Starling success traced to rapid adaptation

Love them or hate them, there's no doubt the European Starling is a wildly successful bird. A new study from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology examines this non-native species from the inside out. What exactly happened at the ...

Starlings sleep less during summer and full-moon nights

Researchers of the University of Groningen and the Max Planck Institute have found that starlings sleep five hours less per night during the summer. Compared to winter, the birds take more mid-day naps and live under higher ...

Male birds sing less to females on antidepressants

During courtship male starlings sing less to females who have been fed dilute concentrations of antidepressants, according to a new study led by the University of York.

Birds of a feather flock together to confuse potential predators

Scientists from the Universities of Bristol and Groningen, in The Netherlands, have created a computer game style experiment which sheds new light on the reasons why starlings flock in massive swirling groups over wintering ...

Songbirds have a thing for patterns

You might think that young children would first learn to recognize sounds and then learn how those categories of sounds fit together into words. But that isn't how it works. Rather, kids learn sounds and words at the same ...

Flocks of starlings ride the wave to escape

Why does it seem as if a dark band ripples through a flock of European starlings that are steering clear of a falcon or a hawk? It all lies in the birds' ability to quickly and repeatedly dip to one side to avoid being attacked. ...

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