Baby Birds Research Articles

Online assessment of narrative macrostructure in adult Irish-English multilinguals.

BackgroundOnline assessment of narrative production and comprehension became an important component of language assessment during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to establish quantitative measures of narrative macrostructure in the production and comprehension of adult Irish-English bilinguals in an online assessment.MethodsA total of 30 Irish-English bilingual adults participated in an online assessment of oral narrative production and comprehension. Narratives were elicited using LITMUS-MAIN for Irish and English. Story-tell elicitation method was used for all stories. Twenty participants produced Baby Birds and Baby Goats story pairs while 10 participants produced Cat and Dog story pairs. Quantitative measures of story structure, comprehension score, and the overall number of Internal State Terms (ISTs) in production and comprehension were compared across the story pairs, languages, and the output type (production vs. comprehension).ResultsA general linear model indicated no differences in either story structure or story comprehension scores across languages for both sets of stories. Combined analysis for all participants and stories indicated no difference in the story structure scores or comprehension scores across the languages or the story pairs. While the overall number of ISTs was the same across languages, a higher number of ISTs was observed in comprehension relative to production in both languages for Cat and Dog story pair only, but not for Baby birds and Baby goats' stories. The major benefit of using online assessment was the accessibility of participants. The major drawback was the inability to control the environment and the quality of the internet connection.Conclusion and implicationsWhile online assessment increased the availability of participants, which is a significant factor in rural Ireland characterized by low population density and the high percentage of Irish speakers, the availability of stable internet connection limited the applicability of online assessment. Measures of narrative macrostructure were stable across the languages and the story pairs. This is important because of high variability in exposure to Irish, frequent code-switching, and a high number of morphosyntactic errors due to rapid language change that characterizes Irish-English bilinguals. Identifying reliable measures of language performance for Irish-English adult speakers is an important step toward establishing developmental norms for Irish-English bilinguals.

The Recovery of the American Peregrine Falcon in Alaska

American Peregrine Falcons nesting along Alaska’s upper Yukon River have been studied for nearly 50 years. Peregrine populations decreased in the 1960’s because widespread use of the insecticide DDT caused their eggshells to thin. Thin eggshells meant that eggs crushed easily in the nest, which reduced the number of baby birds produced. Eventually, Peregrine Falcons were listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act in the United States (U.S.). After the U.S. banned the use of DDT, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, and others helped Peregrine Falcons recover. Today, upper Yukon River Peregrine Falcons have rebounded and are thriving. The Peregrine Falcon’s recovery in the U.S. is a shining success story of the Endangered Species Act, although climate change and other pollutants create continuing challenges for the species.

