Parakeets gone wild in Tokyo

By Allison Love, CNN

Updated 1241 GMT (2041 HKT) December 30, 2015

During the 1960s, many Japanese people owned pets for the first time. Tropical birds like Mizutani's parakeets were brought to the country from places such as India and Sri Lanka. The feral birds Mizutani encountered are the descendants of the former pets.

Despite the challenges of photographing wild animals, Mizutani began to understand more about the parakeets and their relationship with their environment.

"I learned that they change the tree on which they build nests and the time and direction they take to return home depending on the season," he said.

Mizutani's photos have an eerie quality to them and convey the feelings of fear he experienced when he first encountered the birds.

Yoshinori Mizutani spent a year photographing wild parakeets that can be found in Tokyo and other parts of Japan.

For Mizutani, the colorful parakeets are incongruous with Tokyo's urban environment. Normally, birds of this nature couldn't survive in a climate like Tokyo's. But they have adapted to the cold.

Mizutani chose to photograph the birds with a strobe light. Without the light, he said, their vivid color would be lost and the birds would appear as a dark shadow in the sky when photographed from below. In order to get close-up shots, Mizutani photographed the parakeets from buildings, all the while fearing he could be attacked.

(CNN)Every morning in Tokyo's Setagaya ward, flocks of parakeets would fly to an elm tree near Yoshinori Mizutani's home.

The parakeets, an uncommon sight in Japan with their bright-green feathers and scarlet beaks, caught the photographer's attention. As he noticed the birds each day, more and more began to arrive until there were hundreds of parakeets.

Mizutani was struck by shock and fear at seeing so many.

"I felt as if I'd walked into the Alfred Hitchcock film 'The Birds,' " he said.

Mizutani researched the parakeets and learned there was a large nest in one of Tokyo's suburbs, Ookayama. He visited the site, inhabited by hundreds of birds, and started photographing them.

Continued ...

Recycling Tokyo Crows Build Their Nests Out of Coat Hangers

By Sumitra on April 18th, 2014 Category: Animals

Crows are known to be highly intelligent birds, and it looks like they can now teach us a thing or two about recycling and stealing. The Asian Jungle Crow, a large-billed crow, actually builds its nest out of coat hangers that it steals from people’s homes!

Crows make use of pretty much anything they find lying around to build their hardy nests. House Crows generally build crude structures, made of interlocking twigs gathered from surrounding trees and shrubs. They weave the twigs together with little pieces of metallic wire that strengthen the nest structure. In some nests, the clever crows incorporate knotted lengths of thick plastic instead.

 Present Simple

But perhaps the most amazing crow nests are the ones built around Tokyo, Japan. Twigs and other natural materials are hard to come by in the busy metropolis, so the birds settle for the next best thing, and that seems to be coat hangers. You have got to see pictures to believe it! A blogger had posted some of these images way back in 2005, after solving the mystery of the missing hangers from her back yard. But it isn’t just the one nest – it seems that Japanese Jungle Crows are compulsive collectors of hangers!

Sometimes the crows build their hanger nests on the power lines. This could cause huge power blackouts, especially during mating season. So the Kyushu Electric power company actually has ‘crow patrols’ that search for and destroy hanger nests on their power grid.

I for one am truly baffled by these hanger nests. As a person who is continually battling tangled coat hangers in my closets, I do admire these crows who managed to put such intricate structures together.

http://www.odditycentral.com/animals/recycling-tokyo-crows-build-their-nests-out-of-coat-hangers.html

Hummingbirds' wings 'shape-shift'

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC News, Valencia, Spain

Footage shot with high-speed cameras has revealed how hummingbird wings bend and flex, to keep the birds in the air.

Masateru Maeda, a PhD student at Chiba University in Japan, captured the footage.

The ultimate aim of his measurements of the movements of the wings is to copy their function in the design of flying robots.

The scientist presented his findings at the Society for Experimental Biology's annual meeting in Valencia, Spain.

The researchers captured their footage at Tama Zoological park in Tokyo.

As birds and insects move through the air, their wings are held at a slight angle, which deflects the air downward.

This deflection means the air flows faster over the wing than underneath, causing air pressure to build up beneath the wings, while the pressure above the wings is reduced. It is this difference in pressure that produces lift.

Flapping creates an additional forward and upward force known as thrust, which counteracts the insect's weight and the "drag" of air resistance.

The downstroke or the flap is also called the "power stroke", as it provides the majority of the thrust. During this, the wing is angled downwards even more steeply.

You can imagine this stroke as a very brief downward dive through the air - it momentarily uses the weight of the animal's own weight in order to move forwards. But because the wings continue to generate lift, the creature remains airborne.

In each upstroke, the wing is slightly folded inwards to reduce resistance.

The team chose hummingbirds as their "wing model" because they can be studied so easily; they hover quite still as they feed on nectar.

"And they're very small," added Mr Maeda. "Larger birds that cannot hover have to be studied in wind tunnels."

But to get his footage, Mr Maeda had to work in the glasshouse of the zoo, which is kept at 35C for the birds and butterflies that live there.

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