Tuesday cont’d: Woodpecker brains, cat vs. catbird, and the dark side of brightness

10:00 a.m. Hans Winkler, of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, asks why do woodpeckers have such large brains? (I hadn’t actually noticed this myself, but Winkler has the measurements to back it up – he poured “steel micro-spheres” into skull cavities of woodpeckers and other birds to make sure.)
The answer might have to do with [...]

Tuesday at AOU: Hawaiian Honeycreepers Fading Fast

9:37 a.m. The Smithsonian’s Rob Fleischer kicked off the meeting with an overview of the unfolding tragedy of the birds of Hawaii. It’s a story familiar to most of the ornithologists here: the Hawaiian islands are the most isolated islands in the world – barely cooled lumps of volcanic rock sitting dead in the middle [...]