Hello and welcome. This. The Science of Birds podcast is a lighthearted, guided exploration of bird biology for lifelong learners.

This is episode 42.

And because the year is almost over, this is the annual review episode.

We'll be looking back at some highlights of bird science in the year

2021. What fascinating things did ornithologists and other biologists discover about birds this year?

I've picked five studies to highlight for you. These are stories that, in most cases, were interesting enough to make

the news. Well, they were on my news feed anyway. The Google algorithm knows what I like. I like

news about birds, of course, but also feel-good stories about puppies and kittens, and Hollywood

gossip and cryptocurrency. That's pretty much it.

And I hope you can tell that I'm kidding about some of that. I wasn't kidding about the puppies,

though. Anyway, I chose these five studies because I find them quite interesting, and because I

think you will too. This is in no way a comprehensive review of all the research published about birds in 2021.

Thousands of papers about birds were published this year.

I did not meticulously comb through massive stacks of scientific journals

to select the top five papers at the pinnacle of scientific rigor and significance.

Ain't nobody got time for that. So these are just some cool studies that caught my attention.

We'll take a few minutes each to talk about them. If you're interested in digging deeper,

I'll put links to the studies in the show notes on the Science of Birds website.

At the end of the episode, I'll wrap up with a little personal note about how the podcast is doing and all that jazz.

All right, let's do this. The first study has to do with bird brains, dinosaurs, and extinction.

As we all know now, birds are dinosaurs.

Birds represent the only lineage of dinosaurs that survived the great mass extinction that happened 66 million years ago.

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