Great Blue Heron overhead! Wingspan: 6 ft (1.8m) — wider than most humans are tall. Standing height: 4 ft (1.2m). Weight: about 5.5 lbs (2.5 kg). They're essentially a fishing spear disguised as a kite. Durham, NC. #BirdOfTheDay #LargeBirdsInFlight #GBHE

"I'll try the lobster." Yellow-crowned Night-Heron with a specialized crustacean-crushing bill to back it up. Sandy Creek Park, Durham, NC. #BirdofTheDay #snacks #YCNH #birding

Not a goose. Not originally from Egypt. Not native to Florida. But when you have five kids, taxonomy is the last thing on your mind. The Egyptian Goose is a shelduck that escaped captivity and has built a life where it found itself. #BirdOfTheDay #AdultsWithChicks #birding

The Blue Grosbeak: half color, half engineering. "Gros bec" in French is literally "big beak." He is a seed-crushing specialist wrapped in indigo. Don't let the pretty color distract you from the serious hardware. #BirdOfTheDay #Blue #BLGR #birding

Every waterfowl bath seems to go the same way: dunk, preen, stretch, flap. If you see a Mute Swan working through its ablutions, just wait. The finale is coming. #BirdOfTheDay #WingsOpenNotFlying #MUSW #birding

A Fox Sparrow's breast chevrons are (likely) a reaction-diffusion pattern; melanin pulses during feather growth, unfurling into V-shapes as the barb ridges spiral out of the follicle. Same math Turing described in 1952. #BirdOfTheDay #speckled #FOSP #birding

Great Blue Heron on a post, mid-yawn, showing off its vivid orange gape that you don't see when the beak is closed. Even dinosaurs need to stretch. Durham, NC. #BirdOfTheDay #OpenBeak #GBHE #birding

Turdus migratorius -- for some, but in NC, they never leave. We get these colors year-round: black velvet head, burnt-orange breast, bill like a shard of gold. The beautiful American Robin, so common and so underrated. #BirdOfTheDay #tricolour #YearRound #AMRO

Thank you, Dr. Bergstrom!

Great Egret conducting a full feather audit where every plume is accounted for, inspected, and zipped. Durham, NC. #BirdOfTheDay #Preeners&Scratchers #GREG #birding

White-throated Sparrows migrate from the spruce forests of Canada to winter across the Southeast USA. They've been in Durham NC since October - but not for much longer. #BirdOfTheDay #Migratory #WTSP

Weeping to see the entire multicellular plant lineage reduced to a guard cells, and those a tiny afterthought in the corner! Nobody puts plants in the corner!!

This Barred Owl fledgling dove from a tree to pounce on something in the leaf litter. It missed, but then immediately struck a sunning pose and cooly stared at me, "I meant to do that." Durham, NC. #BirdOfTheDay #Grounded #BAOW #birding

Mourning Dove couple surveying the neighborhood from their mossy rooftop. They mate for life, and seem to have found their forever home. Durham, NC. #BirdOfTheDay #MarriedCouples #MODO #birding

Purple Sandpiper in its element -- wedged between rockweed and barnacles, right where the tide meets the stone. Barnegat Light, NJ. #BirdOfTheDay #LandMeetsWater #PUSA #birding

Very serious bathing commitment from this Canada Goose. Backlit water droplet splash chaos in shaft of light at golden hour. Durham, NC. #BirdOfTheDay #Splash #CANG #birding

December truce. These Eastern Bluebirds grew up together and still share the mealworm feeder - for now. A few weeks later, the peace ends and they start claiming territories and nesting sites for spring, and my yard is really only big enough for 2 pairs. Durham, NC. #BirdOfTheDay #Feeders #EABL

Can't go wrong for #GreyDay when you've got "gray" right in your name, spelling differences aside. Gray Catbird deep in the summer elderberry stash. July 2025, Durham, NC. #BirdOfTheDay #GRCA #birding

"Sorry, no time to sing for you today — gotta go!" This Song Sparrow had other audiences to perform for. #BirdOfTheDay #SongBirds #SOSP

