The Science of Birds - Awesome Things We Learned About Birds in 2022

Episode Date: December 31, 2022

This is Episode Number 67. It’s the last episode of 2022, so that means it’s the Annual Review!We’re going to look back at 2022, at some of the most interesting scientific studies of birds that were published this year. Will this be a painstakingly thorough review of everything that scientists learned about birds in 2022? No. Not so much. The studies I’m telling you about today—while they did make it into the newsfeed—are just the ones that I found most exciting. Or at least interesting. I decided they’re worth yapping about.~~ Leave me a review using Podchaser ~~Links of InterestCockatoos are in a "cultural arms race" with Sydney residents and their bins [VIDEO]Slow-motion video of woodpeckers hammering into wood [VIDEO]ReferencesHummingbird plumage color diversity exceeds the known gamut of all other birdsInnovation and geographic spread of a complex foraging culture in an urban parrotWoodpeckers minimize cranial absorption of shocksThe homogenization of avian morphological and phylogenetic diversity under the global extinction crisisCretaceous ornithurine supports a neognathous crown bird ancestorJuvenile bar-tailed godwit "B6" Sets World RecordAvian neurons consume three times less glucose than mammalian neuronsDeterrence of birds with an artificial predator, the RobotFalconHow woodcocks produce the most brilliant white plumage patches among the birdsLink to this episode on the Science of Birds websiteSupport the show

Hello and welcome This is the Science of Birds I am your host, Ivan Philipson. The Science of Birds podcast is a lighthearted exploration of bird biology for lifelong learners. This is episode number 67. It's the last episode of 2022, so that means it's the annual review. We're going to look back at 2022, at some of the most interesting scientific studies of birds that were published this year. Will this be a painstakingly thorough review of everything that scientists learned about birds in 2022?

No, not so much. The studies I'm telling you about today, while they did make it into the news feed, are just, the ones that I found most exciting, or at least interesting, I decided they're worth yapping about. So let the yapping commence. Let's look at some of the awesome things we learned about birds in 2022. The first scientific study today has to do with hummingbirds. and with the colors of bird feathers. Birds are, of course, among the most wildly colorful creatures around. Think about the thousands of different colors you can see across the plumages of birds around the world.

Black, white, gray, brown, grayish brown, yellow, orange, red, green, basically all the colors, right? Bird feathers display an enormous range of colors that are visible to human eyes. But birds, you might recall, can see many more colors than humans can. We have three different color-sensitive cell types in our retinas. These are called cone cells. Birds have not three, but four types of cone cells in their retinas. The extra cone type they have is sensitive to colors in the ultraviolet end of the spectrum. So that means that however colorful birds appear to us, they are even more

colorful and dazzling to each other. They show off colors to each other that we can't see. Colors we can't even imagine. But here's maybe something you can imagine. Imagine you're a bird and you just went shopping at Bird Walmart. You bought an enormous box of crayons. The box is filled with crayons representing every feather color in the world, every color that exists in the plumages of birds. This complete set of colors is something biologists call a gamut, G-A-M-U-T. A color gamut captures the diversity of color produced by a particular taxonomic group, whether you're talking about birds, insects, orchids, Labrador retrievers, or whatever. A biological color gamut can then be mapped to what a group of animals can actually see. For example, the color

gamut of bird feathers, the complete set of plumage colors, is much smaller from a human's more limited perspective compared to what a bird can see. So now what about this 2022 study? It was published in the journal Communications Biology, and it came out of Richard Prum's lab at Yale University. The researchers in this study wanted to estimate the color gamut for hummingbirds. A study from this same lab back in 2011, looked at the color gamut of 111 bird species, representing 55 avian families and 18 orders. But there were just three hummingbirds in that sample of 111 bird species. But we all know that these little buzzing beauties are among the most colorful birds on the planet. On top of that, the hummingbird family, Trocili, is incredibly diverse. It contains over 350 species.

