Well, 35 million years ago, anyhow. Interestingly, they would have been roaming around a desert, which calls into question their original development being in a cold climate. At National Geographic, “Giant Penguins Once Roamed Peru Desert, Fossils Show”,

The new study describes two new species of penguins from fossils, including the first complete skull from an ancient giant penguin.

That species, which the authors say lived in Peru about 36 million years ago, is the third largest penguin known and stood about 4.5 feet (1.5 meters) tall.

The other, dating to 42 million years, was about three feet (a meter) tall, which is comparable to the today’s second largest living penguin, the king penguin.

There’s something wonderful about a story that starts off like this:

Freaky Beaky the blue tit owes his life to a diet of bread and dripping.

That sounds like the beginning of a children’s book. :) The story is on the BBC website this morning, “Freaky Beaky’s love of dripping”.

The bird, seen in Hampshire, England, has an abnormally sized beak: 1 inch long, which is gigantic on a four-inch bird. It wasn’t able to eat normally either, having trouble with the usual blue tit fare. A home owner saw this happening and puzzled out what to do.

She tried putting some wholemeal bread fried in beef dripping into the feeder, and was delighted when Freaky Beaky kept coming back for more.

A “bird expert” takes up the story:

Andre Farrar, spokesman for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said: “Blue tits normally have short, powerful, stubby beaks that allow them to pick up insects, seeds and berries but this one clearly has a gross deformity which means he can only eat out of the side of his beak.

A Discovery News article today has the story of nuthatches that have apparently learned to interpret the calls of another bird, the chickadee.

It’s not unusual for one animal to react to the alarm call of another, but nuthatches seem to go beyond that — interpreting the type of alarm and what sort of predator poses a threat. When a chickadee sees a predator, it issues warning call — a soft “seet” for a flying hawk, owl or falcon, or a loud “chick-a-dee-dee-dee” for a perched predator.

There is some question about the methodology of the study that reached these conclusions, but whatever the case it looks to warrant further investigation.

One orinthologist commenting on the story mentioned a sneaky tactic by one variety of chickadee:

…black-capped chickadees have been known to produce false alarm calls, causing other birds to fly away, leaving the cheating chickadees to enjoy a food source by itself.

Smart birds. :)

Okay, why don’t we have these kind of events nationwide over here? This would be awesome!

BBC: “UK’s bird watching event begins”

Thousands of people are expected to spend an hour this weekend taking part in a national survey of garden birds.

The Big Garden Bird Watch, organised every year by the RSPB, aims to find out which species are the most common visitors to UK gardens.

Last year, a record-breaking 470,000 people took part the survey and counted eight million birds in 270,000 gardens.

Even if just California did this, it’d be cool.

Not the Norweigian Blue with its beautiful plumage, but a great deal more lively. From the BBC: “Parrot’s oratory stuns scientists”

The finding of a parrot with an almost unparalleled power to communicate with people has brought scientists up short.

The bird, a captive African grey called N’kisi, has a vocabulary of 950 words, and shows signs of a sense of humour.

He invents his own words and phrases if he is confronted with novel ideas with which his existing repertoire cannot cope - just as a human child would do.

We have a poodle whose only handicap for speaking English is lack of vocal cords. ;)

This reminds me of a portion of Nick Sagan’s “Memories Of My Dad” post from the Carl Sagan Memorial Blog-a-Thon earlier this month.

His laugh was explosive and uninhibited. It was the kind of laugh that made you feel good for making him laugh. His sneezes were booming. And sometimes he’d talk to animals in their native tongue. The times we’d see dolphins, he’d greet them in a reasonable approximation of dolphin speak. They’d often answer him. I have no idea what was said.

I’ll bet the dolphins did, though.