Caught a bunch of birds to show to my Vertebrate Natural History class this weekend, including this gremlin

Quite possibly the easiest thing I’ve ever skinned, and now our teaching collection has a new genus of mammal

Postdoc advertisement!

Hi all, I'm looking to hire a Postdoc in BIOACOUSTICS for work on Owls. Your job would be to collect & analyze bioacoustics data, and write papers. 🦉🦉🦅🐦🦜🦉🦉

Per the #AOS quiz bowl last night: the bird with the longest tail is the Onagadori, a chicken breed from Japan

🤨

Great gray owls are abundant in Manitoba this winter

Some owls only have a short comb on the proximal part of P10, which this picture doesn't show. I think that was the part of Ketupa ketupa that had a comb. In this figure the orange dots were fish/fishing owls, the blue dots are Pygmy owls, which have less of a comb than fish/fishing owls

Many papers on 'bioinspiration' of quiet flight have assumed the velvet affects turbulence noise. Our result does not support this. The velvet is longest in regions *in between* feathers (green), right where it should be if it is to reduce rubbing. The velvet that's exposed to air is short (blue).

We also came up with an experimental manipulation: Hairspray, which stiffens the velvet. Adding hairspray to velvet-containing feathers (red) increases the sound of rubbing by about 7 dB relative to the controls (Blue, Green), but has a smaller effect in species lacking velvet

The sound of feathers rubbing is broadband (similar to white noise). Here, Barred Owl (Strix varia) feathers, which have the velvet, are about 20 dB quieter than feathers that lack the velvet.

We hypothesized this velvet surface reduces sounds when feathers rub. So, Lori came up with a couple ways to rub feathers together.

New paper by an undergrad in my lab, Lori Liu! Owls have a fuzzy surface to their feathers (top) that most other birds don't have (bottom)

doi.org/10.1242/jeb....

Hey! I'll be presenting at SICB tomorrow in the "Sound production and acoustic cues" session, room A704. The talk is actually biomechanics: it's about how Bearded Tachuri (a flycatcher from Argentina) makes sounds with fluttering feathers #SICB2025

POSTDOC announcement! I am hiring a postdoc to study owl flight biomechanics. I will be at SICB. Please email me for the full advertisement, screenshot below. Please retweet!

Ideal candidate has research experience with wild birds, 3D kinematics and acoustics.

#SICB2025

Always a blast to show undergrads how owls glow under black light!