BirdNote Daily

Knowing how clever parrots are, researchers wanted to see how they’d respond to another parrot saying hi on a tablet or phone. After being trained how to start a call, many parrots chatted amiably on calls and stayed on for the maximum amount of time. Some birds even seemed to develop friendships, choosing to stay in touch even after the experiment ended.

This episode is brought to you by Wild Delight Bird Food, which aims to support wild bird populations with clean, nutritious ingredients in every blend. Available at Chewy.com.

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Milkweed plants are important to Monarch butterflies, which depend on milkweed to raise their caterpillars. But Monarchs aren’t the only ones who benefit from milkweed. Scientists once documented hundreds of insect species they found eating some part of the common milkweed plant – including 132 species of beetles alone. When it’s part of a diverse community of plants, milkweed helps many species find food and shelter, including birds.

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It’s National Poetry Month in the U.S., and each year we like to celebrate by sharing our favorite contemporary writers’ work about birds. Ornithologist and poet J. Drew Lanham often writes about racial justice, and his experience as a Black man in the outdoors — both the joy of being in nature and the racism he faces in the field. Sometimes that's led him to birding spots that others might pass by. In this episode, Drew shares a poem inspired by little brown sparrows thriving in overlooked places.

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In spring, millions of songbirds — like the Orchard Oriole — migrate north across the Gulf of Mexico, from the Yucatan to the southeastern U.S. When birds encounter storms or headwinds, many may die. Why risk such an end, when they could migrate north along the length of Mexico? It's likely that many birds evolved to take the potentially perilous trans-Gulf route because it is direct and considerably faster, putting the birds on the best breeding territories more quickly.

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The Scissor-tailed Flycatcher nests in the open country of Texas, Oklahoma, and the south-central region. It's an elegant bird with a slender, deeply forked tail longer than its body. Agile in flight, it can spread and fold its tail, altering the surface area, like an extra pair of wings. When displaying to a female, the male dives again and again, opening and closing his tail. He may even perform a reverse somersault, flashing his pink sides and that long streamer of a tail.

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More info and transcript at BirdNote.org.

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