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February 3 – Frequent Flier
Today’s Factismal: Over its lifetime, a typical Arctic Tern will fly about 1,320,000 miles or more than five times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. In 1638, Francis Goodwin wrote a science...
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February 8 – Faster than a speeding pullet
Today’s Factismal: A peregrine falcon has been recorded diving toward its prey at 242 mph. What brown and white and found all over? The peregrine falcon! This predator is both the world’s fastest bird...
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February 21 – Carolina (Parakeets) On My Mind
Today’s Factismal: The last Carolina Parakeet died in 1918. Imagine that you are walking along a river in the Carolinas during the early part of the last century. As you wander along, you see a sudden...
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May 11 – Woodn’t You?
Today’s Factismal: Insects make up less than a third of a red-headed woodpecker’s diet. There is no bird more familiar to children of a certain age than Woody Woodpecker. This anthropomorphized version...
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May 16 – Ring around the birdie
Today’s Factismal: The Romans used bird bands to communicate 2,250 years ago. Imagine that you are a Roman soldier trapped in a fortress and surrounded by angry Gauls who are almost as upset about...
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May 30 – Bird Brains
Today’s Factismal: The oldest known bird dates back 135 million years ago – or does it? One of the open secrets in science is that there are very few cases where you can say definitely categorize...
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June 24 – Soar Like An Eagle
Today’s Factismal: In 1963, there were only about 820 Bald Eagles in the wild; today, there are more than 200,000. There is something majestic about a soaring bald eagle. The steady flap of its wings,...
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July 27 – I Sea You!
Today’s factismal: Seabirds have a specialized gland that removes salt from their blood and pumps it out their noses. If you ever see a seabird and it looks like it has a runny nose, don’t worry that...
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January 20 – Brak!
Factismal: Today is Penguin Awareness Day. Penguins are among the world’s most mis-understood animals. When they aren’t being mis-cast in cola commercials, they are being portrayed as tap-dancing...
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August 31 – For the birds
Today’s factismal: Filling your yard with native plants provides up to 7.5 times more food for the local birds. Birds are pretty weird. There are species that fly from one end of the globe to the other...
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September 2 – Huffin and Puffin
Today’s factismal: I’m traveling and don’t have time to do a proper factismal. So here’s a link to a puffin cam instead! http://explore.org/#!/live-cams/player/puffin-burrow-cam
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September 20 – A Confusion of Terms
Today’s factismal: There are more than fifty different terms for groups of birds. If you are a typical hunter-gatherer (or mathematician), then you tend to count like this: one bird, two birds, three...
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September 26 – Bird Is The Word
Today’s factismal: Birds are born with belly buttons but they lose them as they grow older. At first blush, it seems like an odd question: “Do birds have belly buttons?” but it turns out that, as is...
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October 2 – Blow Your Horn!
Today’s factismal: The trumpeter swan is the heaviest living bird native to North America and the biggest living waterfowl anywhere in the world! There is indescribable beauty in the dance of a...
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October 29 – Eye On The Sparrow Hawk
Today’s factismal: The American Kestrel is the smallest and most common raptor in North America. If you ask the typical seven year old “What is a raptor?”, they will probably tell you that it is a kind...
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November 16 – Bird On The Land
Today’s factismal: There are (or were) flightless birds on every continent. Diogenes and Plato once got into an argument about how to define man – what set him apart from the other animals? Was it his...
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December 3 – Watch the birdies!
Today’s factismal: About one out of every eight bird species is threatened with extinction. If you’ve ever seen a flock of 200,000 chinstrap penguins sunning on an island (or smelled them), then it...
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December 4 – In The Black
Today’s factismal: The black swan is the only animal with a logical fallacy named for it. Back in the 1900s, there was a great debate about how to define science. Was science just what scientists do?...
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December 29 – Fly the coop
Today’s factismal: There are twenty-three birds in “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. Everyone knows the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. (That’s no surprise, given that it has been a perennial...
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January 20 – Brak!
Today’s Factismal: Today is Penguin Awareness Day. Penguins are among the world’s most mis-understood animals. When they aren’t being mis-cast in cola commercials, they are being portrayed as...
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