Baby birds beat the heat thanks to singing parents

Baby zebra finches hatch into one of Earth's most inhospitable environments, the Australian outback, where summer temperatures can exceed 40°C. Fortunately, zebra finch parents can prepare their young for this dangerously hot climate by singing to them before they hatch. When temperatures rise above 26°C, parents emit ‘heat calls’ that warn their embryos of high environmental temperatures. Unlike their normal vocalizations, heat calls have a high-pitched frequency, a fast rhythm and can prompt embryos to develop differently in preparation for the heat. Notably, birds that are serenaded by heat calls as embryos tend to be relatively small, a characteristic thought to help them lose heat more efficiently and produce more young throughout adulthood. Despite the lasting influence of heat calls on zebra finch physiology, the mechanism through which they act remains a mystery.Led by Eve Udino (Deakin University, Australia), a team of researchers also from Deakin University, Clemson University, USA, and the Doñana Biological Station, Spain, questioned whether the energy-generating units inside cells (mitochondria) are the missing piece to this musical puzzle. Mitochondria use oxygen to convert food into cellular energy (ATP), while a portion of this oxygen is also diverted to produce heat. Since changes in mitochondrial function during development can have long-term effects on animal physiology, Udino and colleagues suggested that zebra finch mitochondria may be responding to heat calls produced by their parents. The team collected eggs from zebra finches maintained at an outdoor aviary in Geelong, Australia, and incubated the eggs at a blistering 37.5°C. A few days before they were due to hatch, the team played recordings of heat calls to the developing embryos. The newly hatched chicks were then raised in nests at various temperatures, ranging from 22°C to 34°C. Once they turned 13 days old, the team obtained some blood from the chicks to assess the function of the mitochondria in their red blood cells.The researchers first discovered that nest temperature can alter how well zebra finch mitochondria work. The birds raised in hotter nests had less efficient mitochondria, meaning that their mitochondria produced less ATP and consequently more heat than the mitochondria of birds raised at cooler temperatures. Remarkably, embryonic exposure to heat calls improved mitochondrial efficiency across all nest temperatures (22–34°C), suggesting that heat calls re-program how zebra finch mitochondria balance ATP versus heat production.While a nest temperature of 34°C may seem hot, zebra finches can experience temperatures that are much, much higher. Therefore, Udina and colleagues took the study one step further and exposed a group of the 13-day-old birds to a brief heatwave, warming the youngsters’ nests to 44°C over the course of 2.5 hours before checking the mitochondria again. This time, the mitochondria of birds that had listened to heat calls as embryos tended to be less efficient. Although this may seem disadvantageous, the team suspects that there may be benefits to reducing mitochondrial efficiency under extreme heat conditions. High rates of mitochondrial ATP production can produce toxic reactive oxygen species, compounds that can wreak havoc on proteins, lipids and DNA. Making mitochondria less efficient at extremely high temperatures may help birds reduce the damaging effects of reactive oxygen species.We often think that a bird's life begins once it hatches, but birds can sense and respond to events going on in the outside world before they enter it. As zebra finch parents sound the heat alarm, their embryos get to work altering their physiology. So, next time you hear zebra finches calling in the Australian heat, don't think of their sweet songs as ‘music to the ears’, but rather, as ‘music to the mitochondria’.

КНЯЗЬ АЛЕКСАНДР НЕВСКИЙ: СТАНОВЛЕНИЕ ПОЛКОВОДЦА И ДИПЛОМАТА

The years of adolescence, youth and early youth of Prince Alexander Nevsky are practically unknown or known only to a narrow circle of historians. This topic is of considerable interest and has become the subject of discussion at the regular XXIXth International Educational Christmas Readings: “Alexander Nevsky: West and East, the historical memory of the people.” Prince Alexander was a representative of the second generation of the “Big Nest” baby birds – of Yuri Vsevolodovich, the Grand Duke of Vladimir- Suzdal. In his adolescence, Prince Alexander went through a difficult school of government in Veliky Novgorod. Together with his elder brother Theodor, he went through a difficult time of hunger, pestilence, disease and helped the Novgorodians cope with the consequences of these hardships. After the untimely death of Prince Theodore in June 1233, the young 15-year-old Prince began to rule alone in Novgorod the Great, pursuing the policy of the Grand-Ducal Vladimir-Suzdal dynasty in the North-West of the Russian land. In 1234, at the age of 16, Prince Alexander received his first baptism of fire. During the Mongol- Tatar campaign to Europe in 1237 – 1242 and the crusading encroachment on the lands of Pskov and Novgorod, he pursued the political course adopted by his father Yaroslav Vsevolodovich, the Grand Duke.

Macrostructural Narrative Skills of Monolingual and Simultaneously Bilingual Preschoolers

Abstract. This article compares the development of macrostructural narrative skills of monolingual and simultaneously bilingual preschoolers in telling a picture story. It also addresses the connections between macrostructural narrative skills, receptive and productive language skills (LiSe DaZ), and auditory perception and processing skills (HASE). The narrative skills were collected using the Baby Birds picture story of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) and analyzed regarding the macrostructural components of story structure, story complexity, and story comprehension. This contribution includes data from 229 monolingual and 76 simultaneously bilingual children. The comparison of the three age groups (4;6 – 4;11, 5;0 – 5;5, 5;6 – 5;11 years) indicates significant developmental increases in the performance of monolingual children regarding story structure, story complexity, and story comprehension, while no clear age trends are apparent for the simultaneously bilingual children. Correlations are found for the story structure and story comprehension of monolingual and simultaneously bilingual children with individual receptive language skills and language-processing skills.