So this 2022 study focused just on hummingbirds, 114 species of hummingbirds. That represents about one-third of all the hummingbird diversity out there. The researchers analyzed colors in 1,600 feather patches. They used museum specimens for this work. For each hummingbird, color was measured and quantified for six plumage patches. The crown, back, tail, wing, belly and throat. So what were the results of this study? Well, how about we return to our analogy of a box of crayons? Let's say the number of crayons in the box is based only on that earlier study from 2011. And let's imagine that set of colors, that gamut, includes 1,000 unique

colors. One thousand crayons. Now, if we were to update our box of crayons with data from those 114 hummingbird specimens in this recent study, well, you're going to need a bigger box. By including these hummingbirds, the researchers found that the color gamut of all birds increased by 56%. So your box of crayons would now contain a whopping 1,560 colors. The new colors added for hummingbird feathers might include ruby topaz, sun angel green, and velvet purple. The full spectrum of colors displayed by hummingbirds is so ridiculously broad,

it's more extensive than the gamut of all other birds combined. But just a reminder here, we're talking about colors that birds can see, not all of which are visible to humans. As a human, I might look at that box of crayons and wonder why so many of them are the exact same shade of green, for example. But to a bird, each of those green crayons would appear as a unique, color. Among the hummingbirds in this study, the parts of their plumage that showed the highest diversity of color were the crown and throat feathers. That makes sense, since even we humans can see that those feathers have vibrant iridescent colors. But often it's only when the bird is

directly facing you, right? You know how when the hummingbird turns away and its feathers appear sort of dark and drab? But then it turns toward you and holy moly, suddenly, the crown and throat feathers catch the sunlight and sparkle with metallic greens, violets, and blues. You might be super impressed with the beauty of a hummingbird in this situation. But the opposite probably isn't true. The bird in front of you looks you up and down and judges you harshly. Behold my glorious feathers, you insignificant primate, and be ashamed of your own lackluster integument. My scintillating kaleidoscopic colors are beyond the comprehension of your simple mammalian mind. Male hummingbirds especially use those brilliant crown and throat colors

to dazzle their potential mates or to intimidate their rivals. And finally, here's a question we all want to know the answer to. Among the 114 colorful hummingbirds analyzed in this study, which was the most colorful of all. That honorable distinction goes to the velvet purple coronet, Buesanoa Jardinai. This little bugger is gorgeous. It has a black head, purple crown and belly, green wing coverts,

Buffy flight feathers in the wings, and turquoise flanks. The colors found in the velvet purple coronet's plumage span the largest portion of the hummingbird gamut. That's what we mean by the most colorful hummingbird. This species lives in just a small band of humid forest on the western slopes of the Andes Mountains in Colombia and Ecuador. There's certainly more I could tell you about this super cool study on bird feather colors. But we got to move on to the next one. But hey,

if you want to learn a lot more about bird vision and the colors of feathers, be sure to listen to episodes 7 and 56 of this podcast. Not long ago, I was walking around in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia. I was enjoying a little light birding during a long layover between flights. It wasn't long before I started hearing raucous sounds like this. The loudest of the screechers were sulfur-crested cockatoos, cacatua galarida. For someone from North America, like me, hearing and seeing wild parrots in a city is an exciting experience. But to the fine citizens of Sydney, this cockatoo is a common species. Maybe not quite

rock pigeon status, but still pretty much an everyday kind of bird. These curious, highly intelligent parrots have adapted well to life in the suburbs of Australia. Sulfur-crested cockatoos have proliferated in human neighborhoods in recent decades. One thing these cheeky cockies do is dig through people's trash. They swoop in to assail the trash containers people leave out on the curb. Locals call these receptacles wheelie bins. The birds plunder wheelie bins in the hopes of finding food, of course. Fruit and bread are among their favorite treats to score.

They toss most of everything else aside, littering the street with rubbish. As you can imagine, people aren't too happy about the messes cockatoos leave behind. So, sulfur-crested cockatoos are sort of like the equivalent of raccoons in North America. They're smart and adorable. People mostly love them. But they can also give you a nasty bite, and they frustrate us with their dumpster-diving shenanigans.

