Roosters Prefer Mates That Have The Biggest Comb Size

Size matters, and bigger is always better, at least when it comes to what roosters want when looking at possible mates.

New research published in the journal PLoS Genetics suggests that roosters select the girl with the largest hairdo, or “comb.”

The scientists, from Linköping Universitet, say that the larger the comb of a hen, the bigger dose of sperm she will receive from the rooster, which leads to more eggs.

Domestic hens have larger combs, as well as denser bones, when compared to wild hens. According to the research, this feature can be changed through human manipulation.

The scientists say that the greater the bone mass a hen has, the more eggs she is able to lay. They have spotted a clear correlation between comb size and bone mass in chickens from a cross between red jungle fowl and domestic chicken.

After spotting this correlation, the team set up a study to determine where these chickens were crossed for several generations, allowing them to “map” the functions of individual genes.

After the eighth generation, the team found an area that had a strong effect on the weight of the comb, as well as bone mass and fertility.

The genetic variation has gradually decreased over the course of domestication, according to the findings.

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Museum's rare treasures revealed

Stashed away underground beneath a popular museum in Northumberland lies a vast collection of rare and precious items.

From hippo skulls to extinct birds, stuffed lions to poison spears, the Natural History Society of Northumbria's collection is one of the best in the world.

With more than half a million items kept in storage under the Discovery Museum in Newcastle, cataloguing the huge assortment is a lifetime's work.

The collection dates back to the mid-18th century and includes some items that are seen as priceless because of their rarity.

Dan Gordon, Keeper of Biology at Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, said: "The oldest parts of the collection date from the 18th century and were the private collection of a local aristocrat called Marmaduke Tunstall.

"Over the years it was passed on and came into the possession of a local society and it's important for a number of reasons, one being the very old and valuable items.

"We have records for half a million objects but there may well be more, and cataloguing them all is a lifetime's work. We are still discovering new things in the collection."

One of the rarest items is a juvenile Great Auk, a flightless bird that is now extinct but which was once commonplace in Great Britain.

Read on

Shy Male Birds Likely To Flock Together And Have Fewer Friends

University of Oxford

Male birds that exhibit ‘shy’ social behavior are much more likely to join flocks of birds with a similar personality than their ‘bold’ male counterparts, a new study has found. But shy birds also have fewer social partners than bold birds.

The research, carried out by scientists from Oxford University and the Australian National University, used a new way of analyzing the social networks that link individual animals to each other – a kind of ‘Facebook for birds’ – to reveal how differences between individuals underpin the way that social interactions occur across populations.

The study of great tits (Parus major) in Wytham Woods, near Oxford (UK), also found that shy male and female birds don’t interact with as many different individuals as bold males or females, and that shy males and females tend to have more stable relationships than bold ones – being seen with the same individuals more often over time.

A report of the research is published in the journal Ecology Letters this week.

“Our aim in this project has been to understand why individuals differ in their social behaviour, and ultimately what consequences this has. We’re increasingly realising that processes in wild populations depend in many ways on how individuals interact with each other,” said Professor Ben Sheldon, Director of the Edward Grey Institute at Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, an author of the report.

“There has been a lot of work describing the range of individual personalities in the great tit,” said Lucy Aplin, a DPhil student with Oxford University and the ANU Research School of Biology, first author of the report. “Now we are linking it to the social networks and social organisation of the species, which hasn’t been done before.”

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Wedding delayed as ring-bearing owl goes for a sleep

A wedding service was delayed when an owl bearing rings fell asleep in the church roof.

Darcy the barn owl was meant to fly down the aisle at Holy Cross Church in Sherston, Wiltshire, and deliver rings to Sonia Cadman and Andrew Matley.

Instead the one-year-old owl flew into the church roof to roost. It took about an hour to get her down.

The Reverend Christopher Bryan said: "We tried all we could to get it down but it just wouldn't budge."

He said the owl seemed "very happy" in the roof and could not be tempted down with a treat.

"It must have been an hour before they got a ladder to rescue it," he said.

'Absolute stitches'

The specially-trained owl had been hired by Ms Cadman for the wedding, which took place at the weekend.

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Hope for Northern bald ibis as Moroccan population has best ever breeding year

Record season for Morocco's Northern bald ibises

September 2013. The largest fully wild population of Critically Endangered Northern Bald Ibis has had its second most successful breeding season on record, with the number of breeding pairs at its highest since surveys began in the 1980s. The colonies at Souss-Massa National Park and nearby Tamri, in south-west Morocco, fledged 148 young, bringing the total population at the end of the breeding season to 443 birds.

Two, tiny populations separated by more than 1000 miles

Once widespread in North Africa and Europe, the Northern Bald Ibis survives in two disjunct populations. Well to the east of the Moroccan birds is the semi-captive population at Birecik in Turkey, and south of that a tiny remnant population at Palmyra, Syria. There is also a newly formed population of Northen bald ibis in southern Spain recently created from captive bred birds released into Andalucia.

Wardens

Management and conservation of the Moroccan population is supervised by SEO/BirdLife (BirdLife in Spain) in conjunction with High Commission for Water and Forest and Fight against desertification and GREPOM (BirdLife in Morocco). SEO/BirdLife has hired seven wardens to protect and monitor the colonies, with funding from HSH Prince Albert II of Morocco, the Species Champion, through the BirdLife Preventing Extinctions Programme. The wardens provide daily fresh water for the birds, and prevent disturbance. This year they succeeded in persuading a persistent group of anglers to move away from one sub-colony in the National Park, allowing the ibises to begin nesting.

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Scientists begin tracking migratory songbirds with NASA radar on Delmarva Peninsula

NEWARK, Maryland — A team of scientists is using a high-tech NASA radar to monitor the fall migration of birds over the Delmarva Peninsula.

The News Journal (http://delonline.us/193WIgF ) reports scientists will be looking at where birds are stopping, eating and lingering as they examine the best habitats that remain for the region's migratory song birds.

University of Delaware researcher Jeff Buler says the majority of birds are migrating at night. He says residents can hear their flight calls if you listen carefully.

The NASA Polarimetric radar in Newark, Maryland, is normally used to study rainfall. But birds don't typically migrate when it's raining, so scientists can use the radar for both types of research.

Researchers from the Nature Conservancy and Old Dominion University are also collaborating on the project.

http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/cbbdbb2e4b194f6ea32e102a87914ce9/DE--NASA-Radar-Bird-Tracking

Dinosaur Feathers Discovered in Canadian Amber

Today a group of paleontologists announced the results of an extensive study of several well-preserved dinosaur feathers encased in amber. Their work, which included samples from many stages in the evolution of feathers, bolstered the findings of other scientists who've suggested that dinosaurs (winged and otherwise) had multicolored and transparent feathers of the sort you might see on birds today. The researchers also presented evidence, based on the feathers' pigmentation and structures, that today's bird feathers could have evolved from dinosaur feathers.

We've got a gallery of these intriguing feathers preserved in amber.

In a profile of lead researcher Ryan McKellar, The Atlantic's Hans Villarica writes:

These specimens represent distinct stages of feather evolution, from early-stage, single filament protofeathers to much more complex structures associated with modern diving birds . . . They can't determine which feathers belonged to birds or dinosaurs yet, but they did observe filament structures that are similar to those seen in other non-avian dinosaur fossils.

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