Einfluss des Bildaufbaus in Narrativen auf die Erzählkomplexität von Vorschulkindern – eine empirische Vergleichsstudie

The aim of the present study was to test the influence of picture composition on the narrative complexity of preschool children, and to compare the different procedures of the Cat Story of Hickmann (2002) and the Fox Story of Gülzow & Gagarina (2007) with the Baby Birds and Baby Goats Story of MAIN, by Gagarina et al. (2012). For this purpose, 27 children between the ages of 5;01 and 6;09 were tested with both variants to check whether a macro-structurally controlled picture structure would lead to more complex stories. The results show that narratives with a Goal-Attempt-Outcome structure, i.e. the Baby Birds and Baby Goats Stories, make children with increasing age tell more complex stories by means of a rise in story complexity than the narratives of Hickmann and Gülzow & Gagarina without that structure.

Macrostructural organization of adults’ oral narrative texts

This study investigates macrostructure in elicited narratives of 69 monolingual German-, Russian- and Swedish-speaking adults. Using the LITMUS-MAIN (Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives), and its Baby Goats and Baby Birds stories, story structure and story complexity, concerning episodic organization, were examined across the 3 languages. As theoretical underpinnings, a multidimensional model of macrostructure was used. This model includes analyses of story structure (SS), in which a narrative merits a maximum score of 17, based on the occurrence of five types of macrostructural components (Internal states as initiating event and as reaction, Goal, Attempt and Outcome), and of story complexity (SC), which measures combinations of Goals, Attempts and Outcomes within one episode. The highest attainable complexity is the GAO-sequence, when a Goal, Attempt and Outcome are produced within the same episode. The results for SS were similar for German, Russian and Swedish, where adults included 11-12 components per story. A more detailed analysis of the individual components revealed striking similarities across the 3 languages, both for frequently used and seldom occurring components. SC did not differ significantly across languages nor across stories, whilst for SS, a slight difference between the two stories was found. We interpret this finding as story complexity (a qualitative measure of macrostructure) being of a more universal nature. Furthermore, our results indicate that caution is warranted when conclusions about children’s narrative skills are to be drawn on the basis of the MAIN Baby Goats and Baby Birds stories.

Comprehension and production of narrative macrostructure in Swedish: A longitudinal study from age 4 to 7

This article reports results from a longitudinal study from age 4 to 7 of comprehension and production of narrative macrostructure in Swedish monolingual children ( N = 17). Baby Birds/ Baby Goats from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) were used to elicit narratives and ask comprehension questions at age 4;4, 5;10 and 7;4. Results showed a steep development from age 4;4 to 5;10 in both comprehension and production of macrostructure, but only some further development in comprehension to age 7;4. For the measures studied, children seem to reach a plateau around age 6. Consistent differences between comprehension and production (higher scores in comprehension) and between stories (higher scores on Baby Goats) were found across time points.