Research in recent years has shown us how sulfur-crested cockatoos teach each other how best to break into covered wheelie bins. There isn't just one strategy that works. If there was, all the cockatoos would probably have figured it out long ago. Instead, the birds need to develop new strategies because people who own the bins come up with innovative methods for keeping feathered scavengers out of the trash. In any case, when one cocky discovers a way to get the lid off a wheelie bin, its friends pay attention and learn that new technique. Before long, all the cockatoos in the neighborhood are skillfully lifting the lids off the local wheelie bins. This spread of information among sulfur-crested cockatoos

is an example of culture in non-human animals. These parrots aren't born with instincts on how to break into trash cans. Their behaviors have to be learned and passed from bird to bird, socially. Cockatoos in different neighborhoods use different techniques. They have distinct dumpster diving cultures. The situation in Sydney has gotten out of hand. It appears to be an all-out arms race between human and bird. It's an innovation arms race, a war over garbage. A team of researchers in Germany and Australia have, for years now, been studying this arms race

and the social behaviors of cockatoos. The overarching title for their research is The Clever Cocky Project. Seriously, the clever cocky project. Fabulous. In 2022, this team of scientists published a paper on the innovation arms race between cockatoos and humans. The study in this case focused on the human side of the war. The researchers wanted to see how humans in Sydney have adapted to the behaviors of all those clever cockies. They wanted to see if bin protection behaviors are spreading from human to human? Are there any geographic patterns to these behaviors that would suggest neighbors are learning from each other? Here's a description of the methods directly from the

paper. Quote, to map the local patterns of bin protection behavior, we recorded 3,283 bins across four suburbs with reported bin opening activity by cockatoos. For each bin, we recorded whether or not it was protected, and if so, the rationale of protection, method, location of the protection device on the bin, material of the device, and whether or not it was fixed to the bin. End quote. The researchers also used an online survey to get responses from over 1,000 residents about their battles with cockatoos. The biggest discovery of this study was this.

Whether or not people protect their bins from cockatoos and what type of the ones of of bin protection they use, all depends on where those people live. These human behaviors are geographically clustered, clustered into neighborhoods. This shows that residents in Sydney are learning from their close neighbors how to protect their wheelie bins from the onslaughts of clever cockies. So one person comes up with the idea of, let's say, putting a rubber snake on the lid of their trash bin, you know, to scare off all the hungry cockatoos. That person's neighbors see the rubber snake and think, hey, that's a brilliant idea. Pretty soon there are rubber snakes coiled up on dozens of bins in the neighborhood.

And this works, for a little while anyway. The cockatoos keep their distance. But then one extra clever, extra brave cocky decides to swoop in and confront the spooky snake. But lo and behold, it's a hoax. Fool me once. Shame on you, human. The bird tosses the rubber snake aside, lifts the lid, and helps itself to the bounty of hot garbage inside. Meanwhile, his cockatoo friends are watching.

They soon learn that all those snakes are bogus. The fake snake strategy is no longer effective. The cycle repeats. Some clever human kicks the arms race up a notch by inventing a new strategy. Their neighbors follow suit. This works for a while and then the birds discover a workaround.

And on it goes. The arms race escalates. And the way it plays out differs from one neighborhood to the next. Ben Protection Innovations include fake owls, spikes on the lid, bricks weighing down the lid,

bungee cords, hooks, hooks, and sticks that jam the lid hinges. Geez, if this situation keeps spiraling out of control, maybe we'll soon see garbage bins being protected from cockatoos by electrified barbed wire. Or heat-seeking laser cannons

powered by artificial intelligence. Or, ooh, how about specially trained attack chihuahuas? Each one perched menacingly on the lid of a bin, ready to snap its tiny jaws at any marauding parrot that gets too close.

But seriously, you know how they say necessity is the mother of invention? Well, an Australian guy actually invented a device called Secure a Lid. It's a small device that latches to keep the wheelie bin lid from being lifted. But when a garbage truck comes along and picks up the bin, gravity opens the latch when the bin tips over. There are photos of cockatoos on the Secura Lid website,

so I think it's safe to assume what necessity was the mother of this particular invention. What's an arms race without arms dealers? right? Maybe secure a lid is like the nuclear bomb of this particular arms race in Sydney. Will all the humans soon stockpile these undefeatable locking devices, leaving the birds no choice but to give up and sign a peace treaty? Only time we'll tell. Remember that one time when I made a podcast episode all about the avian family piccadie? You know, the woodpecker family? If you haven't listened to it, check it out.

