On a clear morning — this time of year — the unmistakable hammering of a great spotted woodpecker is one of the first signs of spring. With its distinctive pied plumage and flash of red under the tail ...

An illustration of a magnifying glass. An illustration of a magnifying glass.

Wisconsin is home to nine species of woodpeckers. Woodpeckers belong to the family Picidae, which is part of the order Piciformes. This family consists of approximately 240 species. Interestingly, ...

The avian palaeognath phylogeny has been recently revised significantly due to the advancement of genome-wide comparative analyses and provides the opportunity to trace the evolution of the ...

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Edited by Scott McWilliams, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI; received September 10, 2021; accepted May 5, 2022 by Editorial Board Member Scott V. Edwards ...

The toucan family includes five extant genera and over 40 different species. Some of these birds have names like aracari or toucanet, but they all sport that large, comical bill. Their size and weight ...

The complete host range of avian herpesviruses in wild birds is unknown, and information about nucleotide sequences is available only in limited cases. The aim of this study was to detect the presence ...

Evidence that the bill of the Toco Toucan, Ramphastos toco Statius Muller, 1776, has a specialized role in heat dissipation suggests a new function for the large and light-weight bill of the toucan ...

Consistent patterns of positive selection in functionally similar genes can suggest a common selective pressure across a group of species. We use alignments of orthologous protein-coding genes from 39 ...