Wildlife

Canadian Geese - Death-Defying Strategy For Surviving Hailstorms

These Canadian geese stare up into the sky as hail pounds the pavement all around them.

If you or I were to try this form of high-intensity storm watching, we'd likely walk away with bruises or a black eye. However, according to Jeremy Ross, a biologist and bird expert at the University of Oklahoma, this behavior has been spotted before in feathered creatures when hail is falling. And it probably helps them survive the storms, by presenting a smaller target for the falling ice, he said.

What's more, "a few individuals seem to be actually reacting to individual hailstones," Ross said. "So not only are they looking up into the sky to reduce their profile, but perhaps when a hailstone was imminently going to hit them in the face, they dodge it really quickly."

Vanishing Penguins

The population of king penguins in what was once the world’s largest colony has plummeted by nearly 90 percent over the last 35 years, and scientists say they don’t know why.

The Île aux Cochons colony in the southern Indian Ocean was also once the second-largest colony of all penguins. But satellite images revealed the number of birds there dropped from 502,400 breeding pairs in 1982 to 59,200 in April 2017.

Scientists say overfishing, feral cats and invasive diseases or parasites could be responsible for the disappearing penguins in the remote French territory.