Image by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen

Meet the Northern Wheatear, an insect-eating bird about 6 inches long that weighs less than an ounce. On the outside, it looks like any ordinary beautiful bird, but when you delve deeper, this is one of most hardcore travelers on the planet.

According to the BBC, this little bird travels from the Arctic to sub-Saharan Africa and back each year. The half of the species that lives in the Canadian arctic travels over Greenland to Africa on a whopping 4,500 mile journey. The wheatears that live in Alaska go over Russia and Kazakhstan and through the Arabian desert to get to western Africa. That’s about 9,000 miles one way.

Impressive migrations are nothing out of the ordinary for birds, but each time I hear one of these amazing stories of a tiny bird traveling long distances, it’s difficult not to be astonished.

To put it into perspective, Alasdair Wilkins from io9 makes some stunning comparisons:

Proportionally speaking, we would have to travel roughly 50 million miles to cover the same sort of distance these wheatears do. In other words, for us to migrate on the same scale as these tiny Arctic birds, our entire species would need to travel to Mars and back every single year. (And yes, I’m aware that’s not exactly a fair analogy – it’s simply too awesome not to point out.)

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St. Valentine’s Day gets a lot of criticism for being a manufactured holiday that’s designed by corporations to get people to spend money. While businesses might pump up the holiday a bit, there’s actually an interesting origin story for the modern interpretation that’s associated with birds.

For centuries, St. Valentine’s Day was just a day to feast in celebration to honor a martyred priest in Rome. It wasn’t until a 1382 poem by Geoffrey Chaucer (of The Canterbury Tales fame) that Valentine’s Day and love were mentioned together. Here’s an excerpt from Parlement of Foules (translated into more modern English):

“For this was Saint Valentine’s Day,
when every bird cometh there to choose his mate.”

Birds have a strong reputation for being a species known for their unique relationships to one another and no one knew this better than Geoffrey Chaucer. When he wrote the poem on the first anniversary engagement of the King and Queen of England, it was a time when romance was a prominent theme and few things represent true love better than birds.

As you can tell from the excerpt, Chaucer is pointing out that St. Valentine’s Day is the start of breeding season when birds start mating with one another. However, February 14, the day commonly associated with St. Valentine’s Day, is likely too early for birds to start mating in England since it’s too cold, so he was probably talking about a different day. Nonetheless, his talk of a fictional tradition of love and birds choosing one another (which before then was no tradition at all), stuck with St. Valentine’s Day.

It’s no coincidence that Chaucer chose birds as a representation of love because many birds exhibit the characteristics of love we commonly associate with our relationships.

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There are many birds you’re sure you are never going to see at your backyard bird feeder. For example, you probably never expect to see a Sri Lankan Frogmouth in your yard or a Frigatebird eating at your tube feeder. However, sometimes you could be surprised at what you might find.

That’s exactly what happened in Los Angeles when a group of drivers on the freeway spotted a huge Laysan Albatross with a 7-foot wingspan nonchalantly sitting in the back of a pickup truck.

When the driver of the truck saw alarmed motorists trying to flag him down, he noticed the massive bird in the back and immediately turned the bird over to lifeguards.

If you’ve never seen a Laysan Albatross, picture a seagull on steroids. They usually have a greyish back with white underparts and a pink beak. These “near threatened” seabirds are usually only found on remote islands in the North Pacific where they nest.

Rescuers have an idea as to how this beautiful bird made it’s way to L.A. (and it’s not because it was trying to make it to Hollywood). Here’s an excerpt from the Los Angeles Times:

They suspect the bird stowed away on a cargo ship, hitching a trans-Pacific ride to Los Angeles before disembarking and hopping into the pickup.

The seabirds are adept at soaring long distances and can spend years roaming vast areas of the ocean without ever touching land. But they can mistake the flat surface of a passing container ship for a nesting island, landing and sitting there unnoticed until the ship arrives in port.

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Right before the sun sets over one Kentucky town, the sky turns black, but not for the reasons you’d expect. The sky actually turns black from thousands of black birds, mostly European Starlings, flying in huge murmurations.

While large flocks of birds are not unusual, it can be pretty intimidating for anyone to see this many birds flying over your head at once. According to an article on Colorado’s 9 News, the birds cover a three-mile radius and have been there since Thanksgiving. They engage in these murmurations between 5:30 and 6:00pm.

Even though you might not think this is a big deal, having such a high concentration of birds in one area poses a lot of problems. One of the main issues is the fecal matter. A striking sight from the news report below is a woman carrying an umbrella because of the droppings raining from the sky. This could be a serious issue because excessive amounts of droppings could introduce bacteria into the air and create a foul smell. There are reports of people getting eye infections and irritation in their throats.

These murmurations can be hypnotic and beautiful in small doses, but being held hostage by the birds, for fear of defecation and health hazards, is troublesome. Many news reports are likening it to Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds.”

If you don’t know anything about European Starlings, they are non-native invasive species in the U.S. There are an estimated 200 million of these birds, which are all descended from about 75 that were released in Central Park.

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