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  1. Wandering albatrosses, which are an iconic sight in the Southern Ocean, are highly adapted to long-distance soaring flight. Their wingspan of up to 11 feet is the largest known of any living bird, and yet wandering albatrosses fly while hardly flapping their wings. Instead, they depend on dynamic soaring—which exploits wind shear near the ocean surface to gain energy—in addition to updrafts and turbulence.

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  2. Canada geese collide with aircraft, intimidate unassuming joggers, and leave lawns and sidewalks spattered with prodigious piles of poop. They're widely considered nuisance birds, and municipalities invest considerable time and money harassing geese to relocate the feisty flocks. But new University of Illinois research shows standard goose harassment efforts aren't effective, especially in winter when birds should be most susceptible to scare tactics.

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  3. Red knots of all ages and sexes show behavioral traits. These remain mostly unchanged over time but differ across individuals. Some individuals are more adventurous and show more exploratory behaviors a in new environment than others. Other individuals take less risks and hardly dare to move around in a new environment. These "personalities" have ecological and evolutionary consequences, but to what extent is largely unknown, because few studies have investigated this in the field.

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  4. As UN climate talks close in Egypt and biodiversity talks begin in Montreal, attention is on forest restoration as a solution to the twin issues roiling our planet. Forests soak up atmospheric carbon dioxide and simultaneously create habitat for organisms. So far, efforts to help forests bounce back from deforestation have typically focused on increasing one thing—trees—over anything else.

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  5. Researchers have shown—for the first time—that less intensively managed British grazed grasslands have on average 50% more plant species and better soil health than intensively managed grassland. The new study could help farmers increase both biodiversity and soil health, including the amount of carbon in the soil of the British countryside.

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  6. A trio of researchers from the University of California, Discover Owls and the University of Washington has discovered how great gray owls are able to find and capture voles under two feet of snow. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Christopher Clark, James Duncan and Robert Dougherty describe using acoustic cameras to spatially locate sound sources under the snow.

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  7. If you see a great bustard (Otis tarda) in the wild, you're unlikely to forget it. Massive, colorful, and impossible to mistake, they are the heaviest birds living today capable of flight, with the greatest size difference between the sexes. They are also "lek breeders," where males gather at chosen sites to put on an audiovisual show for the visiting females, who choose a mate based on his appearance and the quality of his showbirdship.

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