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John James Audubon's images may be beautiful, but they were created at the heavy cost of avian lives. 

Lazuli Bunting

California condors are remarkable birds. They have a nine-foot wingspan, the largest of any North American bird! They are so large that they are more often mistaken for airplanes than other birds. Due to their size, Native Americans called them "thunderbirds," because the sound of their wings flapping purportedly made thunder. They are mostly black, with white patches under the wings. Another myth, from the Chumash tribe, tells that condors once had white feathers, but were burned when they got too close to a fire.

The critically endangered condors are in the same family as vultures, and many vultures are scavengers, meaning that they eat the remnants of dead animals. Unlike some vultures, however, condors do not have a particularly good sense of smell, instead using their sharp eyes to find food. They do not have talons and cannot carry prey, so they eat 2-3 pounds of food at a sitting and then sit for a day to recover! They are so big that they intimidate most would-be competitors for food. Even bears ignore them, and golden eagles are the only species that will fight them. Dominant, older birds eat before the younger ones.

Condors mate for life. When a male spots a potential mate, his head turns bright red and he walks towards her with his wings spread. If she lowers her head, it means she accepts. Although no actual nest is built, they lay their eggs in hard-to-access caves in rocky cliffs. Incubation takes two months, with the parents taking turns sitting on the egg.

At one point, there were thousands of condors in the wild. Ten thousand years ago, they lived on both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, from British Columbia to Baja California and from New York to Florida. However, they were endangered by many factors. They were hunted (particularly for museums) and poisoned by DDT. They got lead poisoning by scavenging dead animals killed by hunters who used lead bullets. Their habitat was also destroyed, and, as more people moved in, condor collisions with power lines increased. Additionally, people collected the condors' eggs. In the Gold Rush, condors were even turned into pets. The entire California condor population was reduced to 22 birds.

Captive breeding programs saved the condors. In the wild, condors are slow breeders, but they "double-clutch," or lay a second egg if the first one is lost or taken. So scientists took the condors' first eggs, allowing the pairs to raise the second eggs. The first eggs were put in an incubator until they hatched, when the chicks were fed with condor puppets and recordings of condor sounds were played to them. In twenty years, the population grew to 200 birds.

Today there are 369 condors in the world, and 190 of these are wild. However, they are not safe. Some of them have been killed by coyotes or eagles. Some still flew into power lines, but now before new birds are released they "undergo a power pole aversion training program which uses mock power poles that deliver a small electric shock to the birds when they try to land on them," according to the US Fish & Wildlife Service. This has effectively stopped the collisions. They are also accidentally hunted, or are poisoned by chemicals. Lead poisoning from scavenged meat is still one of the biggest threats. Since reintroduction, 15 condors have died from lead poisoning. (Nine of the cases were proven, and six were recorded as very likely.) Recently, lead ammunition has been banned within the condors' range. Although some people refuse to comply with this law, it has reduced the risk. They have been reintroduced to parts of California, Arizona, and Utah. They are still very rare, but their populations are increasing. Captive breeding and careful conservation seem to have saved this magnificent raptor.

Making birdseed Christmas ornaments is supposed to be a simple kids’ craft. Of course, it has been elaborated, so that you are supposed to use cookie cutters, add ingredients to the birdseed, and bake them in the oven. But the old-fashioned way is much quicker and easier.

This craft had been on Mom’s to-do list for a long time. We had a bird feeder, but that was year-round. When we finally made them, we used ice-cream cones as our base, covered them in peanut butter, and rolled them in birdseed. Then, we attached threads and hung them outside on the bottlebrush. Within two hours of sitting in the sun, the peanut butter had melted off the ice-cream cones, taking the birdseed with it. Perhaps this ought not to be attempted in places with a warm
climate or on unusually hot days.

Pinecones can be used rather than ice-cream cones, but the scales should be open instead of closed so that there is plenty of space for putting the peanut butter and birdseed. The best substitutes for peanut butter are honey or vegetable shortening.

These ornaments attract the same kinds of birds as a regular feeder. The standard species include cardinals, chickadees, sparrows, warblers, mockingbirds, blue jays, etc. If you do this regularly, migratory birds may also put you on their list of rest stops!

The passenger pigeon was the most common bird in North America. Mile-long flocks numbered into the billions, making farmers view the birds as pests. Explorers were amazed by the multitudes, writing that the flocks took hours to pass overhead and that they were countless. No one expected them to go extinct.

No one expected the Rocky Mountain locust, another pest, to go extinct, either. While the passenger pigeons were the second-most common animal in the whole world, these arthropods were the most common. In 1875, a swarm was spotted estimated to be 198,000 square miles -- larger than the entire state of California! That alone would have contained 12 and a half trillion insects, and weighed more than 27 tons!

