Nature Hub

  (Sequencing the DNA of more than 10,000 birds could reveal how best to conserve our feathery friends—and when they evolved from dinosaurs) From Smithsonian Magazine Kat Eschner Edited by Vinuri Randhula Silva, Creating a phylogeny of all bird life will help researchers map birds' evolutionary relationships and create conservation plans.  Juniors Bildarchiv GmbH / Alamy For Charles Darwin, birds offered a window into the process of natural selection—and ultimately, evolution. After observing the remarkable variation of beaks among Galapagos Islands finches in the 1830s, the British naturalist  remarked:  “Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.” Yet more than 150 years after Darwin, the evolutionary relationships between birds remain a compelling mystery. This month, a coalition of u

From - Earth Unreal Edited by Vinuri Randula Silva . The diederik cuckoo is a smallish cuckoo at 18 to 20 cm and found throughout Kenya in wooded grassland, dry acacia scrub, parks, gardens, and farmers' fields at elevations ranging from sea level to 7,200 feet (2,200 m). The Diederik Cuckoo feeds mainly on hairy caterpillars and insects such as termites, grasshoppers, beetles and Lepidoptera adults. It also eats the eggs of the host species and consumes seeds too.