- Birds are literally afraid of being watched
- Butterfly wing “eyes” are meant to scare birds
- Nature needs a balance of occasional destruction with time to recover
- Fuzziness is needed to imagine other lives
- Wrens are very productive and promiscuous
- Birds with big eyes can “see” the day earlier and so sing earlier
- Bird eyes are huge!
- They sing in a combination of preference and when there is room in for them in the acoustic space
- “Singing is expensive”
- Males tend to sing more often than females
- Female robin sing to be fed; the longer the male ignores her the louder and closer to the border she sings
- Owls auditory nerve runs by the optical center so they may “see” sound
- Owls can’t see well in the dark (about the same as us), instead they rely almost entirely on sound and memory
- Ravens evolved with us
- Juvenile ravens roam in murders looking for food and new territories
- They will mob resident crows to get their way, but only if they have the numbers
- Bird perception is really high; eels are around 14 pulse a second, humans are 60, birds are over 100
- Birds have two voice boxes with incredible precision
- Parts of the brain that control song expand in the spring and contract in the fall
- For some birds, they are born with a compass but have to learn the route
- Song birds needs a little blue light (starlight) to effectively “see” the magnetosphere, leading to them migrating mostly at night
- Bird feeders and houses reshape the local population to the birds who favor the food or are aggressive
- The best way to promote native birds is to provide native food
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