Lorna Gibson

speaker

199 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 13 Jul

Lorna Gibson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Something You Should Know · Has Therapy Gone Too Far? & The Hidden Genius of Birds · 13 Jul 2026 podcast

So a lot of the color in birds and feathers is from pigments.

For instance, there's melanin pigments that give you grays and blacks, and there's another kind of melanin that gives you sort of reddish browns.

There's carotenoid pigments that give you reds and yellows.

But there's this amazing iridescence in feathers, and the iridescence is caused by tiny little microscopic structures that are very well sort of aligned and oriented, and those structures are

have a similar length to the wavelength of light, which is really remarkable.

It's tiny, tiny structures that produce the iridescence.

The birds work at keeping their feathers clean.

You often see birds preening their feathers.

They have something called a preen gland at the base of their tail and the preen gland exudes an oil and when they stick their bill into this preen gland they get the oil on their bill and then they run their bill through their feathers and that puts the oil on their feathers.

And it's thought that that does a couple of things.

They think that it sort of makes the feathers more supple and less brittle so they don't break.

And it's also thought that the preen gland oil helps repel bacteria and things that could adversely affect the bird.

So the preen gland is important and also the preening is important.

The birds need to keep their feathers in good condition in order to be able to fly and to have the feathers function.

So it's important that they groom and preen.

Well, some birds definitely return to the same spot over and over again.

People who study bird migration sometimes put various tracking devices on the birds.

And some of these devices, you have to be able to get the device off the bird to get the data down from it.

And Arctic terns, for example, have these incredible migrations.

They breed...

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