Natural flyers like birds, bats and insects outperform man-made aircraft in aerobatics and efficiency. University of Michigan engineers are studying these animals as a step toward designing flapping-wing planes with wingspans smaller than a deck of playing cards.

In the latest issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, Swedish researchers report that birds captured in the hyperboreal tundra, in connection with the tundra expedition “Beringia 2005,” were carriers of antibiotics-resistant bacteria.

With the aid of various alarm calls the Siberian jay bird species tells other members of its group what their main predators-¬hawks¬-are doing. The alarm calls are sufficient for Siberian jays to evince situation-specific fleeing behaviors, which enhances their chances of survival.

Twenty-five percent of all bird species in the United States are at risk of extinction, according to a report by the National Audubon Society and American Bird Conservancy, the nation's leading bird conservation groups. WatchList 2007 is a compilation of the most endangered birds in the United States.

According to a study published in Conservation Biology, climate change, exacerbated by habitat loss, could cause up to 30 percent of land-bird species (which include the vast majority of all bird species) to go extinct worldwide by the year 2100.

Geographic range maps that allow conservationists to estimate the distribution of birds may vastly overestimate the actual population size of threatened species and those with specific habitats, according to a study published online this week in the journal Conservation Biology.

M.C. Escher's ambiguous drawings transfix us: Are those black birds flying against a white sky or white birds soaring out of a black sky?

Whereas most birds are sole proprietors of their nests, some tropical species “time share” together – a discovery that helps clear up a 150-year-old evolutionary mystery, says Biology professor Vicki Friesen.

Even bird brains can get to know an entire continent -- but it takes them a year of migration to do so, suggests a Princeton research team.

The earliest birds acted more like turkeys than common cuckoos, according to a new report in the November 6th issue of Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press. By comparing the claw curvatures of ancient and modern birds, the researchers provide new evidence that the evolutionary ancestors of birds primarily made their livings on the ground rather than in trees.

At the end of the Pleistocene epoch some 10,000 years ago, two species of condors in California competed for resources amidst the retreating ice of Earth's last major glacial age. The modern California condor triumphed, while its kin expired.

Scientists have shown that birds with higher stress levels adopt bolder behaviour than their normally more relaxed peers in stressful situations. A University of Exeter research team studied zebra finches, which had been selectively bred to produce three distinct types – ‘laid-back’, ‘normal’ and ‘stressed’ – based on their levels of stress hormone.