These three American Crows are always together. Mated pair and a yearling? Three siblings? With corvids, the family politics are real but the loyalty is too. Sandy Creek Park, Durham, NC. #BirdOfTheDay #Corvidae #AMCR

Barred Owl portrait. Stunning raptor, sure. But zoom in on those eyes. That's a parent of two who hasn't slept since fledging season, and has been up all "night," again. My backyard, Durham, NC. September 2024. #BirdOfTheDay #Photogenic #BAOW #BADO

A Great Egret and its consultant, agreeing on the next move. Sandy Creek Park, Durham, NC. #BirdOfTheDay #StandingInWater #GREG

Boat-tailed Grackle serving iridescent blue-black on the shoreline runway. No stylist. No agent. Just fierce main character energy, a beach and that swishy tail. Werk it! Sunset Beach, NC. #BirdOfTheDay #SteppingOut #BTGR

Female Prothonotary Warbler, bill stuffed with moss destined for a cozy old woodpecker hole. Most eastern warblers weave open nest cups, but the PROW is the only one that chooses already-excavated cavities, preferably over standing water. #PROW #NestBuilders #BirdOfTheDay alt.

A face built for the night shift. Yellow-crowned Night-Herons have rod-dense retinas tuned for low light, a bill heavy enough to crack crab carapaces, and the patience to stand motionless until something moves. #YCNH #BirdOfTheDay #SideView

This isn't just a power pose. Turkey Vultures drop body temp overnight to save energy, then spread their wings in the AM to reboot: solar-heating flight muscles, UV-killing feather bacteria, baking off parasites. This "horaltic" pose is maintenance and power. #TUVU #PowerPose #BirdOfTheDay

Vascular plants and mosses both produce Fibonacci-like spiral phyllotaxis, but diverged 450MYA. One uses auxin transport across a multicellular meristem to get the shape, the other does so via a single cell dividing such that new walls avoid oldest neighbors. Convergent evolution or deep homology?

She's not migrating. Cardinals don't use torpor; they depress nighttime body temp ~1.3°C, saving an estimated 10-16% on energy. In winter, diet shifts from insects to seeds. Fat reserves hit 3x summer levels. Puffed plumage traps warm air. Brrrrr. #NOCA #WinterSurvivors #BirdOfTheDay

This Barred Owl is still drying off after a successful crayfish hunt. Some apparently eat so many that their underwing feathers can turn pink (!) from the carotenoids, like a flamingo. The most opportunistic owl in North America; 85+ prey taxa documented. #BAOW #portrait #birdOfTheDay

Hooded Mergansers can change the refractive properties of their eyes to hunt underwater by sight. Built-in goggles via their transparent nictitating membrane. These two males are sizing each other up topside, but the real action is below the surface. #HOME #DivingForFood #BirdOfTheDay

My #BirdOfTheDay offering is this male bluebird feeding his mate, a mating ritual seen regularly in the spring in middle Tennessee. #birds #canonbirdphotography #wildlife #BirdOfTheDay #bluebird

Beak crammed with every squishy invertebrate it could find. Maximizing prey per trip, minimizing flight time to the nest. The bill-loading strategy: efficiency over elegance. Parents of all sorts will recognize this energy math. #AMRO #Birds&Bugs #BirdOfTheDay

How do you find a gravity-sensing system nobody knew existed? First, knock out all 4 Arabidopsis LAZY genes so the plants can't stand up. Then, mutagenize thousands of those plants, and look for the one that pops back up! One aa change (S149F in SLQ1), and a whole new pathway emerges. #gravitropism

The fungal immune system runs on the same protein families as your innate immunity: NLR sensors, TIR signaling, gasdermin pore-formers. The pathways cluster in 2-3 gene operons, echoing bacterial defense islands. Billion-year-old toolkit, still in production.

