Weekly Article
Written by: Doctor Francisco Rivas

The Birds

Birds are incredible animals! Incredible in the ways they have adapted to their environments, from polar ice packs and deserts to steamy rain forests; incredible in their beauty; their migration paths; their ways of courting, nesting, feeding, and moving. Hummingbirds are capable of flying backwards. Male emperor penguins incubate their single egg on their feet for two months, mostly without moving, through the bitter Antarctic winter. So you see birds are incredible creatures indeed.

We know now that even the most commonplace birds do marvelous things, like the young warblers that each autumn fly, in a single, unguided hop, from New England backyards across the open sea to Venezuela. In the end, the most remarkable thing we've learned may be that there are no unremarkable birds-that each, in its own way, lives an astounding life.

In the following articles, I will try to give you interesting bits and pieces of information about birds but this will be only a fraction of the many, many intriguing things that we know about birds.