Yet, less than thirty years after this sighting, the species was extinct. How? These locusts swarmed about for periods, then returned to sandy riverbeds, their natural breeding grounds. When they were in the riverbeds, burrowing under to lay their eggs, they were endangered by farmers plowing the ground above them to plant crops. Records state that farmers brought up thousands of egg cases while tilling their fields. Their egg cases discovered and their breeding grounds destroyed, these insects eventually went extinct. The last locust in the wild was found in Canada in 1902. North America is the only settled continent without a major species of locust.

Like the locusts, the passenger pigeons also vanished. In 1914, the last passenger pigeon, Martha (named after Martha Washington), died, and, unlike the ivory billed woodpecker, which is critically endangered today when it had been believed extinct for years, no other passenger pigeon has ever been found.

There are many causes for this entirely preventable extinction. For sport, hunters went out and slaughtered thousands of them. Shockingly, people killed passenger pigeons in many cruel ways. Some hunters caught a bird, sewed its eyes shut using a needle and thread, and tied it to a stool. As the bird attempted to land, it would flutter its wings, thus attracting the attention of other birds flying overhead. When the flocks landed near the blind bird, the other birds were trapped in nets and the hunters would crush them. Secondly, trees where pigeons made their nests were set on fire, and the smoke drove the birds from their nests. Another means of capturing these birds was to feed them grain soaked in alcohol, which made them easier to catch.

Loss of habitat and introduced diseases were also factors in their disappearance, as was the fact that they were eaten extensively in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1805, in New York City, a pair of pigeons could be bought for two cents. As a result, some slaves and servants never tasted any meat but pigeon. Even when there was only one large flock (of 250,000 birds) left, the hunters, who knew what was happening, did not spare it.

After people realized -- and cared -- that the birds were going extinct in the wild, there was no way to reintroduce them. Flocks of passenger pigeons could only mate if gathered in large numbers; there were not enough pigeons left to make even one of the enormous flocks. For the same reason, captive breeding centers also failed. Mourning doves are the closest relatives of the passenger pigeons. Scientists may someday use them to clone the passenger pigeon. This is similar to how scientists are trying to bring the quagga, which was similar to the zebra, back from extinction.

The quagga's face and neck looked like a zebra's, but the stripes faded along the back to a plain brown. Because of these unusual markings, it was hunted for its skin. It was also valued for its meat and, like the locusts and the pigeons, farmers thought of it as a nuisance. Now, people regret that they killed off this harmless horse, and are trying to breed horses that look more and more like the quagga once was.

It is important to remember the past so that we do not repeat it. Yet any kind of reintroduction, for any species, will not change the fact that their dying out was a disaster that could have been easily avoided... and wasn't.

Every kind of baby animal has a particular name. Some of them make sense -- a baby goose is called a gosling -- and some don't -- since when was calling a baby kangaroo a joey logical? See if you can pair each species of animal to its particular name!


HINT: Many species of baby animals are referred to as the same thing: for instance, a baby cow and a baby rhinoceros are both called calves. So while some of the following animals can be called the same thing, no two animals can be connected to the same name.

NOTE: This image may be printed for educational purposes, but cannot be sold or printed for commercial reasons. © Mikaela Sarkar 2010

Becoming a vegetarian not only benefits the animals, it also helps the planet. By easily altering your diet, you can save many resources, including land, food, water and energy.

Energy One third of all fossil fuels produced in the US are used to raise livestock to be eaten. Eighty percent of all agricultural land is used by the meat or dairy industries. All of the little stages needed to convey meat to your home add up into one huge problem. Turning off lights or unplugging appliances when they are not needed are very minor contributions when compared to the immense environmental profit created by a transition to vegetarianism. Consider the steps needed to produce a packaged hot dog or hamburger or chicken nuggets:

1. Remember the 80 percent of all farming land used by the meat companies? They use a lot of the land to grow corn, soybeans and grain to be used as feed. These crops must be watered, sprayed with pesticides and nurtured just as food for human consumption would be. This uses a lot of energy in itself. While this process is not eliminated by vegetarianism, many of the other steps could be.

2. When you see 18-wheelers driving down the highway, don't they strike you as being very bad for the environment? They're giving off clouds of pollution, and they get very bad mileage or they use more gas per mile than an energy-efficient car would use. Those trucks carry the grain to the feed mill. The feed mill isn't environmentally-friendly, either. It uses a lot of electricity to power it. Although being a vegetarian isn't perfect, at this point the food would be ready to go to the grocery store. But there's still a long process before the final product arrives at the supermarket.

