Dec. 8, 2003 – University of Utah biologists twirled louse-infested bird feathers on an electric fan and flew pigeons and doves like kites on strings in a study that found small lice stick to small ...

Writer Christopher Norwood sat down with Ornithologist Jason Weckstein for this edition of "So Birds are beautiful, with their colorful feathers, graceful flight and sweet songs. But what about the ...

When Jason Weckstein looks at a bird, he doesn't see just a creature with feathers that flies. He sees the bird as a teeming community of tiny creatures, some of which live and feast on its feathers, ...

Although chewing lice spend their entire lives as parasites on birds, it is difficult to predict patterns of lice distribution, new research reveals. Although chewing lice spend their entire lives as ...

Figure 1. Fossilized nits of chewing lice, tightly affixed to feathers of an enantiornithine bird, entombed in mid-Cretaceous amber from northern Myanmar. (a) Isolated barbs and regularly arranged ...

Birds of a feather flock together and -- according to a new analysis -- so do their lice. A study of the genetic heritage of avian feather lice indicates that their louse ancestors first colonized a ...

Camouflage in nature is nothing new. A wide variety of animals, like rabbits, birds and deer, are cryptically colored to blend in with their background and guard themselves from predators. Now ...

Parasites are a fact of life for birds, for good and for ill. But don't worry – they're not after you. In 1933 a man named Harold Peters contacted bird banders in the eastern half of the country. He ...

“Believing that it is always best to study some special group, I have, after deliberation, taken up domestic pigeons,” wrote one Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species. Four years earlier, Darwin ...

Dinosaurs might have been the first animals tormented by the kinds of lice that now often bedevil children, scientists now suggest. These new findings also hint that birds and mammals actually began ...