It's episode 11. In that episode, I talked about the adaptations woodpeckers have for protecting their brains from concussions. I mentioned that woodpecker skulls are reinforced in the front and back to withstand repeated blows. But there's also a small region of spongy bone in a woodpecker's skull, in front of the eye but behind the beak. Spongy bone, also called cancellous bone, is, as you might expect, less dense than normal bone tissue. It's lighter and contains lots of tiny cavities filled with marrow. Biologists once thought that surely this region of spongy bone acts like a shock absorber in the woodpecker's skull. It must helped to prevent the brain from being damaged during all that furious pecking on trees.

I even told you that very thing in another podcast episode. I was talking about biomimicry, where human engineers take inspiration from nature, using what they learn from animals and plants to solve human problems. In that episode, I discussed how a guy had invented a bike helmet with a sophisticated liner made of cardboard. His design was inspired by the spongy bone found in the woodpecker skull. But here's the thing. This so-called fact that spongy bone is a shock absorber in woodpecker skulls has never really been convincingly proven by scientists. It's just been assumed to be true and then spread around. Spread around by people like me. Then, in the year

2002, a new study was published, and it cast serious doubt on this whole shock absorption hypothesis. The study was published in the journal Current Biology by a group of European and Canadian researchers. They tested the shock absorber hypothesis using several methods. In addition to computer simulations, the research team used high-speed videos of woodpeckers doing what they do best. They filmed several pilliated, black, and great spotted woodpeckers slamming their adorable faces repeatedly into blocks of wood. I'll put a link to some of this video footage in the show notes. It's pretty awesome.

The high frame rate of the videos meant they could be played back in super slow motion. The researchers looked at the videos frame by frame. They analyzed the movement of several landmarks on the bird's heads, including the eye and two spots on the beak. If the spongy bone in those woodpecker skulls was an adaptation for absorbing shock, we would expect it to compress a little bit every time the bird made violent contact with wood. If that happened, you would expect the distance between the eye and beak markers in the slow motion video to decrease. Because remember, the spongy bone is between the eye and the beak.

If that spongy material was squishing, compressing as it absorbed shock, the eye should decelerate a bit slower than the beak. But that's not what happens. The beak and eye decelerate at the same rate when the bird hits wood. The distance between the eye and beak markers doesn't change. The researchers argue that the motion of the eye is a good approximation of what the bird's brain is doing. If the eye isn't being cushioned by the spongy bone, then neither is the brain.

In hindsight, after reading about this research and hearing the arguments made by the scientists, it seems perfectly logical to me that there wouldn't be a shock-absorbing mechanism in the woodpecker's skull. The birds don't want to absorb the impact. They want to keep as much of that energy as possible concentrated in the tip of the bill when it strikes the wood. The cranial skeleton of these birds has evolved to be a highly efficient tool for excavating wood. The analogy used by the researchers is a hammer. If you want to make a useful hammer, you wouldn't add a squishy spring or cushion into the striking end. That would severely reduce the effectiveness of the hammer, right?

A woodpecker would have a much harder time chiseling into wood if lots of energy was being absorbed in the skull. The bird would actually have to hit the wood that much harder to make a dent. so cushioning might sort of cancel out its own usefulness. But what about concussions? If these birds don't have a built-in shock absorber, how do they keep their little brains safe from banging around inside their skulls? Well, having little brains is at least part of the answer. The researchers used computer models to show that given the size, weight, and shape of woodpecker brains,

these birds would get brain damage only if they whacked into wood twice as fast or four times harder than they naturally do. A small brain with a small mass has relatively low inertia, so it doesn't bang around inside the skull as forcefully as our enormous human brains do. So there you go. What was once a common assumption was actually a misconception. This latest research from good old 2022 suggests that we have to let go of the idea that the spongy bone in woodpecker skulls acts as a shock absorber. We have to stop telling our kids and grandkids this deplorable mistruth. Gather around my children and let grandma tell you about the marvelous skull of the woodpecker. Did you know that it's filled with shock absorbing cancellous bone?

Whoa! It's true. What's more, the woodpecker's beak is pure titanium, and its leg bones are made of candy canes. Isn't that just delightful? I tell you, these lies must stop. But being forced to toss out our old understanding is a beautiful thing, really. This is science doing what it does. New data and research comes along, and we need to update our ideas about how nature works. I love it. I love it. I love love that with each of these small steps, scientists help us get closer to making sense of reality, closer to making sense of the beautiful universe we live in. I do have to wonder about that

bike helmet, though. You know, the one lined with cardboard, inspired by the supposed shock-absorbing property of spongy bone in woodpecker skulls? I mean, does that helmet even work? Maybe it's worse than wearing nothing at all. Our next study has to do with conservation and the threat of bird extinctions. When we think about species going extinct, we tend to focus on the numbers. For example, we might think losing 20 species forever is worse than losing five species. But not all species are created equal. or rather they didn't all evolve to be equal.

