Nature & Wildlife
Daylight savings time—the practice of advancing clocks to make better use of the longer daylight available during summer so that darkness falls at a later clock time—will end on November 2 this year. That means that we’ll set our clocks to “fall back” into standard time.
Nature & Wildlife
Growing up, you probably learned some version of the following: in the animal kingdom, humans are exceptional and unique. Among the one-of-a-kind qualities that we possess are a higher intelligence than all the other creatures on the planet, the ability to use tools and empathy.
Nature & Wildlife
You know them because you see them in your neighborhood every day. And you certainly have heard their distinctive, harsh caws and kraas. They are crows and ravens, the corvids that are well-known for their black color. Crows can be found all over the world in a variety of habitats.
Nature & Wildlife
For me, spring and Rachel Carson are inextricably linked. In her visionary, 1962 book, Silent Spring, Carson—a marine biologist and environmental trailblazer—wrote: “Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty…
Nature & Wildlife
If you asked any wildlife fan or pet owner if animals have beliefs, I’m guessing their answers would almost all fall within the “yes” category, based on observations and anecdotal evidence. Science, however, is always held to a higher standard: proof is required.
Travel Tales
The world that I look out upon from the window in my home office, here in Wisconsin, is pretty quiet right now. In other times, the interstate just beyond the woods that surrounds my house would be busy with fast-moving cars and semitrucks. But presently, only occasionally does the sound of any traffic reach me.
Videos
Ever since I read Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” in junior high school, the bird has fascinated me. Corvids, such as ravens and crows, are among the smartest of all birds and have a reputation for solving more and more complicated problems invented by increasingly creative scientists.
Videos
We’re always delighted when we find evidence of extreme intelligence in the “others,” such as when we learn that crows crack nuts open by using passing cars and gorillas dismantle snares to thwart poachers. While primate and corvid intelligence is well known, what may be a little less apparent is the intellectual power of parrots.
Conservation
Corvids—a family of birds that includes crows, jays, magpies, nutcrackers and ravens—are smart animals. They can make tools, recognize individual human faces and give our five-year-old children a run for their money in solving puzzles.
