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American Woodcock demonstrates "distal rhynchokinesis," the ability to flex the end of its bill. This allows it to grab earthworms it encounters when probing in soil. Other shorebirds, including Dunlins & Sanderlings, can bend their bills in this way. 😃

Cold War overproduction of nukes is commonly attributed to fears of a "missile gap," despite this being obviously farcical. In reality, this was mere cover for the real reasons: the USSR, as the world's first atheist state, needed a much larger deterrent to keep the angelic legions of heaven at bay, whereas the US's pioneering work on quantum mechanics led to a tense standoff with dozens of different parallel USSRs that threatened to attack simultaneously.

For something a bit different, here's a silly little video of a silver gull hunting flies. The area had been hit by a storm recently which washed massive amounts of kelp and other sea weed onto the beach which in turn attracted enormous numbers of flies.

Ducks don't actually know how to swim they just look for the water that's thick enough to stand on and put on their little show, which of course I no longer fall for

I just can't suspend my disbelief about anteaters. It doesn't make any sense that a mammal that huge can keep its body sustained eating just ants and termites. "Oh but they raid hundreds of nests per day and eat thousands and thousands of them!" Dude, I feel like even you must know you're reaching here. Come on.

It's a shame, because the idea is genuinely really cool, a big fluffy guy whose main deal is slurping up insects with its crazy tongue, what's not to love. But they went too far and felt the need to make that gimmick its ENTIRE food supply, and then it just... doesn't work! Nobody would be complaining if it ALSO ate some berries or something every once in a while! Your worldbuilding is allowed to have some nuance!

And I guess they tried to address this when they made the aardvark by introducing the aardvark cucumber, which is a special melon-looking fruit that only aardvarks care about and which supplements their mostly insect-based diet. Which... okay to be honest I think that's a really ham-fisted and dumb solution, but at least it's something.

There was another, on the bin just behind it, but someone with a dog startled it off. 'The fucking size of it ...!' wheezed the someone, as it lifted off over our heads. I guess they weren't really looking before. It's hard for me to get into the head of someone who isn't paying close attention to every single gull they see, but I had a go just then and tried to imagine the sudden shock of what amounts to a piece of scenery twisting free of the background, shoulders rippling with a fine muscular strain as it pushes against the weft of the air, rising, falling slightly, rising, falling slightly, rising and falling and finally accelerating up out into the vast unclosed parenthesis of the sky.

Yeah, no, I couldn't quite hack it, lol.

Mischief and craft are plainly seen to be characteristics of this creature.

—Claudius Aelianus, third century A.D., writing about the octopus

Fun fact: You can fit a barn owl inside a Quaker oats container.

Some of their tail and wings will stick out a bit but the whole rest of the bird fits inside ao this is a sound method to use when banding youngsters who are near fledging (and thus adult sized).

depiction of the sopping nasty muddy robin i saw building a nest

part of American Robin nest-building involves sitting down in it to shape it, and when your nest is lined/mortared with mud that means its a full body experience. they also carry big gobs of mud in their bills.

The dissertation is officially real!

[https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/93366974] Anhinga || Anhinga anhinga Observed in United States Least Concern in location of observation

Completely unperturbed by my presence. Check out all his majesty

Untitled Wednesday Library Series, Part 151

Ian Newton's Population Ecology of Raptors, published in 1979 by T. & A. D. Poyser, Ltd., a publisher specialized in ornithology about which there's a surprisingly tidy little Wikipedia article.

The How

As I mentioned last week, I found this next to the book I featured last week. I'm pretty sure this is the one I picked up and waved around at @krieper to signal a Bird Find, but I suppose it could've been the tern one instead. The treachery of memory. You understand.

The Text

'Raptors' here stands for an obsolete version of the order Falconiformes, which included the families Cathartidae (American vultures and condors), Pandionidae (the osprey), Accipitridae (hawks, kites, buzzards, eagles, and Eurasian and African vultures), Sagittariidae (the secretarybird), and Falconidae (caracaras, falcons, and falconets). The author acknowledges that this grouping is probably paraphyletic — a good and correct notion; more recent work has split his subjects across two orders — but the systematics aren't really the point. Unlike last week's feature and despite its similarities to this week's, neither is behavioral evolution. This is very straightforwardly a population ecology book. Hence, like, the title, I guess.

To that end, lots and lots of summaries of breeding and migration studies, as well as of then-current conservation work, including and especially efforts concerning DDT and other organochlorides. The focus is mainly but not entirely on British bird populations and management practices, and mainly but not entirely on perspectives well represented in the contemporary literature about them. Nothing revolutionary, but all (it seems to me) competently collated.

The Object

Very British, though subtly so. Some of that impression is down to the copy style, but the graph layout and illustrations don't hurt either. The type is all 10/11 pt. VIP Melior, which as far as I can tell is a branch of Hermann Zapf's Melior family that ITC sold for variable input typesetting machines.

Lots of photos (in 32 plates, most doubled) from lots of people, some of which are even OK to look at. The photos, that is. The illustrations (one per chapter, plus the cover, frontispiece, and a couple spares), all by one Jim Gammie, are a great complement to Netwon's prose and really tie the whole thing together. Figures (50) and tables (68) are mostly legible and occasionally really cool.

Orange endpapers; black bookcloth; gold spine detailing; thin but not flimsy paper printed by photolithography. The previous owner wrapped the jacket in a proper paper/mylar protector, which means I don't have to do it myself. Nice.

The Why, Though?

I mean, it's birds of prey.

Not all of them are birds of prey I've got meaningful access to, but some of them are, and what does that matter anyway? This is more of a goes-on-the-bird-shelf-to-fill-out-the-bird-shelf kind of thing than a cover-to-cover read, but I've been meaning to put more mid-level bird taxa in my head and this is fine for that, outdated though it otherwise is.

It doesn't hurt that it's a looker, of course. If this series had any themes or motifs — it doesn't, but hypothetically — one would be that I care more about pretty things than I care to admit.

A spoon's only objective in life is to make soup go upwards, and it knows this. That's why when you put one under a running tap it blasts the water way high. The spoon thinks there's suddenly TONS of soup to deal with and it freaks out.

Red-tailed Comet (Sappho sparganurus)

A brilliant hummingbird belonging to tribe Lesbiini of subfamily Lesbiinae, the "coquette" hummingbirds. Primarily resident in the Andes from central Bolivia south into northern Argentina, as well as on isolated mountains of Córdoba.

Photo: Evelyn Henriquez ML503935561

imagine you're a chat and you ditch your chat spouse to go to the chat nightclub to have a hot chat date and you see your chat spouse there who is also ditching you. wyd

(from the Yellow-breasted Chat account in Birds of the World)

love learning about odd-couple interspecies joint-nesting events

nesties (nest besties)

Grunt twice if you like cormorants

Sandhill cranes from L.A. Portenko Birds of the Chukchi Peninsula and Wrangel Island v.1 (1981).

Full text here.