Despite having a brain about the size of a walnut, a raven’s cognitive ability is comparable to a great ape’s. Some even refer to ravens as “feathered apes.”
As recently as the 1970s, hunters killed 1.5 million woodcock yearly, and to this day hunters and archers throughout Massachusetts hunt woodcock during its hunting season from early October through late November.
Ninety percent of a sharp-shinned hawk’s diet is small birds, from the size of a sparrow to the size of a robin, and the larger females might even prey upon a pigeon or dove. Adult hawks need to eat four or five birds each day.
Eastern coyotes appear in a range of colors from dark brown to reddish to grayish and even white – from a recessive gene also found in golden retrievers like the one that in Newfoundland that ran off with a coyote in 2001 and was never seen again.
What was this cute little songbird doing here in Cambridge? No one knows, but it got people’s attention – and now we’re paying attention to a very different aspect of ornithology and a sometimes grim history.
Unique among birds, tiny chickadees’ have brains that grow and shed neurons – and memories of where food is stored – so they’re not too heavy to fly with. Yet other species flock with chickadees for their valuable information.
Our dogs are funny, with their butt-smelling and sometimes bizarre eating habits, but each of their peculiar traits are astonishing, with a basis in thousands of years of evolution from Eurasian wolves as many as 30,000 years ago.
World War II bomber crews carried pigeons into battle wearing oxygen masks and heated suits at 20,000 feet – while even at temperatures 45 degrees below zero, the birds just fluffed their feathers and closed their eyes, suffering no apparent ill effects.