3. The feed is loaded back into the 18-wheelers and driven to the factory farms, where animals are mass-produced. The animals have to be raised on the factory farms, which wastes a lot of energy. Think about it - they have to be fed, watered, and given injections of hormones and antibiotics to prevent the diseases which spread quickly in such unsanitary conditions, and many other things that most people don't realize are necessary.

4. Once the animals are grown, they are loaded onto specially-equipped 18-wheelers and trucked to the slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse, which is yet another inefficient industrial building, takes huge amounts of energy to run.

5. After they have been killed, the animals are often again transported and delivered to packaging factories, which must be powered to pack the bags of processed food that you buy in a grocery store.

6. The packaged food is driven to a grocery store, where it must be refrigerated to prevent its spoiling. You buy it and take it home, where it must again be kept cool.

Greenhouse Gases If every American substituted vegetarian food for a meal of chicken once a week, the carbon dioxide reduction would be equal to taking over half a million cars off the road, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, an organization trying to preserve natural resources. Eating one pound of meat is the carbon dioxide equivalent of driving an SUV 40 miles in the amount of energy expended to produce the final product.

Wasted Food Eating meat wastes more grain than dining on vegetarian foods, which do not have to be harvested to feed animals before they finally become human food. It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce just 1 pound of animal meat, according to John Robbins' Diet for a New America. That's a ratio of 16 to 1. If every pasture used to graze livestock or grow cattle feed was planted with soybeans for human consumption, no one in the world would be starving.

Pollutants The runoff from factory farms producing meat pollutes public water more than all other industrial sources combined. In towns around Bellingham, in Washington state, the fields are sprayed with contaminated, brown water from chicken plants. We went to a town, Lynden, which had a Dutch heritage and featured windmills and half-timbered buildings. It would have been quaint, except that it smelled horribly like the dirty water being used to irrigate the nearby fields. Because the corn fields were also being watered with the polluted water, that Halloween we could not go to any corn mazes.

Scenic Drives The French and Swiss Alps have been turned into huge cow pastures. The smell in some towns was so bad that we could not walk around in them. We tried to hike up to a glacier located in open space in France, but had to jump fences and avoid the fields with grazing cows in them. In England, it is sheep and not cows which roam everywhere. Although the sheep are not as bad as cattle, they still make traveling less enjoyable. When driving through the Midwestern US, we often pass stockyards where cows are packed into small, muddy enclosures.

Benefits of Vegetarianism Although being a vegetarian sounds strange and difficult, it is one of the very best things you could do for the environment. People turn off the air conditioning or the TV when they leave a room and use canvas grocery bags instead of paper or plastic ones, but, although this helps the environment some, eating meat wastes a lot more energy.

Everyone’s heard of chimpanzees using relatively sophisticated tools to perform everyday tasks, like to eat their food or to hunt. But other animals, like elephants, octopuses, and even some species of fish also use tools to perform common actions. Here are twenty such silly animal anecdotes.

In Depth Measure Gorillas and orangutans have been observed using sticks to measure the depth of bodies of water. And when an orangutan saw local humans spear fishing, he was spotted using a stick to catch fish from a net.

“Checkmate!” Rooks are more than just a chess piece. They are large, raven like birds which, as in Aesop’s fable, can drop stones into a narrow glass of water to reach the worm floating inside.

Good Neighbors According to the elephants, Robert Frost was wrong when he asserted that fences make good neighbors. They have been known to take huge stones, carry them to an electrical fence, and drop it down! That either breaks the fence or cuts off the electricity. Elephants also use branches as fly-swatters or back-scratchers.

Can Openers Sea otters have been observed using stones to dislodge their prey. Once they have caught it and are again floating on the surface they also use stones to crack the shells of their dinner.

Stepstools Honey badgers, which live in Africa and parts of Asia, can use logs as tools. One was seen rolling a log through an underground cave. It then climbed on top of the log to reach a kingfisher fledgling trapped in the roots coming through the cave’s ceiling.

Modified Toy Common bottlenose dolphins blow bubbles, which they form into rings and play with, using their noses and bodies to keep the ring from floating to the surface. That’s a fun kind of tool to use!

Betty In an experiment with “Betty,” a laboratory crow, scientists laid an assortment of wires, some straight and some with hooked ends, in her cage. Then, they put a basket-shaped metal piece in a narrow glass for Betty to pull up. The scientists did not expect what the crow did: she picked a straight wire, bent it into a hook, and used it to hoist the basket out of the glass.

