There’s no denying that everything looks cooler in slow motion, but birds of prey on the hunt are particularly mesmerizing through the lens of a high-speed camera. This Goshawk is being lured into attacking a water balloon baited with a piece of meat, and its mid-air maneuvers make even our most advanced fighter planes look primitive.
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Remember the lazy summer days of your youth spent whiling away the hours on your backyard tire swing? It only stands to reason that your local bird population—who are all clearly unemployed—are looking for a lazy spot to hang out too. So this 5.5-inch ceramic tire swing bird feeder is the perfect way to lure them to your yard.
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In Focus collected a whole gallery of beautiful starling murmurations photographs, but this is one of those cases where photography can’t beat seeing thousands of birds in motion. These videos are breathtaking.
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The thing about mad scientists is that they’re both mad and good at science. It seems obvious, but the outcomes are always unexpected. Case and point: this team of Hungarian physicists who created a bunch of autonomous drones that flock like birds. The invasion begins now.
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Take a dip in the salty waters of the Dead Sea, visit a surprisingly musical milking parlor, get swept away by the surreal majesty of "underwater rivers," and go birding in the urban alleyways of Cambodia—all in this week’s landscape reads.
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The world’s largest solar plant is awesome—
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Last week in the California desert, a $2.2 billion solar plant opened that creates electricity by harnessing solar energy. Rather than using traditional solar panels, this facility has hundreds of mirror-like reflectors that shoot the sunlight at a tower filled with water in the center of the mirror arrays.
That water inside the tower is turned into superheated steam by the 1000°F temperatures to turn a steam generator, making electricity. Researchers working on the project said that they expected the heat could result in some dead birds. What they didn’t expect was how many birds would be killed by the massive solar death ray. Unfortunately, dozens of birds with singed and charred feathers have already been recovered at the site.
The birds don’t even have to land on the tower; simply flying through the solar beam will kill them. Researchers are currently conducting a study to determine how to reduce the threat to local avian populations. Until the research is complete, Big Bird should maintain his distance.
[via WSJ]
Meet 007. Not Bond but the bird. But they might just be as smart as one another because the crow can use tools to figure out complex puzzles just as well as a spy. Here’s a crow taking one of the most complex tests for the animal mind ever created. If he succeeds, the BBC says it’ll be a world’s first. Spoiler: he figures it out.
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Swans: elegant symbols of romantic love or terrorizers of plants, small children, and airplanes? The non-native mute swan has been wreaking enough havoc in New York City that the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation wants to declare it a "prohibited invasive species." By 2025, under the proposed plan, there will be virtually no more wild mute swans in all of New York.
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What are you looking at? Some trees, some leaves, a few branches and… a bird. You see, on top of that broken tree branch actually stands a completely still bird, the common potoo. It’s hiding in plain sight and will stay that way even if predators are deathly close to them.
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