They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and they play different roles in their ecosystems. Healthy ecosystems tend to have bird species of many kinds. Big ones, small ones, weird ones with crazy-looking beaks, scary ones that are really good at murder, and generic, boring ones that look like the illustration in the dictionary next to the word bird. Species with unusual,

specialized diets or lifestyles tend to have correspondingly unusual body forms and beak shapes. We're talking about critters like flamingos, vultures, crossbills, curlews, pelicans, and hummingbirds. Lovable weirdos like these are outliers in the distribution of bird morphology. By morphology, I mean their physical form and structure. Clustered in the center of this distribution, near the peak of the bell curve, you have your quote-unquote normal birds. These would be standard-issue characters like house sparrows, blackbirds, and rock pigeons.

These guys are generalists. But it's often the specialist species that fill important niches in their environments. Losing a specialist to extinction might be more disastrous in the ecological sense than losing a typical generalist species. Enter Emma Hughes, until recently a Ph.D. student at the University of Sheffield in the UK. She and her colleagues came up with some interesting research questions. Are the more unusual and

specialized birds at a higher risk of going extinct? If so, would losing them result in a world where birds as a group are a lot more homogeneous? A world where bird species all tend to look and behave the same? Emma Hughes earned her PhD in 2022. One of the cool papers she got published this same year addressed those research questions I just mentioned. Dr. Hughes and her fellow researchers did something incredible to collect data for their research. They visited museums and took morphological measurements from bird specimens. How many specimens do you think? One hundred? One thousand? Nope. They measured beak size and shape, lower limb length, wing length, and body size for each of 8,456 bird species. First off, that's a ton of work. It took years. And that

sample of almost 8,500 bird species represents over 75% of all bird species on the planet. Very cool. The next step was to use all that data to make sophisticated graphs, plotting out the physical differences and similarities among those many species. Hughes and friends then systematically removed birds from the dataset based on their likelihood of going extinct. That information was gathered from the IUCN's Red List, which I've mentioned many times on this podcast. The first birds to be removed from the data were the critically endangered species. Next up were the endangered species, then the vulnerable species, and so on. Looking at how the graphs of bird morphology changed as the data set was pruned down this way, it became obvious that the most unusual

birds, our lovable weirdo outliers, were the species most likely to go extinct. It turns out that extinction risk isn't random across all birds. The ones most likely to disappear are the largest and the smallest species, as well as those with unusual morphologies and special ecological roles. If we humans keep messing things up, we're going to lose those special birds. Entire ecosystems might suffer when bird species that help to keep things in balance are lost. If, for example, vultures disappear, who's going to clean up all those rotting corpses? Not me, that's for sure.

Similarly, if two cans go extinct, many rainforest trees might not be able to disperse their seeds. The potential trend highlighted by this recent study is toward the homogenization of all birds. No more albatrosses, no more spoonbills, no more sunbirds, or condors, or hummingbirds. The resulting collapse of entire ecosystems and massive losses of biodiversity would be a devastating crisis. What we might call, in technical terms, a real bummer. But you know what would be the absolute worst thing about the homogenization of Earth's avian fauna? Birding just wouldn't be as much fun. In this nightmarish dystopia, every time you go out with your binoculars,

you'll just see a bunch of yawn-tastic vanilla. birds like rock pigeons, European starlings, common minas, great-tailed grackles, and, of course, house sparrows. I've got one more awesome study to tell you about. This one has to do with fossils, paleontology, and all that jazz. In a related side note, I'm excited because I ordered the newly published book Birds of the Mesozoic, and it's coming in the mail soon. Anyway, once upon a time, there was a bird that lived in Belgium.

