Stray Feathers From a Bird Man's Desk

PAGE Introduction 9 Birds Using Tools 15 Birds as Brigands 19 Birds Bathing 22 How Birds Anoint Their Feathers 25 Traveling Birds' Nests 28 Maladaptation in Birds 31 Feathered B...

In Pennsylvania starlings have been seen to come to walnut trees when the nuts were almost three-quarters grown, in June, and peck a hole in the sticky hull of a nut, clip the b...

This covering of the eggs by the parent is not unique in the bird world. The pied-billed grebe of North America also does this. When disturbed at the nest the incubating bird ha...

SUBLEASES The snug, secure cavity that a woodpecker chisels in some tree trunk for its nest will last for many years, a shelter in which tree swallows, house wrens, screech owls...

TAILORING The tailoring is done by birds of quite another group. They are Old World warblers of several sorts, some in southern Asia and some in Africa. The tailoring consists o...

The next winter Jaeger found a poor-will, perhaps the same bird, hibernating in the same niche. Over a period of eighty days, from November 26, 1947, to February 14, 1948, he vi...

Vocal music bulks large in our avian springtime chorus, but don't overlook the instrumental music that accompanies it. The drumming of the downy woodpecker on the dead limb of a...

Then in Britain came a whole host of records, after an observation in Holland in 1946 of curlew sandpipers washing food. The birds were probing the dry mud at the edge of a litt...

Sand grouse, relatives of the pigeons that have adopted the general appearance and habits of quail, live in the Old World, primarily in arid or even desert areas. Where they occ...

To care for the weak, the unfit, and the cripple is usually considered an extremely highly developed altruism in our society. As our society progresses, more and more provisions...

names: appropriateness, 51, 85 available scientific, 85 domestic and foreign, 157 euphony needed, 84 for boats, 84 how given, 51 natural selection not operating, 203 nests: co-o...