Birds are dinosaurs
Birds did not just descend from dinosaurs — scientists count them as dinosaurs, the one group that survived the asteroid impact 66 million years ago. Many dinosaurs had feathers, and fossils from China show feathered dinosaurs that were not birds at all. A ROBIN on a fence post is, in the strict family-tree sense, a small living dinosaur. It is also one of the few British birds that sings right through winter, when both males and females defend their own patch, and in 2015 it won a public vote for the country's national bird by a wide margin.
The clues are in the bones: hollow, light and strong, with a wishbone, and in the scaly legs and feet. The OSTRICH, the largest living bird, lays the biggest egg and can run at about seventy kilometres an hour, but it cannot fly; and it does not bury its head in the sand. Our dinosaurs page covers the rest of the family.
Clever crows and a magpie in the mirror
The crow family is among the most intelligent groups of animals. In 2008 a study found that MAGPIE birds could recognise themselves in a mirror, trying to remove a coloured sticker they could only see in the reflection — something very few animals can do. New Caledonian crows shape twigs and leaves into hooked tools to pull grubs out of holes.
American CROW flocks can remember individual human faces. In one study, researchers wearing a particular mask trapped and released a few crows; for years afterwards crows scolded anyone wearing that mask, including birds that had never been caught, which suggests they passed the warning on.
Pink from their food
A FLAMINGO is not born pink. Chicks are grey, and adults get their colour from pigments in the algae and tiny shrimp they filter out of the water. Flamingos in zoos are given food with added pigment to keep them bright. The PEACOCK is the male bird with the spectacular tail; females are peahens, and together they are peafowl.
Pigeons have surprising abilities. The homing PIGEON can find its way back from hundreds of kilometres, and in a 1995 experiment pigeons were trained to tell paintings by Monet from paintings by Picasso, and could then sort pictures by those painters they had never seen before.
A kingfisher that changed a train
Japan's early bullet trains made a loud boom when they shot out of tunnels, because they pushed air ahead of them. An engineer who was also a birdwatcher, Eiji Nakatsu, noticed that a KINGFISHER dives into water with barely a splash, thanks to its long pointed beak. The nose of a later bullet train was reshaped along the same lines, which made it quieter and faster.
In Britain, the Crown traditionally claims ownership of unmarked mute SWAN birds on open water, and every summer the swans on part of the Thames are counted and checked in a ceremony called Swan Upping. The rest of the grid holds the DUCK, FINCH, HERON, SPARROW, WREN, WOODPECKER, PELICAN, PENGUIN, PARROT, CANARY, SEAGULL, and the hunters — the EAGLE, OWL, FALCON and VULTURE.