Hasta La Gadget!

Allis Markham is a taxidermist for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. She also owns Prey, a taxidermy shop and school. Allis’ friend Emily is a fan of Game of Thrones, so she decided to give her a unique gift: a three-eyed crow.

After preparing the deceased crow’s body through procedures that would make Saw look like Teletubbies had the bird been alive, Allis cut a hole on the bird’s head, set a third crow eye on the exposed skull with clay and then made an eye ring using Apoxie Sculpt. As a final touch, she had the crow perch on a copy of A Feast for Crows.

Warg this way to Imgur to see Allis’ grisly photos of her process. If you don’t want to see the icky parts, work your way down the gallery slowly. You’ll know when to stop, because you’ll hear yourself screaming.

[via Geekologie]

We’ve seen a hexacopter with six legs, but this quadcopter takes after birds instead of spiders. This particular quadcopter is Vishwa Robotics’ test unit. New Scientist reports that the company is developing leg add-ons for “small US air force drones.” The legs will allow drones to perch on branches, wires and other objects in order to survey and conserve energy.

Vishwa Robotics founder Bhargav Gajjar modeled the legs after those of the American kestrel. A computer controls the drone’s landing based on footage from a camera mounted on the drone: “Just like a real bird, the drone has to brake sharply just above its landing site and perform a controlled stall in order to touch down.” The legs’ strong claws allow a drone to stay upright without using any power. In addition, drones can also use the legs to walk short distances.

Vishwa Robotics is also testing its legs on fixed-wing drones, bringing us that much closer to seeing tiny Valkyries.

[via New Scientist via Gigaom]

These unusual ice cream flavors were unveiled by at the Small Bird Expo in Osaka, Japan by Torimi Cafe: sparrow, parakeet, and cockateil. Sounds exotic, doesn’t it?

Before you wrinkle your nose in disgust, note that the ice cream wasn’t made with these actual birds as the ingredients. Instead, the ice cream is actually made using the type of food that the birds eat. The sparrow-flavored ice cream is flavored with grains and marshmallow; the parakeet ice cream has honey and apple thrown into the mix; while the cockatiel ice cream contains pumpkin and sunflower seeds mixed in.

As for the taste, Torimi Cafe describes the sparrow ice cream as giving you “the feeling of pressing the breast of a java sparrow into your mouth.” Parakeet apparently feels like “eating some vanilla ice cream in one hand and then taking a whiff of a parakeet in your other hand,” while cockatiel is like when “you’re sleeping with your mouth open and your cockatiel runs over your face and gets its leg in your mouth.”

I don’t think those descriptions sound particularly appetizing, although they are quite fun to read.

[via Incredible Things]

While there has been advances made in the world of robotics, we are not quite on the cusp of a robotic apocalypse just yet. Still, this does not detract from the good work that was done by different research groups, including a Maryland professor’s robot bird that is said to be good enough to fool the real thing, as you can see for yourself in the video above. This robotic bird is able to dive and roll in such a realistic manner, that other birds have actually thought it was a rival, and attacked it in mid-flight.

The brainchild of Professor Satyandra Gupta who has this great love for birds, he decided to put his skills as a professor of mechanical engineering to good use at the University of Maryland. Calling it the Robo Raven, this is a labor of love that has taken a good eight years to complete, where he obviously met with his fair share of failures in the past. It would be interesting to see how the Robo Raven will be used in everyday life, although I suspect that the military might find it useful for their purposes.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Japan Government Look To Robots For Home Based Medical Care, Japan Plans To Build Robot Nurses To Help Care Givers Assist Elderly Patients,

What’s not to love about birds? Many are beautiful to look at and even some of the tiny creatures flit around from flower-to-flower, pollinating the world and making it a prettier, greener place for all us humans to live in.

So why not lend a hand and provide them with some accommodations in exchange for their help in keeping our world a prettier place, as it should be? No worries if you’re not very handy with a hammer and therefore, find yourself unable to build your own birdhouse, because Klaas Kuiken’s ceramic birdhouse roof tiles are here!

They’re basically roof tiles with a small birdhouse built into the top of the tile itself. If you have a couple of shingles that are up for repair, then why not be a good neighbor to the birds in your neighborhood and replace them with these tiles instead?

Klaas first designed these quirky clay birdhouses in 2009, but now they’re finally available for purchase. You can check his site for ordering information, but you’d better hurry, because only 100 birdhouses have been produced so far.

[via Colossal]