Factoids

• Precocial birds like chickens, ostriches, ducks, and seagulls hatch ready to move around. They come from eggs with bigger yolks than altricial birds like owls, woodpeckers, and most small songbirds that need a lot of care from parents in order to survive.
• There are only about 4,000 kinds of mammals. This sounds like a lot, but when you consider there are 21,000 kinds of fish and a whopping 800,000 kinds of insects you’ll realize mammals are a pretty small class!
• The Blue Whale, Balaenoptera musculus, is the largest mammal living today. It is also the largest mammal to have ever lived. In fact the Blue whale is the largest animal ever to have lived on the planet as far as we know; bigger by far than even the largest Dinosaur. The longest Blue Whale ever measured was a female, 110ft long. The heaviest weighed over 190 tons. We haven’t actually got a set of weighing scales big enough so weights are estimated from the cut up remains.
• Fish have been on the earth for more than 450 million years. Fish were well established long before dinosaurs roamed the earth. It is estimated that there may still be over 15,000 fish species that have not yet been identified. There are more species of fish than all the species of amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals combined. About 40% of all fish species inhabit fresh water, yet less than .01% of the earth’s water is fresh water.
• Most reptiles are carnivores, and eat whole prey or insects. Some reptiles (adult green iguanas, for example), are herbivores and eat green plants. The shape of a reptile’s pupil indicates whether the animal is active at night or during the day. Most reptiles active at night have slitlike pupils that can be closed almost completely in bright light. Reptiles active in daytime have round pupils. Most reptiles have good vision, and some can tell the difference among colors.
• Amphibians include frogs, toads, salamanders and caecilians. The word means double life—many species spend part of their life in aquatic (water) and terrestrial (land) environments. Because their skin lacks a shell, scales or outer drier covering, most amphibians live in wet or damp situations to prevent dehydration.

• Teach, teach, teach-er is the song of the Ovenbird. Ovenbirds are found mostly in the Eastern parts of North America. The Ovenbird eats mostly insects and plant matter. Domed nests can be found on the ground or in deciduous and evergreen trees. A nest is shaped like an old-fashion oven.

• For more than 40,000 years before European navigators visited the shores of the Great South Land, Aborigines occupied Australia, including its arid deserts, tropical rainforests, coastal plains, mountains, and especially its major river systems. Estimates by anthropologists put the population of Australian Aborigines before 1770 at more than 300,000. They spoke 500 different languages grouped in thirty-one related language families.
Aborigines were completely at home in their surroundings and had no trouble "living off the land." This was mainly because of their intimate knowledge of the topography and natural resources of their tribal territories, and their complete understanding of the habits of the animals they hunted. The Australian aborigines extensively used insects from their surroundings as food, medicine, and as part of their cultural beliefs. However, most data concerning the use of insects by Australian Aborigines occur as scattered references in various anthropological, gastronomical, and pharmaceutical sources.
Insects have been consumed as food in many parts of the world, and insects consumed directly as food was probably the most important use of insects to the Australian Aborigines. An interesting example of mass harvesting of edible insects is the moth feasts that occurred in the Bogong mountains of New South Wales. The Bogong moth, Agrotis infusa, aestivated in large numbers every year in rock shelters of these mountains. From November to January, hundreds of Aborigines from different tribes would gather for huge feasts on these adult moths. Rock crevices were covered with layers of these moths, which were collected by dislodging and then collecting the moths from the cave of crevice floor. Moths were then cooked in sand and stirred in hot ashes, which singed off the wings and legs. Moths were then sifted on a net to remove their heads. In this state, they were generally eaten, although sometimes they were ground into a paste and made into cakes. As a food, the Bogong moth was rich in fat, with the average fat content of the male’s abdomens exceeding sixty-one percent, and of females, fifty-one percent of their dry weight.

Bird Droppings

How Do Thousands Of Starlings Fly Without Colliding?
You’ve probably seen it and scratched your head in amazement—a massive flock of starlings, often just before sundown, darting around in the sky in an impossibly complicated pattern, like a school of sardines trying to evade a shark.
It’s likely you’ve wondered why the birds never crash into each other, or why no stragglers ever get left behind, or how the birds seem to always maintain their place despite the shifting shape and density of the flock.
Physicist Andrea Cavagna also asked those questions, probably getting a stiff neck from staring into the dusky sky over his native Rome, watching the birds overhead. He was so intrigued by the mystery, in fact, that he spent the past three years trying to crack the code.
Now, he is happy to report, he has the key to the puzzle. STARFLAG: Starlings in Flight—a collaboration of seven European institutes that he led under the direction of the Italian National Institute for the Physics of Matter—has come up with some answers.
What’s the starling secret?
The secret is that the starlings, whether there are 100 in the flock or 10,000, use a tracking system that helps them maintain their distance from the seven other birds around them, regardless of the distance between them.
If the flock is under attack from a predator—in Rome, for example, the birds are often targeted by Peregrine Falcons—they will spread apart. At other times, such as when the flock is making a tight maneuver or directional change, they will merge much more closely together.
"They do these incredible maneuvers but they never lose birds, they are always with the flock no matter how drastically they change the shape or the intensity, they always stay together."
After one year of studying the data collected in the two previous years of the study, Cavagna said the researchers have come to the conclusion the birds base every movement on what their wing-mates are doing.
"They always interact with six or seven birds irrespective of what is the distance of these seven birds," he says.
That means that after an attack has taken place, and the flock has expanded, it can regroup very quickly because cohesion doesn’t rely strictly on the distance between the birds.
Previous research held that each bird interacted with all other birds within a certain physical distance surrounding it.
Researchers collected their data in Rome, using cameras mounted on the roofs of buildings in neighborhoods where starlings often perform their aerial acrobatics.
The flocks were photographed at the same time by multiple cameras, using a rate of 10-frames-per-second.