An END for exotic Newcastle disease virus?
Agricultural Research - October 1, 2003, by Sharon Durham
The last thing poultry producers want their flocks hit with is exotic Newcastle disease (END), a contagious and fatal viral disease affecting most species of birds. Almost all unvaccinated chickens die within days of being infected with the virus. The END outbreak, diagnosed in late 2002, left ... (Read More)

Birds of a feather - One Small Step/Bird Brain Dance - Brief Article
Sierra - September 1, 2003, by Marilyn Berlin Snell
"Where I live, people fly a lot of homing pigeons. In the evenings I have watched bird formations spiral up, catch the light, suddenly turn white, and then disappear for a moment. Looking at this, I started thinking about navigation. In 2000 I created the Pigeon Project, the first of my Bird Brai... (Read More)

Weird Game Stories of the Week
Electronic Gaming Business - July 2, 2003
Acclaim Entertainment used homing pigeons as a branding vehicle at Wimbledon. The company painted logos for its Virtua Tennis 2 game on both wings of 20 birds that were trained to fly in and out of the tennis venues. Dubbed the "pigeon campaign," by Acclaim's international marketing VP Larry Spar... (Read More)

Date with extinction: for a thousand years before people settled in New Zealand, a small alien predator may have been undermining the islands' sea bird populations
Natural History - April 1, 2003, by Laura Sessions
Our yellow Zodiac bobbed across the choppy sea and made its way slowly through the clouds of seabirds that wheeled and soared around us. Albatross, cape pigeons, diving petrels, monymawks, mottled petrels, and sooty shearwaters all took their turns skimming our bow wave for fish. In the distance ... (Read More)

After West Nile virus: what will it do to the birds and beasts of North America?
Science News - March 29, 2003, by Susan Milius
The alligators at Clabrook Farm were under the weather last fall. Some seemed depressed, others were wobbly, and a few crawled in circles. Within a few days of first showing such symptoms, alligators at the farm near Christmas, Fla., sank into neurological meltdown and died. During September and ... (Read More)

Fancy navigation, for an invertebrate - Homing Lobsters - spiny lobsters have true navigation
Science News - January 4, 2003, by S. Milius
Scientists willing to drive boats and cars in convoluted patterns say that spiny lobsters are the first animals without backbones to pass tests for the orienteering power called true navigation. This capability lets homing pigeons and a few other animals figure out not just compass orientation-... (Read More)

Wings over the West: believe it or not, bird-watching is the hottest hobby in America. Here's Sunset's complete guide to its pleasures
Sunset - November 1, 2002, by Lora J. Finnegan,  Jim McCausland
Many years ago, I walked down to our family's basement and discovered a bird book from the 1930s. It was tattered and dog-eared, and its margins bore notes in my mother's girlish hand. When I asked my mother about it, she explained that it dated from her childhood in Seattle. She told me it had b... (Read More)

Two tests of the stuck-in-time hypothesis - animal memory
Journal of General Psychology - October 1, 2002, by William A. Roberts,  Shelley Roberts
THE QUESTION HAS BEEN RAISED as to whether animals are capable of cognitive time travel (Suddendotf & Corballis, 1997). That is, can animals remember experienced events as having occurred at specific times in the past, or can they anticipate events that will occur at some point in the future? The... (Read More)