Prey Animal

Prey Animal Emily Pittinos (bio) The director of the songbird hospital refers to the kitchen’s freezer as The Morgue. The hospital is a tidy operation in a converted, rural house. The front desk has two phones for receiving reports of injured birds and giving advice to the Midwesterners who discover them. There is a small area for triage, a metal table surrounded by well-labeled containers of syringes and swabs and medications, the purposes and names of which I do not yet know. The bald and hideous hatchlings are kept in buckets inside an incubator and fed every fifteen minutes with droppers full of mush. I’m told that once they grow strong enough to perch on the edge of their buckets, they are moved into larger cages in the nursery with the adolescents. Once they fledge, they are considered adults and are soon released. A bird’s neck has between fifteen and twenty-five vertebrae, and as the woman training me fidgets with the cadaver pigeon, every one of them droops to the side. Under the plumage, a pigeon’s skin is purple, like a full-body bruise. She shows me the keel, the extension of bone that joins the spine to the tail. She explains the crop, a muscular purse of seeds and stones stored at the base of the bird’s gullet to aid digestion. If the crop is punctured by an animal attack, it is impossible to repair. We test this by guiding a dropper of water through the mouth and into the crop, and if the skin of the throat springs a leak, it’s too late. She shows me an image of pigeons splayed on the ground with handfuls of seed leaking from their necks. Bird as torn sack; bird as one long gash. At the end of my initial volunteer training, the woman running triage says, “If you want to work in our ER, I have to ask you up front: would you be comfortable euthanizing birds?” “Yes, sure,” I say, nodding too vigorously, too eager to please. I want to be the best at saving, whatever that means. “We don’t like to, of course, but many of the birds who come to us are just too far gone.” “Yes, of course I can.” This may be a lie. I’ve never killed, though I have watched a thing die. [End Page 86] I am told to beware of masking, a term for when an obvious minor issue camouflages a serious injury. The lazy diagnosis. The hope for a quick fix. The assumption that there is only one problem to solve at a time. The daze brought on by dehydration may make diagnosing a head trauma more difficult. Head injury may distract from a crop punctured by the claws of a cat. This phenomenon can occur in humans as well. When my father broke his ribs by falling on black ice, his pain and exhaustion may have distracted doctors from the liver failure that quickly killed him. Many humans are incapable of caring for the weak. They do not do their research. They birdnap fledglings whose mothers are chaperoning their first flights from above. They find hatchlings on the ground and feed them wet dog food. They force juice into the crops and stomachs of young pigeons with droppers. One woman offers a baby cardinal her own breast milk. They often do these deeds to encourage their own offspring, girls and boys who want to crush baby birds with love between their palms. “Just put the bird in a shoebox and keep it in a dark room,” I say again and again through the phone. “No. Please, bring it in. Do not try to save the bird on your own.” Songbirds are prey animals. Prey meaning they’re at the bottom of the avian food chain. Prey meaning in a choice between fight or flight, they choose flight every time. But when the birds are injured and trapped by the monstrous grip of a volunteer, fleeing isn’t an option. This triggers panic in the birds. Panic so severe that it can stop their hearts. Imagine: a bird dying of...

Nestling and adult sparrows respond differently to conspecific dialects

Baby birds prefer local dialects. Songbirds have predispositions to learn songs of their own species over others, but what about species that have regional dialects? And how different are responses of baby and adult birds? We show that golden-crowned sparrow chicks, before song learning, treat foreign songs like heterospecific songs. Adults, on the other hand, show graded responses to local, foreign and heterospecific songs. This study tells us how song responses change across life stages.

The Witness

The Witness A. Molotkov (bio) My cat killed a baby bird after killing its mother. The baby bird had a small hole in its head. The head itself was very small. The bird was still alive when I found it. It kept dozing off – a second or two later it would awake with a spasm. Its eyes opened and closed, opened and closed. I was torn, uncertain what to do. It seemed evident that the bird was not going to make it. But I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know enough about baby birds. I watched it for a few minutes. Then I left it and went on with my day. What was the baby bird thinking? In its dreams, it was briefly able to fly – something it had not learned in life and would never get a chance to learn. It flew over the backyard, enjoying a glorious experience first, followed by an abrupt loss of control, as if the texture of the air itself had changed. The fall was terrifying, with an immense void opening up below, ready to suck everything in. When I checked back in about an hour, the baby bird had moved a few yards. Its condition appeared the same. Drowsy eyes, the body fighting, unwilling to give up, shaken by an occasional spasm. With each dream, each fall, the confidence required to continue flying was bitterly fading. The gigantic void was getting closer. The bird’s eyes were so small I could not distinguish the pupils. I didn’t know what to do. I took the baby bird in my clumsy hand and placed it in a less accessible location, by the fence, where the cat would not notice it. I was still hoping that the bird might survive. And if not, I wished it an easy death free from further aggression. [End Page 61] Once again, I left it and reentered my life. Now the bird was determined to escape. With this singular notion in mind, it overcame the inviting drowsiness and moved on, in one direction. When I came back about an hour later, it had made it through the gate and was in the front yard, still shuffling ahead in slow, spasmodic increments. If only it could find its mother! She would take care of everything, just like she always had: all that effort put into building the nest, warming the egg into life, supporting the being that had come out of the egg. This was the last time I saw the baby bird alive. Half an hour later, I looked out the window, and the immobility of that tiny organism was strangely stunning. The most efficient of flies had already discovered the new opportunity. I went to get a garbage bag. It’s when I came outside to pick up the baby bird that I found the mother. She was lying nearby, worms well at work on her body. I packed both birds together in the same bag and threw them away. My cat had killed them both, after all. Newly departed from the body, the baby bird’s soul floated around for a while, trying to comprehend what had happened, to learn a lesson. “It was not my fault. I was not unprepared,” it said to its little bird god, to its mother, to me, so hopelessly stunned by its death. “I wasn’t a bad bird. It was just an accident. I will try harder next time.” But it had not been an accident. It was my cat. I had been feeding it every day for quite a few years. “Is there a next time?” the bird asked after a pause. “I don’t know,” I replied. “I don’t know.” I couldn’t lie, not now. [End Page 62] Three years have passed. Today we buried the cat who had killed the birds. She was hit by a car. Judging by the state she was in, it must have happened instantly. Cars travel fast. She must have gone out in one enormous scream. She didn’t experience the agony the little bird had gone through, and I didn’t witness her death. It was not her...