Its name was Genavis Phanalodens. It looked sort of like a gull, and it weighed about as much as a turkey vulture or a gray heron. This was a long, long time ago in the ballpark of 66.7 million years ago. So this bird actually had teeth. It shared the planet with its cousins the O.G. dinosaurs, the non-avian dinosaurs. Those big dudes weren't going to be around much longer, however, since there was an asteroid heading their way. Unfortunately, Janavis Fanalodens didn't survive either. It went extinct around the time the asteroid hit Earth. That we know of, this was one of the last birds that had teeth.

Fast forward to modern times. Somebody finds a fossil of our toothed bird. Paleontologists look it over and write up some research on it. They recognized it as being special, since it was, as the title of their paper put it, Europe's last Mesozoic bird. About 20 years later, another group of researchers re-examined the same fossil and discovered something surprising, something that had been overlooked the first time. This ancient bird had, wait for it, a flexible upper jaw. Why was that surprising? To understand the answer, I need to briefly tell you a little about the evolution of birds.

If we look at the avian tree of life, with its many branches representing all the living bird species, families, orders, etc., looking at that tree, we see that the deer. we see that the deepest split between two major branches occurs at the base of the tree. The branches are two distinct evolutionary lineages. One branch, let's call it the left-hand branch, includes all of the ratites, a group of flightless birds including ostriches, castaweries, and kiwis.

And that branch also includes the tenemus of South America. These birds are all considered relatively primitive. They have many anatomical. features that were shared by their prehistoric ancestors in the Mesozoic. The other major branch of the avian tree, the right-hand branch, includes everybody else, all of the remaining birds alive today. One of the key anatomical traits that distinguishes birds from these two branches is the structure of the palate, in other words, the roof of the mouth in the upper jaw.

Birds on the left-hand branch have fused bones in their palate. They're like us humans because they can only move the bones of their lower jaws. They can't move their upper jaws. Birds in this evolutionary lineage are called paleognaths. That word means ancient jaws. But the many thousands of birds on the right-hand branch can move their upper jaws. Those guys are called neignaths, meaning new jaws. The bones of their palates are not fused.

Almost all neignaths can move their upper beaks independently of the rest of their skull. So this study published in 2022, in the highly prestigious journal Nature, no less, this study revealed that an ancient bird with teeth had a friggin' flexible palate, similar to our modern, new-jaw's birds. Prior to this discovery, scientists thought that birds from the Mesozoic would have primitive, immobile upper jaws. After all, that's what all the other dinosaurs had. Theropod dinosaurs like T-Rex and his pals were, more or less, the ancestors of birds. It was thought that a flexible upper beak was something that came along much later in the evolution of birds,

that it was a special evolutionary innovation found in modern birds only. This discovery also points to the very real possibility that those paleognaths, way back in their evolutionary history, actually had a flexiagnat. palate, but then lost it later when their palate bones fused. And that would be weird, because being able to move your upper jaw is a useful trick, a generally beneficial adaptation. It would be like humans evolving an opposable thumb, then losing it later. That would be weird. Why would this flexible upper jaw trait first evolve in the common ancestor of all birds, only to be lost on the paleognath branch leading to the ostriches and kiwis and whatnot. We just don't know.

And look, I'm sorry, I know this is stressful stuff to think about. I considered not bringing up this particular study because it's so controversial and earth-shattering. I hope you aren't up all night tonight, rocking back and forth in the corner, trying to make sense of these fossil bird jaws, saying over and over, what does it all mean? This 2022 nature paper that I'm talking about, proposed the official scientific name for our ancient bird from 66.7 million years ago. The researchers offered some insight into the etymology, the origin of the name they came up with, Janavis fanalidens. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know I love me some etymology. The genus name, Janavis, combines Janus with Avis. Avis meaning bird and the

Janus part, referring to the Roman god of that same name. He was the god of, among other things, beginnings and endings. Janus had two faces, one that looked forward and one that looked backward. This makes sense because our bird existed at a time of transition, from the old world before the Great Extinction to the one that followed. And in case you didn't know, it's from Janus that we get the name for the month of January. The second part of the name, the specific epithet, Phanalodens, is also a mashup of two words. It combines the Latin words for final and for teeth, because Janavis Fanalodens was, to our knowledge, the last of the toothed birds that ever lived.

And hey, speaking of January, this podcast episode is dropping on December 31st, the last day of 2022. It's New Year's Eve, baby. I'm going to go out, get drunk, dance and party all night. Just kidding. What I'm actually going to do is chill at home with my lovely wife and our nine pet chickens. We'll probably be fast asleep well before midnight. Now it's time to buckle up and get ready to zoom through some more ornithological gems from 2022. It's time for the speed round. Speed round. I'll tell you about a few more studies that came out in 2022.

