'Early birds' find worms for dinner

Birds, such as great and blue tits, search for food in the morning but only return to eat it in late afternoon, scientists have found.

The team believe the behaviour maximises their chances of avoiding predators during the day without starving to death overnight.

Researchers from the University of Oxford tracked the birds' winter foraging movements using tiny tags.

All five of the studied species of songbirds behaved in the same way.

The results are published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

Lees meer: BBC Nature

Three Swifts Probably Flew Non-Stop For 200 Days

In September of 2011, three alpine swifts took to the air in southwest Africa, and stayed there for almost 200 days. They fed on the wing. They slept on the wing. By the time they firmly settled back on solid surfaces, it was April of 2012 and they had travelled across the Sahara to the Mediterranean.

By fitting the birds with tiny trackers, Felix Liechti from the Swiss Ornithological Institute showed that they probably flew non-stop for almost seven months. It’s possible that they landed occasionally, but very rarely and never for more than a few minutes at a time.

Lees meer: Not exactly rocket science