잊혀진 왕실 병풍, ‘花草屛’과 ‘引雛翎毛屛’

잊혀진 왕실 병풍, ‘花草屛’과 ‘引雛翎毛屛’

Reproductive Behaviour of Funambulus Pennatii A Case Study of Ajmer Rajasthan

Northern Palm Squirrel Funambulus Pennatii Is Native To India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Adult Body Weight Is About 147 Gm; Body Length Ranges 230-356mm Including Tail. The Tail Alone Makes About Half of the Total Body Length. Key Physical Features Stripes On The Back, There Are Five Lightly Coloured Stripes On The Back. The Top Coat Color Is Grey. Head Is Also Grey. Widespread And Flexible In Their Habitat Preferences, Typically Living In Elevations Below 4000m. These Animals Have Been Found In Grass Land, Scrubland, Plantations, Dry Deciduous Forest, Urban, Rural, Suburban, Agriculture. Live On Plantation And Around Farm Lands And Near Houses. Play Role in Pollination and Dispersal of Plantation Trees. They Are Herbivorous To Omnivorous, They Typically Feed On Wide Variety Of Foods Seeds, Nuts, Buds, Young Bark, Leaves, Insects, Flowers And Grubs. They Also Eat Baby Birds. They Feed Both In Trees And On Ground. They Store Food For Later Use (Foraging Behavior). The Behavior Of Funambulus Pennantii Is Studied In Present Paper.

Perspectives on bilingual children's narratives elicited with the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives

This Special Issue is all about the stories of children: preschool- and school-age children; bilingual and monolingual children; children developing typically or identified as having a specific language impairment (SLI); and children speaking and experiencing one or more of the following languages: English, Finnish, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, and Turkish in minority or majority language contexts. The stories are fictional ones, about baby birds and baby goats, a cat and a dog: a cast of characters the reader will come to know well as they read the Introduction (Gagarina, Klop, Tsimpli, & Walters, 2016) and individual articles. They were collected using a new narrative assessment tool that is common to all the articles within the issue: the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings—Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN; Gagarina et al., 2012, 2015), described at some length by its developers in the Introduction to the Special Issue.

Fiddlewood Leafroller, Seagrape Moth (suggested common names) Epicorsia oedipodalis (Guenée, 1854) (Lepidoptera: Ditrysia: Pyraloidea: Pyralidae: Pyraustinae)

These caterpillars roll up leaves of the host plants and use the rolled leaves as larval retreats and locations for pupal cocoons. Although these leaf-eating pests do no permanent damage, they can completely defoliate fiddlewood, a Florida native that can form a large shrub or small tree. The shrub simply puts out a new flush of leaves. The larvae themselves are valuable food source for baby birds during the spring dry season in Florida. This 4-page fact sheet was written by William H. Kern, and published by the UF Department of Entomology and Nematology, February 2015. (Photo:W.H. Kern, Jr., UF/IFAS/FLREC) EENY617/IN1079: Fiddlewood Leafroller, Seagrape Moth (suggested common names) Epicorsia oedipodalis (Guenée, 1854) (Lepidoptera: Ditrysia: Pyraloidea: Pyralidae: Pyraustinae) (ufl.edu)

