Happy Thought for 3 May 2024

Have a Happy Thought:

We’ve talked before about taking short breaks out in The Nature for mental and physical health.

But sometimes you just can’t get outside.

Maybe it’s raining torrentially

Or maybe you live or work in the middle of a concrete jungle, which just is not as relaxing as a rainforest jungle.

 

In these cases, you can at least give yourself the audio experience of being out in The Nature

By tuning in to Forest.fm

 This is now one of my fave websites. You are now one click away from seeing the picture of a forest (or sometimes just a beautiful landscape) somewhere in the world, with a couple of minutes of audio recorded there. 

 

tree.fm

 

Click to listen to a random forest and you may be transported to Ghana, or France, or Ecuador, or ... 

(The audio will just keep looping as long as you leave it on. So I’ve been in Denali National Park the whole time I’ve been researching and writing this.) 

And in most of these forests, you will hear birds. 

Which may lead your now pleasantly wandering mind to wonder how bird species are all related to each other?

Ornithologists have gone through several attempts at understanding those relationships, and a very recent study has come out that has filled in some of the gaps and explained some of the “wait, how does that bird fit in to all of this?”

 

Here is the newly published bird “family tree”. To some of the birders in this group, many of these relationships will come as no surprise.

Me though, I still find it fascinating just how many more Passeriformes, or “perching birds” aka songbirds, there are than other types of birds!

Also that falcons and parrots are really closely related!

(PS this took 10+ years of work to do all of the analysis, so amazing job just that, but then putting it all into such an informative infographic!!)

Image:  Relationships and divergence times for 363 bird species based on 63,430 intergenic loci. From: Stiller, J., Feng, S., Chowdhury, AA. et al. Complexity of avian evolution revealed by family-level genomes. Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07323-1

 

 

The best part of me learning about this new bird family tree is..

Ok it’s several things.

1. Being able to use the term ‘bird family tree’ several times and laughing to myself every time [because (a lot of) birds like to be in trees. Yes I just explained the joke]
2. Just geeking out about the evolution of birds in general
3. The fact that all songbirds have their (sometimes very deep) ancestral origins in Australia.
4. The fact that these scientists created a new concept of a grouping of birds called “Elementaves”, basically a bunch of birds that have chosen either Earth or Wind or Water or Fire (or in the authors’ words “because its lineages have diversified into terrestrial, aquatic and aerial niches, corresponding to the classical elements of earth, water and air, and several Phaethontimorphae have names derived from the sun, representing fire.”). Examples are:
1. Earth - plovers
2. Wind - hummingbirds
3. Water - penguins
4. Fire - sunbittern
5. I learned that this bird actually exists:

 Image: a hoatzin (Opisthocomus hoazin) in Peru. Image by Kate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoatzin#/media/File:Hoatzin_in_Peru.jpg, CC BY-SA 2.0

 

Enjoy some nature sounds this weekend!