Latest Flightless birds Stories
Courtship calls tell penguin females how fat a male is and what kind of father he'll beHow does a female penguin choose a mate? Courtship calls help females decide which males are likely to be devoted dads, says a study in the journal Behaviour.Antarctic penguins come on land for just a few short months each summer to breed and raise their chicks. Raising a family in the coldest place on earth is no small feat. Adelie penguins pull it off by tag-team parenting, the researchers explained....
A colony of threatened penguins in South Africa have a little less too worry about after a ban has been placed on purse-seine fishing around the local region, according to marine biologists on Wednesday. The African penguin population dropped by 60 percent in the last 9 years, due to human fish trawling and climate change that is taking a toll on their local food supply. A drop in anchovies and sardines, means a drop in African penguins. There are an estimated 26,000 surviving pairs remaining...
Authorities in Mississippi said they had to handcuff an emu and shock it with a Taser to remove the ostrich-like flightless bird from a roadway. Scott County sheriff's deputies said they initially received reports Friday of two emus on Interstate 20 and Highway 80, but they were unable to locate either of the animals until further calls Sunday placed one of the birds on the I-20 on-ramp in Forest, WBLT-TV, Jackson, Miss., reported Tuesday. Officer Kiley Culpepper said deputies had to use...
Jessica Meir goes to extreme environments to learn how birds and mammals thrive in conditions that humans cannot tolerate, and she tells readers all about itMy main research interest is physiology in extreme environments, particularly those with low levels of oxygen.Animals that thrive in such "hypoxic" environments are ideal species to investigate for how their physiology responds. In addition, studying adaptations to hypoxia in animals at high altitude, during hibernation, or in...
In parts of Australia, including Sydney Harbor, something is killing penguins. The bodies were covered in bite marks, and their stomachs were cut open.It is not clear what exactly is killing the penguins. Officials are ruling out humans. The bites indicate that it might be foxes, which carry their prey in their mouths and shake it, stated Sally Barnes, head of the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service.To the "Penguin Wardens," a 30-member volunteer group of penguin...
Linda the penguin has split up two male penguins who lived as a nesting couple for six years at the San Francisco Zoo, caretakers said.Male penguins Harry and Pepper had been so content together they were allowed to incubate and hatch an egg laid by another Magellanic penguin last year, zookeeper Anthony Brown said.Of all of the parents that year, they were the best. They took very good care of their chick, Brown told the San Francisco Examiner in a story published Saturday.Enter the widow...
One dad at the National Zoo in Washington -- a male rhea -- is learning that raising children gets easier as time goes on. The zoo's adult male rhea will be celebrating his second straight Father's Day with a brood of his own, having incubated and raised his charges once they were hatched, the zoo said in a news release Thursday. The four chicks, hatched May 8, are reaping the benefits of dad having a year of paternity under his wing. Zoo officials said he seemed unruffled about being a...
Germany's Bremerhaven zoo reports that two "gay" adult male penguins have hatched a chick and are now acting as its adoptive parents. The male penguins, Z and Vielpunkt, were given an egg that had been rejected by its biological parents, the zoo said on Wednesday.Z and Vielpunkt reported to be happily rearing the chick, which is now four weeks old.Bremerhaven zoo made headlines in 2005 when it announced plans to "test" the sexual orientation of penguins with homosexual qualities....
Scientists often struggle to discover colonies of emperor penguins in Antarctica, but a study on Tuesday revealed how following trails of penguin poop on satellite images could lead them to the source.Antarctica has a landmass that it about one-and-a-half times larger than that of the US. To make matters worse for researchers, emperor penguins breed on sea ice, which experts predict will shrink in the future due to global warming. "We know that emperor penguins rely on sea ice to breed -...
Experts said Wednesday that African penguins are disappearing at an alarming rate due to depleted food stocks from commercial fishing and global warming affects on breeding patterns, The AFP reported.A statement issued after an international African penguin conference in Cape Town said: "Last year there were only about 26,000 pairs of African Penguins left in southern Africa (this represents their global population) "” a decline of about 121,000 breeding pairs since 1956." Urgent...
Latest Flightless birds Reference Libraries
Tristan da Cunha is an archipelago of five islands within the southern Atlantic Ocean, the biggest of which is the island of Tristan da Cunha itself and the second-biggest, the isolated bird haven Gough Island. It creates a portion of a wider territory named Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha which incorporates Saint Helena and Ascension Island. The main island, Tristan da Cunha, is fairly mountainous; the only flat area is the location of the capital, Edinburgh of the Seven...
The Antarctic Silverfish, (Pleuragramma antarcticum), is a member of the Notothenioidei family of fish. It is widely distributed around the Antarctic, but has largely disappeared from the western side of the northern Antarctic Peninsula based on 2010 research funded by the National Science Foundation. It is also found throughout the Southern Ocean. It grows to an average size of 6 inches, but has been known to reach lengths of up to 10 inches. It is usually pink with a silver tint, and...
The Tasmanian Native-hen (Gallinula mortierii) is a flightless rail, one of twelve species of birds common to the Australian island of Tasmania. Other common names include Narkie, Native-hen, and Waterhen. Locally, the bird is often referred to as a 'turbo chook'. This species was originally described in 1840 as Tribonyx mortierii. The name mortierii is in honor of Barthélemy Charles Joseph Dumortier. The Tasmanian Native-hen is a stocky flightless bird, typically between 17 and 20...
The Snowy Sheathbill (Chionis alba) also known as the Pale-faced Sheathbill, is a species of bird that is mostly terrestrial (ground dwelling). It is Antarctica's only permanently land-based bird species. It occurs in Antarctica, the Scotia Arc, the South Orkneys and South Georgia. The extreme southern populations migrate northward in the winter. The adult is about 15 to 16 inches long with a wingspan of 30 to 31.5 inches. It is pure white except for its bill and pink warty face. Its...
The Rhea is a large flightless bird native to South America. American Rheas live in grassland, savanna, scrub forest, chaparral, and even desert, but prefer areas with at least some tall vegetation. Darwin's Rhea lives in areas of open scrub in the grasslands of Patagonia and on the Andean plateau. It is classified as endangered throughout its range. The Common Rhea, Rhea americana, is not only the largest species of rhea, but also the largest bird in the Americas. Adults weigh up to 66...
