Best Of MetaFilter

Please help me satiate my love for crows: "I am looking for all sorts of information pertaining to those lovable but oft-maligned creatures we call crows. Do you have a fascination for crows? Maybe you can help."

I prefer the dark to the light by Steve Wilson - over 10 million views Thanks !! (cc by)

18,000 years ago in New Guinea, humans tried to domesticate cassowaries

Why is a cassowary the "least birb-like bird on the planet"

“A falcon won’t fuck just any old hat.”

Calling Ornithologists and Birders: Birds Who Are Jerks

Common Starling: From the Right. Number! by birdsaspoetry (cc by)

🎶 Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near? No, but really. Why?

hummingbird by watts_photos (cc by)

spamandkimchi posts about the hummingbird's summer of gorging.

By Fir0002; edited by jjron (cropped) - Own work by author, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5712196

Musical passwords given by miniature birds: great post by nickyskye about the Superb Fairy-Wren (and a fun thread!). In other birbtalk news, learn 12 different chicken calls, including the before and after Egg Songs, from spamandkimchi.

Inaccessible Island Rail (Atlantisia rogersi) by brian.gratwicke (cc by)

There's a reason why chapters of the "Feminist Bird Club" are popping up all over the world and it's part of a larger issue with outdoor recreation, spaces, jobs, and natural/environmental sciences in general that has spawned groups like Latino Outdoors, Outdoor Afro, Unlikely Hikers, and many others: Primalux discusses birding while Latina, poor, queer, and a woman in the Chris Cooper video birdwatch post.

Text TK talks about "my father, Douglas S. Rogers, who lived on Ascension Island from 1966 to 1971, working for Pan-American Airways' Aerospace division ... In his spare time he co-founded the island's historical society, took a ton of amazing photographs with his Hasselblad 500C, and aided visiting scientists" in the How do you get to Inaccessible Island? thread about world’s smallest flightless bird.

My first season, my class had been taught to how handle bees without gloves or even necessarily bee suits, just smokers. Non-africanized bees are gentle enough that they will rarely sting you if you know what you're doing ... Until autumn. Then they switch from "gather the bounty" mode to "protect the spoils at all costs" mode. Which our teacher deliberately did not tell us, because he wanted us to observe it for ourselves. By getting stung: showbiz_liz talks about the "domesticity" of bees in the I Want To Beelieve heart honeycomb thread.

Also recently: birds taking public transit; The Secret Society of Self-Stingers; Why Birds Do What They Do; 'Murder hornets'; "a vicious resource war is being fought between the avians and the rodents"; "Ferris Jabr critiques bird nests and the personalities that build them"; GPS-tracking the movements of eagles; Bird Tableau.

Sir crow's New Estate by SPDP (cc by)

Teaching capitalism to corvids with the open source Crowbox experimentation platform

In song by nagillum (cc by)

If you really want to get your nerd on and have some older computer gear laying around, you can even build your own bird mic and analyze your results using free software. Here are some spectrograms of migration calls recorded with this method.