There is no blue pigment in this bird. The color comes from nanostructured keratin in the feather barbs, air channels that self-assemble and scatter light. We know the physics, but we are still working out the genetics that build the structures. #BirdOfTheDay #StareDown #EABL

Osprey are the only diurnal raptor with a reversible outer toe. When needed, they can do two forward, two back; a zygodactyl-like grip built for catching fish at speed. Also the only raptor in its own family (Pandionidae). Not a hawk, not an eagle. Just Osprey. #BirdOfTheDay #posted #OSPR

The squeak is back! After 100 years absent, Brown-headed Nuthatches are breeding in Missouri's Ozarks again. 102 birds translocated from AR in 2020-21, now raising Missouri-born young. A North American bird that regularly uses tools! #SmallBirdSaturday #BHNU #SqueakyToy 5/10/2025 Durham, NC

Taiaroa Head is the only mainland royal albatross colony on 🌏. First 🥚 found in 1920 but years of breeding failed; eggs stolen, destroyed, eaten. In 1937, Lance Richdale camped beside a nest for months. That chick, "Sprog," fledged in 1938. This season: 44+ eggs, and 1,000 birds since Sprog!

Anhinga or palm tree? Wing-drying is the textbook explanation, but look at how the flight feathers disappear into the dead palm fronds. An ambush predator that hunts by stealth, a 2025 study noted we know "surprisingly little" about anhinga behavior. Maybe that includes this. #NotADeadPalmFrond

Lucas, the Leucistic Pileated Woodpecker - white where black should be, mohawk untouched. Leucism disrupts melanin deposition; carotenoids unaffected. Can lead to weaker feathers, camouflage issues, mate rejection. This guy has a gf and loves working a tree for an audience. 👅 #WoodpeckerWednesday

Handwriting builds brain connectivity that typing doesn't. Same principle applies to learning bird sounds: Merlin telling you the answer isn't the same as training your ear. Passive ID vs. active recall. One gives you the name; the other builds the circuitry. #practicemakesperfect chipnotes.app

February in NorCal meant hunting the redwood shadows for wet dog/dirty sponge-smelling fetid adder's tongues (Scoliopus bigelovii) - a fleeting ephemeral pollinated by fungus gnats, seeds dispersed by ants, and gone by summer. Far Reaches has it 4 sale. Tempting for those of us who moved away.

A Tufted Titmouse caught in the act of taking a walnut "to go" for today’s #BirdOfTheDay theme of #BackyardBirds. #TUTI #peterpeterpeter

Domestication gave us big fruits and higher yields - and quietly deleted genes for stress tolerance, adaptation, and who knows what else. Breeders can introgress traits from wild relatives, but now, super-pangenomes map where to look across entire genera. #pangenome

For AlphaGenome to predict gene function from DNA sequence "alone," it needed training on thousands of human datasets (ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, matched multi-omics). For fungi, we have (some) genomes, but I'm not sure we can just infer the "beef." Seems like a wet lab problem, right? #SaveTheStrains

I do love a good Cistus. I saw this one in 2019 when I was on a multi-day walk in Portugal. Like you do.

Evolution's not a tidy family tree. New work from @davetoews.bsky.social in @plosbiology.org found warblers sharing genes for yellow plumage across species lines for millions of yrs. But some, like this Prothonotary Warbler, took their own path to gold. Durham, NC. #PROW #genomics #ornithology

2018 Trans-NZ. Five days blasting through South Island beech forests while bellbirds made R2-D2 sounds overhead. The korimako makes otherworldly calls - mechanical, liquid, layered harmonics. A soundtrack 4 trying not to crash. Hear them in the NZ bird pack on chipnotes.app #birding #mtb #korimako

While Durham tries to thaw, it's hard not to think about our sleeping garden. Last year, mountain mint (Pycnanthemum muticum) was one of the busiest spots in the yard - carpenter bees, thread-waisted wasps, skippers - fascinating to watch. #SpringIsComing #NativePlants #pollinators #Pycnanthemum

Fungi can become drug-resistant without changing their DNA. They just... turn off the gene. And turn it back on when the drug's gone. This is wild and concerning for treating infections like mucormycosis (50-90% mortality). From Joe Heitman's group at @duke-university.bsky.social.