one of two species in the genus Pyrrhocorax. Its two subspecies breed in
high mountains from Spain east through southern Europe and North Africa
to Central Asia, India and China. It has nested at 6,500 m (21,300 ft),
higher than any other bird species, and its eggs have adaptations that
improve oxygen intake and reduce water loss at these altitudes. This
bird has glossy black plumage, a yellow bill, and red legs. Widely
spread flight feathers allow acrobatic manoeuvres. A large bird with
distinctive whistling calls, it pairs for life and displays fidelity to
its breeding site, usually a cave or crevice in a cliff face. Building a
lined stick nest, it lays three to five brown-speckled pale beige eggs.
It feeds on fruit in winter and mainly invertebrate prey in grazed
grassland in summer. Although some localised populations have declined
due to predation, parasitism and changes in agricultural practices, this
widespread and abundant species is not threatened globally. Climate
change may present a long-term threat by shifting the bird's alpine
habitat even higher.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_chough>
_______________________________
Today's selected anniversaries:
1818:
On the first anniversary of its victory in the Battle of
Chacabuco, Chile formally declared its independence from Spain.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilean_Declaration_of_Independence>
1855:
Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, was
founded as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, the United
States' first agricultural college.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_State_University>
1912:
Xinhai Revolution: Puyi, the last Emperor of China, abdicated
under a deal brokered by military official and politician Yuan Shikai,
formally replacing the Qing Dynasty with a new republic in China.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puyi>
1946:
Black United States Army veteran Isaac Woodard was severely
beaten by a South Carolina police officer to the point that he lost his
vision in both eyes, an incident that galvanized the Civil Rights
Movement.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Woodard>
1993:
Two-year-old James Bulger was led away from New Strand Shopping
Centre in Bootle, England, and brutally murdered by two ten-year-old
boys, who became the youngest convicted murderers in modern English
history.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Bulger>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
gravitational wave:
(physics) A fluctuation in spacetime caused by accelerating mass, which
propagates as a wave at the speed of light.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gravitational_wave>
___________________________
Wikiquote quote of the day:
Slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous
injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our
republican example of its just influence in the world; enables the
enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as
hypocrites; causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity,
and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst
ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil
liberty; criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that
there is no right principle of action.
--Abraham Lincoln
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln>
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