[MCN] Chickens make it to the Washington Post: Smart birds?

[Lance Olsen]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2017/01/13/chickens-changed-the-world-so-why-do-we-ignore-them

Excerpts

Five-day-old chicks display basic addition and subtraction abilities. 
Hens have demonstrated transitive inference, or the ability to deduce 
that if A is bigger than B and B is bigger than C, then A is bigger 
than C. That's considered a milestone for 7-year-old children.

Chickens' food calls are among about two dozen vocalizations that 
convey distinct meanings, and using them is called "referential 
communication."

"When we found it in monkeys many years ago, it was a big thing. We 
didn't think other animals are capable of referential communication," 
said Marino, whose paper was published in the journal Animal 
Cognition. "Now we're seeing a lot of parallels between chickens and 
a lot of the mammals that we think of as very intelligent."






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"Oxygen in the atmosphere might be reduced several percent below the 
present level without adverse effects."

"Free oxygen not only supports life; it arises from life. The oxygen 
now in the atmosphere is probably mainly, if not wholly, of 
biological origin."

Preston Cloud and Aharon Gibor. The Oxygen Cycle. 
Scientific American, September 1970
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"We found that tree mortality rates increased by an overall average 
of 4.7%yr from 1963 to 2008, with higher mortality rate increases in 
western regions than in eastern regions (about 4.9 and 1.9% yr , 
respectively). The water stress created by regional drought may be 
the dominant contributor to these widespread increases in tree 
mortality rates across tree species, sizes, elevations, longitudes 
and latitudes. Western Canada seems to have been more sensitive to 
drought than eastern Canada" (Peng et al 2011).
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"We contend that traditional approaches to forest conservation and 
management will be inadequate given the predicted scale of 
social-economic and biophysical changes in the 21st century."

Forest Ecology and Management Accepted 7 October 2015
Review and synthesis
Achievable future conditions as a framework for guiding forest 
conservation and management
S.W. Golladay, K.L. Martin, J.M. Vose, D.N. Wear, A.P. Covich, R.J. 
Hobbs, K.D. Klepzig, G.E. Likens, R.J. Naiman, A.W. Shearer 
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