Handmade Pocketknives Captive capuchin monkeys were given a flint stone and a closed box containing fruits. The capuchins broke the rock into sharp shards which they used to cut into the box.

Built-in Water Guns Archer fish live in freshwater ponds, where they can surprise unsuspecting insects by squirting jets of water at crickets and other small insects sitting on leaves above the water. Their lower jaws have evolved to become larger to help them do this impressive feat.

Getting Into A Scrape Do you remember how much it hurts when you fall on concrete and graze your knee? When I learned to inline skate, I had to wear elbow and knee pads. Similarly, when dolphins forage for food on the ocean floor, they wear nose pads! They tear off pieces of sponge which they wrap around their noses to prevent getting scraped.

Ostrich Eggs Egyptian vultures use small rocks to crack the thick shells of ostrich eggs. Vultures that have never seen other birds using that technique are still able to manipulate the stone to get inside the egg, proving that it is a genetic trait and not learned.

Fishing for Insects A common practice in the animal world, using a stick to draw hard-to-reach insects from their homes, is not only for chimpanzees. Although the primates have perfected the art of termite-fishing, chewing the stick’s end so that it splits into paintbrush-like bristles, Green jays and brown-headed nuthatches also probe into tree bark to extract the insects lurking within. Woodpecker finches, which live on the Galapagos Islands, have short tongues. They make up for the lack by using sticks, twigs, or even cactus spines in the same manner.

Coconut Housing Veined octopuses have been seen picking up empty coconut shells, carrying them around, and then hiding inside. Although there is debate about whether this really qualifies as tool use, it is advanced cephalopod behavior.

Monkey Missile White-headed capuchins use tools to defend themselves. They can use sticks to hit snakes either in self-defense or to reclaim their stolen baby. But a human observer got the most absurd treatment. The capuchin picked up a much smaller squirrel monkey and hurled it at the human!

Cracking Up Waiting at a traffic light on a Japanese university campus, carrion crows watched cars run over their freshly-picked walnuts. A tragedy? No. The lights changed and the cars halted. The crows walked across the road, eating the exposed meat of the nuts. The cars were cracking the nuts! Similar behavior has been observed in American crows. (To find out more, see PBS’ article.)

Oyster Drive Like the crows with their walnut-dropping habits, seagulls drop live, unshelled oysters onto roads so that passing cars will crack them open. They drop so many that driving along waterway roads is sometimes hazardous!

Underwater Discovery In a recent experiment, captive stingrays were found using water as a tool in a manner similar to that of the archerfish. Scientists gave the stingray a tube, which was sealed on one end, containing some food. The stingray used jets of water to move the food through the tube towards them.

Well Diggers Despite their not having hands, elephants use their trunks as a tool. Elephants dig holes to drink water, but after they’re done they don’t leave the hole to evaporate. Instead, they use a special technique to keep it from drying out! They rip bark from a tree, chew it into a ball, drop the ball into the hole and cover the hole with sand. The elephants remember where their well is so that they can go get free refills whenever they like.

A Heron’s Bait Green herons, which live throughout North and Central America, drop insects, food, or other small things into the water to attract fish. Hooded crows behave similarly.

Stopping the Hole American badgers are carnivores who eat prairie dogs, some kinds of ground squirrel and other burrowing creatures, which live in underground tunnels. The badgers have developed a technique to catch them: they use stones and other objects as corks to stop the burrows’ exits. The hunted animal will have no emergency escape route, enabling the badger to catch it.

It’s not a new idea that crickets chirp by rubbing together their toothed wings, but new studies suggest that birds also vibrate their wings to attract mates. Although an animal singing by rubbing together parts of its body is a practice common among arachnids and insects, only one vertebrate is known to “sing,” or even to make noise, in that manner.



Male club-winged manakins, found in the rainforests of Ecuador, make a series of high-pitched notes, so fast that the individual tones are indistinguishable, every time they flap their wings. Other birds’ flapping may sound like clapping or wind, but this songbird’s sound is unique. To the manakins, which are territorial, the noise is used to attract female birds and to tell other male birds to leave their region.

Manakins flap their wings over 100 times a second, or twice the speed of a hummingbird. On one wing, one feather had seven bumps and on the other wing one feather was stiff and curved, serving as a bow for the bird’s ridged feather. Every time the bird flaps its wings, the stiff feather vibrates against the ridges, producing the unusual sound. The surrounding feathers, which also quiver when the feathers are struck, strengthen the noise.

To find out more about this unusual animal behavior:
Tuning-fork feathers give bird its ‘singing’ wings
Bird “Sings” Through Feathers