ЖЕЛТОСПИННАЯ МУХОЛОВКА FICEDULA ZANTHOPYGIA (HAY, 1845) У СЕВЕРНОЙ ГРАНИЦЫ АРЕАЛА НА БУРЕИНСКОМ НАГОРЬ

The Yellow-rumped Flycatcher is distributed in Priamurye to the North up to 53°NL, and in Bureinsky uplands up to 51°07’ by NL. In the subboreal zone of uplands it gets into mountains not higher than 200-250 m a.s.l., and in the boreal – to 450-500 m a.s.l. Migrations in all the areas of uplands happen approximately at the same time: the spring one – in mid or late May, the autumn one – in the second decade of August. In the subboreal zone of uplands (southeast part) the highest number is observed in the broad-leaved and mixed woods. In the boreal zone of uplands the highest number is observed in an anthropogenous landscape of internal areas in the secondary slope woods. Look number in the northern part of the geographic range (Priamurye) is higher, than in its southern part (Primorye). The northern border of the range is characterized by the overlap of initial stages of a post-nuptial molt with the period of feeding of nested baby birds. The beginning of a post-juvenile molt is shifted, apparently, for later term. The penetration into internal areas of uplands which is observed in the last 80-100 years is the consequence of the current climatic changes as well as the anthropogenous transformation of the environment.

Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver Crystal Wilkinson (bio) In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can,” Barbara Kingsolver wrote in her debut novel The Bean Trees, first published in 1988. Back then she could not have known that her entire ethos as one of our finest creative writers, public intellectuals, and humanitarians would be summed up in this statement. But consciously or not, that’s what Kingsolver has tried to do time and time again in her award-winning works of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry; [End Page 38] in her advocacy on behalf of the environment, local foods, and social justice; and in her establishment of the Bellwether Prize for writers of “unusually powerful fiction.” A daughter of Appalachia who has lived and worked all over the world, Kingsolver has produced novels—among them The Poisonwood Bible, The Lacuna, and Flight Behavior—short story collections, essays, and poems that have been translated into more than two dozen languages. She has received Britain’s Orange Prize for Fiction, the James Beard Award, the National Humanities Medal, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, as well as being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In a recent conversation with acclaimed writer and teacher Crystal Wilkinson, Kingsolver spoke of how her rural upbringing has “never left [her] psyche,” finding her literary voice, and writing across genres. CRYSTAL WILKINSON: As a child you grew up in Carlisle, Kentucky, and then lived briefly in the Congo. How did your sense of the outside world as a girl develop? How did it frame your identity as a woman and as a writer? BARBARA KINGSOLVER: You’ve put your finger on the formative moment in my lifelong sense of place, belonging, and point-of-view. As a rural child in Kentucky, I claimed as my own universe the fields and woods surrounding our farm, and the few dozen children with whom I attended first grade. The next year my parents abruptly moved our family to the Republic of Congo, where my father provided health care to people who badly needed it. Instead of going to school I spent many months prowling with my brother around a village of thatched mud houses, no electricity or plumbing, no school, [End Page 39] no stores, no roads or automobiles. We tried to befriend children who spoke no English and viewed our whiteness as a bizarre curiosity. The girls my age were all busy carrying younger siblings around as they fetched water, worked in manioc fields and gathered firewood from the jungle. Little boys climbed trees in search of things to eat, such as palm nuts or baby birds. I envied these kids’ adult-like competence, and tried to keep up, but mostly failed. I accepted my status as an utter outsider. Surprisingly, that stamp never left my psyche. When we returned to Kentucky I entered third grade and found that important things had happened in my absence. My peers had learned to fit their writing on one line of the ruled paper instead of two. Our segregated school had been integrated. Classmates sorted themselves wordlessly into groups based not just on skin color but also clothing, possessions, whether they lived in town or rode the bus—subtle supremacies that baffled me. The kids who were considered poor in our county were affluent compared with those I’d recently known, who literally had nothing but the shirt on their backs. I resisted the easy order, and fell into a gap that continued to widen. In small towns like these, all human interactions tend to begin with the unspoken question: Are you one of Us, or one of Them? I accidentally became Neither. I felt as if I’d taken an apple from the tree of knowledge, and gotten myself thrown out of the garden. I did what lonely kids do everywhere (or did, before the internet): buried my nose in books about everyplace and everything, and made friends with other people who didn’t quite fit in. Something in me was always watching life from the outside, permanently obsessed with the notion of belonging vs. not-belonging. It did not make for...