But I can't do my usual thing and be all wordy and stuff. Nope. I'm limiting myself to no more than 100 words to describe each scientific study. All right, let's do this. A new world record was set this year when a five-month-old bar-tailed Godwit made its first ever migration from Alaska down to Tasmania. This young shorebird flew non-stop for 11 days and covered an amazing distance of 8,435 miles. That's 13,560 kilometers. This is a new world record for the longest non-stop flight for a bird. We know the flight path. We know the flight path

and distance for this godwit because scientists fitted it with a solar-powered GPS tracker when it was in the nest. Birds like this push the boundaries of what's possible in terms of physical endurance in an animal. Throughout 2022, we've been witnessing the worst ever avian influenza outbreak. I already did an entire podcast episode about this, but it's worth a reminder because it's a really big deal. In previous avian flu outbreaks, the virus mostly killed birds in commercial poultry flocks. But this time, an enormous number of wild birds are carrying the disease and dying from it. Wild birds succumbing to the flu include eagles, hawks, owls, vultures, geese, pelicans, turns, and a variety of seabirds like scuas and gannets. After waning a bit

over the summer, the virus is raging again as we speak. If you look at a bird brain side by side with a mammal brain of the same size, you'll discover that the bird brain is packed with a lot more neurons, aka brain cells. Because brain cells eat up a lot of energy, you might guess that bird brains burn more calories compared to their mammalian counterparts. But a study published in 2022 revealed that a bird's brain, in this case a pigeon brain, uses way less energy than expected. For some unknown reason, pigeon neurons burn three times fewer glucose molecules than mammal neurons.

So bird brains aren't as costly as you'd think. Bird strikes are a problem. This is where an airplane hits a bird or a flock of birds. Such collisions are deadly to birds, but they're dangerous to people too. More often, they cause flight delays and cancellations and expensive damage to aircraft. Robo falcon to the rescue! Scientists invented a remote-controlled robot that looks like a falcon. It has propellers on each wing and a camera in its head.

Robo falcons swoops around at an airport, scaring the bejesus out of the of any birds loitering nearby. Within moments, the bird flocks clear off and they don't come back for a long time. You'd think that nocturnal birds, and those active at dusk, would communicate with each other primarily with sounds. And that's probably true most of the time. But this year, scientists reported something amazing about the tail feathers of the Eurasian woodcock. The white tail-tale tips are 30% brighter than any other white feathers that we know of. Microscopic structures in the feathers enhance their light reflection to produce a brilliant white. Male Eurasian Woodcock's display at dusk, so maybe their white tails are a signal to females, a bright flash that can

be seen from a distance in the gloom. All right, we did it. We survived the speed round and cross the finish line. And that, my friend, wraps up our annual review of awesome bird research in 2022. Thanks for listening to this episode and for being curious about the natural world. And if you've been a fan of the podcast for a while, thanks for being here with me through 2022. I hope you had a great year and are looking forward to 2023. We've got so many birds to and much more to learn about their biology. I'm excited about where we're going in the new year. Just think of all the stupid jokes I'll force you to listen to next year.

Don't act like you don't love it. My amazing supporters on Patreon helped me keep the dream alive in 2022. Thank you all so, so much for your contributions. And let's welcome my fabulous new patrons. Dana Filipini, Manoma Ciracena, Craig Bistrup, Patty Bell, Lilliana McGuffin, Mark Weaver, Cecilia Dumois, Little Hiker Bird, Sue Ann Pyle, and Mark Christ. If you, my friend, want to join the crew and support this podcast, you can click on over to my Patreon page at patreon.com slash science of birds. You can also shoot me an email if you have something you'd like to share with me.

Like maybe an idea you have for an invention, an invention inspired by a misconception about birds, some kind of bike helmet maybe, or a coffee machine or a shower curtain. Whatever it is, you can email me at Ivan at Scienceof Birds.com. You can check out the show notes for this episode, which is number 67, on the Science of Birds website, Scienceofbirds.com. This is Ivan Philipson, wishing you a very happy new year. Peace. Thank you.