05092006 Article on Starlings (and other birds) and their ability to discriminate patterns of vocalizations

There's an interesting press release from University of Chicago on birds' ability to discriminate patterns of sounds and construct grammars. It's at

"Uniquely human" component of language found in gregarious birds

and the paper is at

Recursive syntactic pattern learning by songbirds

01152006

Removed the perch below the nestbox, as it was being used too often by red-tailed hawks. We don't believe that merely having the RTHs around in the area will be a problem (there's really nowhere in the entire valley that doesn't have at least a pair of RTHs, and in fact, last year's kestrels lived practically underneath a red-tail nest until they moved into our nestbox; plus, they don't compete for resources, and red-tails don't normally prey on kestrels), but we don't want the red-tails preventing the any kestrels from getting near the nestbox. Taking down the perch should solve this problem.

12112005

We're all set to start feeding images to Cornell University's Lab of Ornithology's The Birdhouse Network. We've tested the feed, and everything seems to work just fine.