Bird Sology

If you have ever watched a bird nest closely, you may have seen something that looks completely bizarre. A parent arrives with food, feeds a tiny chick, waits for the chick to turn around, and then picks up a small white package from its baby and swallows it.

Yes, the parent bird is sometimes eating its baby’s poop. But this strange behavior has very little to do with ...

Sheep may look like simple grazers, but their diet is more interesting than a mouthful of grass. These animals spend a large part of their day searching through vegetation, selecting leaves, stems, grasses, and other edible plants as they move through a pasture. Their ability to turn fibrous vegetation into energy allows them to live on foods that many other domestic animals ...

Winter changes the way rabbits look at a landscape. In spring and summer, a rabbit can sit in a patch of green grass and find tender leaves, flowers, weeds, and other soft plants almost everywhere. Once cold weather arrives, much of that easy food disappears, dries out, gets buried under snow, or becomes too tough to eat.

That does not mean rabbits stop finding food. W...

Lightning bugs are famous for the tiny flashes they produce on warm summer nights, but their diet is much less familiar. Most people notice the glowing adults flying over lawns, gardens, fields, and wooded edges without realizing that these insects spend most of their lives in a very different form. Before becoming the familiar flashing adults, fireflies spend months or even ...

Emperor Penguins live in one of the most extreme environments on Earth, yet the hardest part of their daily survival is not always the cold. Finding enough food beneath Antarctic sea ice can be just as challenging. These remarkable birds spend much of their lives surrounded by frozen ocean, diving into dark water to hunt fish, squid, krill, and other marine animals.

An...