why vultures frequently collide with conspicuous structures such as wind turbines and power lines, despite having some of the sharpest eyes of any animal.

"This means that making wind turbines more conspicuous will do little to reduce collisions. 'You can paint them with bright stripes or hang things off them, but that won’t be effective,' says Graham Martin, an ornithologist at the University of Birmingham, UK, who led the study published this week in the journal Ibis. 'You’ve got to keep the birds and the turbines apart.'"