From baby birds to feathered dinosaurs: incipient wings and the evolution of flight

Reconstructing the tree of life requires deciphering major evolutionary transformations and the functional capacities of fossils with “transitional” morphologies. Some of the most iconic, well-studied fossils with transitional features are theropod dinosaurs, whose skeletons and feathered forelimbs record the origin and evolution of bird flight. However, in spite of over a century of discussion, the functions of forelimb feathers during the evolution of flight remain enigmatic. Both aerodynamic and non-aerodynamic roles have been proposed, but few of the form-function relationships assumed by these scenarios have been tested. Here, we use the developing wings of a typical extant ground bird (Chukar Partridge) as possible analogues/homologues of historical wing forms to provide the first empirical evaluation of aerodynamic potential in flapping theropod “protowings.” Immature ground birds with underdeveloped, rudimentary wings generate useful aerodynamic forces for a variety of locomotor tasks. Feather development in these birds resembles feather evolution in theropod dinosaurs, and reveals a predictable relationship between wing morphology and aerodynamic performance that can be used to infer performance in extinct theropods. By spinning an ontogenetic series of spread-wing preparations on a rotating propeller apparatus across a range of flow conditions and measuring aerodynamic force, we explored how changes in wing size, feather structure, and angular velocity might have affected aerodynamic performance in dinosaurs choosing to flap their incipient wings. At slow angular velocities, wings produced aerodynamic forces similar in magnitude to those produced by immature birds during behaviors like wing-assisted incline running. At fast angular velocities, wings produced forces sufficient to support body weight during flight. These findings provide a quantitative, biologically relevant bracket for theropod performance and suggest that protowings could have provided useful aerodynamic function early in maniraptoran history, with improvements in aerodynamic performance attending the evolution of larger wings, more effective feather morphologies, and faster angular velocities.

Flying Dinos and Baby Birds Offer New Clues About How Avians Took Wing

At a meeting of vertebrate paleontologists last month, researchers pondered fresh clues about the origins of flight from studies of feathered dinosaurs and baby birds.

Kite Day: A Bear and Mole Story (review)

Reviewed by: Kite Day: A Bear and Mole Story Jeannette Hulick Hillenbrand, Will . Kite Day: A Bear and Mole Story; written and illus. by Will Hillenbrand. Holiday House, 2012. 30p. ISBN 978-0-8234-1603-5 $16.95 R 3-5 yrs. A windy blue sky and the smell of the air convince Bear that it's "Kite Day," and he and his friend Mole work together to construct a lovely yellow one which soars "up. Up. Up" until a storm hits and snaps the kite's string. The two friends rush to extricate their storm-battered creation from a tree but change their minds when they see where it has landed: right above a nest of baby birds, who are now sheltered by its cover. With lively, short sentences, ear-pleasing word choices, repetition of particular words and phrases ("Splat. Splat Splat. Rain pelted the broken kite"), and a simple but dramatic situation, this is a perfect fit for an attention-challenged preschool audience; the bold colors and simple but striking compositions of the mixed-media illustrations also make this a splendid selection for group viewing. Tiny, pale gray Mole with his rosy cheeks and toes is a fine illustrative foil to the exuberant big, brown Bear, and the two friends, while visually quite different, are united by their shared task and by their colorful overalls. Bring this out on a breezy day to inspire a session of kite-making or wind exploration, or share it as part of a kite-themed storytime. [End Page 459] Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois