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July 31 - August 25, 2024
to learn their songs, songbirds use neural pathways that are similar to those we use to learn to speak.
Crows use the same neural circuits we use to recognize human faces.
In a 2020 study, a group of researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology made a fascinating discovery: they compared the genomes of urban and rural Burrowing Owls in South America and found that the urban birds, which had started colonizing cities just a few decades ago, had evolved variants in ninety-eight different genes important for cognitive function—genes that could well play an important role in adapting to city environments.
Because of human pressures on the natural world, habitat change and climate change, evolution is happening much more quickly than it normally would. It’s a time when species must either adapt or die.
The capacity to make flexible decisions over a lifetime, to learn, shift strategies, explore, and adapt—in the case of urban Burrowing Owls, in a remarkably short period of time—certainly qualifies as a kind of intelligence. And it may be some cause for optimism in the face of the catastrophic changes occurring in the world.
As apex predators, wolves of the sky, owls serve an important ecological role, preventing rodents and other prey from crowding out other species, and maintaining balance and preserving the integrity of ecosystems. They show us the interconnectedness of living things.
Owls may be mirrors of our souls, but they’re also windows into what life was like long ago.
In the owl pellets, Bilney identified the bones and other remains of more than 7,500 individual mammals, many now extinct in the region, revealing enormous changes in the makeup of small-mammal populations.
Just before European settlement, Sooty Owls in Gippsland preyed regularly on at least 28 mammal species. Now their diet in this area consists of only 10 species.
sun.
* Shine on your crazy diamond, Pink Floyd
“Nothing in a forest ever dies . . . It just changes shape.”
Nothing in a forest ever dies . . . It just changes shape.”
“Humans are pretty much the biggest problem for owls around the world,”
brood patch,
