Spectacular Mumuration of Starlings - Scotland

Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith were out for a paddle when they witnessed the most amazing murmuration of starlings dancing through the sky.

Science has yet to explain how the starlings choreograph these wondrous movements, which occur every autumn over Scotland, but it is enough for now to simply watch and enjoy.

Gyrfalcons are 'secret seabirds'

The world's largest falcon, the fast, taloned gyrfalcon, is a secret seabird, scientists have discovered.

Gyrfalcons living in the high Arctic overwinter out at sea, spending long periods living and hunting on pack ice.

It is the first time any falcon species has been found regularly living at sea.

The birds likely rest on the ice and hunt other seabirds such as gulls and guillemots, over what appears to be one of the largest winter ranges yet documented for any raptor.

Some gyrfalcons actually spend large amounts of time living and hunting over the ocean”

Ornithologist Kurt Burnham

"I was very surprised by this finding," said ornithologist Kurt Burnham who made the discovery. "These birds are not moving between land masses, but actually using the ice floes or pack ice as winter habitat for extended periods of time."

"Previously, all species of falcon were considered to be land-based birds."

Dr Burnham of the High Arctic Institute, Illinois US and the University of Oxford, UK, together with colleague Professor Ian Newton of Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Oxford, studied the seasonal movements of gyrfalcons (Falco rusticolus) by tagging 48 birds with radio transmitters.

This allowed them to track the movements of the birds living in three areas of Greenland: Thule in the northwest, Kangerlussuaq in the west, and Scoresbysund in the east.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s both!

New research suggests that a bird-shaped airplane — with angled wings and a fatter body — would make the modern plane more fuel efficient.

Geoffrey Spedding, an engineer at the University of Southern California, spoke about this discovery — and how it could change the way we fly.


How did you discover that a bird-shaped design would make planes more efficient?
To start at the beginning, Joachim Huyssen [of North-West University] in South Africa was wondering about efficient aerodynamic designs and whether the current dominant configuration is the best available.

There are several features of that design that are aerodynamically not convenient and not optimal. The best possible [design] from an aerodynamic point of view is a wing by itself.

You would think then the best possible airplane would be a flying wing, and, in fact, flying wings have been made but the difficulty is two-fold:

• You have to make the wing so big to pack people and cargo in that you end up wasting a lot of space. The waste of space causes aerodynamic drag, the airplane is more heavy than it should be. Your optimal design turns out to be not optimal after all.
• All existing airplanes have this tail plane in back. The purpose of the tail plane is to provide pitch stability. The nose goes up or the nose goes down — you control that with the tail plane. This comparatively little tail plane sits at the end of a long body on the conventional plane. The purpose of the long body is to carry the tail plane and put it a long way [from the plane's center of gravity], so it has a large effect. But that’s a really inefficient way to do business. All the time you’re dragging this tail plane through the air, its only purpose is to make sure you don’t pitch up or down. It doesn’t otherwise do any good and it forces you to have a long, cigar-shaped body, which is not the best shape a body can be.

Article Continued here It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s both! - SmartPlanet

Big Beautiful Boobies are back from the brink

The Mark Twain of gannets (Image: T.E. Steeves)

IT HAPPENED to me and it happened to Mark Twain, now it has happened to an enigmatic species of gannet: Reports of its death, it seems, are greatly exaggerated.

The Tasman booby (Sula dactylatra tasmani) was first described in 1988 from fossils found on Lord Howe and Norfolk Islands, off the east coast of Australia, but it was believed to be extinct in the late 18th century, after being hunted and eaten by Dutch sailors.

Having finished exterminating the Dodo, the Dutch sailors from the East India Company moved on to other islands in the region, to continue their colonial plundering of the peoples, flora, fauna and natural resources.

Now, a team of geneticists, palaeontologists and naturalists has declared the bird very much alive and well. It's strong sense of survival enabled it to retain it's meagre existence, living among its fossil ancestors on both islands, and also on New Zealand's Kermadec Islands to the east.

(Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2009.0478).