Blogs / Discoblog

Who knew sharper images and clearer sound would be good for our feathered friends? Come January 15, Hawaii will be the first state in the U.S. to switch over to digital TV, a month before the mandatory nationwide conversion on February 17. But the interesting part about the switch isn’t so much when but why: Federal wildlife officials suggested tearing down the old analog transmission towers earlier to avoid interference with the nesting season of a bird, the endangered Hawaiian petrel.

Petrels, also known as the ’Ua’u, are only found in Hawaii, and more than 1,000 of them nest on the slopes of Maui’s Haleakala volcano, where the analog towers are currently located. The nocturnal species, which reportedly has a chirp that sounds like a yapping puppy, is not adapting well to urban sprawl: The birds are disoriented by city lights and sometimes get caught on wires. Officials think rebuilding the towers at a different location, away from the petrel’s nesting sites, will give them some peace to nest, and help the species’ survival in the long term.

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· Jailbirds for conservation: Britain recruits prisoners to build bird houses and survey threatened species.

· Virgin Galactic rejects $1 million proposal to shoot sex-in-space video on its commercial spacecraft, the WhiteKnightTwo.

· Bikers go green: Honda shrinks the hybrid engine and will offer hybrid motorcycles by 2011.

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Ostriches, kiwis, emus—these birds always look out of place, bound to the land while their feathered cousins take to the sky. It’s easy to imagine that flightlessness evolved only once, and that bird species then split into several species; indeed, most scientists figured that was what happened. But according to a study led by John Harshman of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, that’s not so: Birds lost the ability to fly at least three times.

Harshman’s team began to poke holes in the common ancestor hypothesis by examining DNA from the different birds to see how they were related. The researchers found that emus and kiwis were actually more closely related to a ground-dwelling but flight-capable bird called the tinamous, which lives in the Americas, than they were to ostriches.

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They cheer together. They lose together. They commiserate together. In that way, Andy Radford says, South African birds called green woodhoopoes are much like soccer fans in his native Britain.

Radford, a University of Bristol professor, found that woodhoopoes live in gangs of about a dozen, and those groups don’t get along terribly well—they often descend into shouting contests. Unlike human shouting matches, which usually just end up with everyone unhappier than they were before, the birds’ contests have a definite winner. But, Radford says, the interesting part is what happens with the losers.

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