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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 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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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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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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January 8 – Blue Water
Today’s factismal: Plastic trash floating in the ocean weighs as much as 1,350 blue whales. If you look around yourself, odds are you’ll see some plastic nearby. You’ll see plastic in the keyboard of...
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January 11 – Albatross!
Today’s factismal: At 62 years old, the world’s oldest living banded bird is an albatross named Wisdom. To any biologist, bird banding is one of the most useful and most basic tools. By simply slipping...
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April 14 – Birds of Pray
Today’s factismal: The largest bird skull ever found was 28 inches long. Eighteen inches of that was the beak, which was used to club prey to death. There is a joke in paleontological circles that...
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May 11 – Say What?
Today’s factismal: The word krak means “there’s a leopard here” in the language of Campbell’s monkeys. Just a few decades ago, people were convinced that man was the only animal that used language. And...
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May 31 – Call Me Honey
The yellow tinted honeyeater is one of the more common birds in the Northern Territories of Australia. This small, noisy bird flits from bush to bush, drinking their nectar and eating small insects....
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June 21 – Water You Up To?
The petrel has an amusing habit that gives the bird its name. To a biologist, it is called a procellariidae which means “rider of the storm” in Latin. But though many petrels like to ride the strong...
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June 22 – Gone Forever
Today’s factismal: Ten species have been removed from the Endangered Species List because they are extinct. There was some sad news out of the US Fish and Wildlife Service last week: the Eastern Cougar...
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July 27 – I’m Not Lion
Today’s factismal: Poachers killed Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe last week. If there is one thing that just about everyone can agree on, it is that poaching is bad. And not just “parking in a handicapped...
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September 13 – Fairy Interesting
The world’s smallest penguin is about a foot tall, weighs about three pounds,and is known as the fairy penguin in Australia. That last part is the most amusing because in Australia, these little...
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