Category: Birds
The superior vocal abilities of these starling relatives make them popular as pets - they are able to reproduce everyday sounds, and even the human voice, with amazing clarity and accuracy. In the wild, they inhabit the hill regions of South Asia and Southeast Asia. The dialects of wild populations of these birds vary so rapidly with distance that birds living more than 9-10 miles away from each other may have no call-types in common with each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_hill_myna
http://www.birdlife.org/datazone/speciesfactsheet.php?id=6841
Asleep at the wheel?
Can you imagine spending nearly all of your life in the air? The common swift doesn’t have to - it just does! From the day this bird learns to fly, it almost never touches the ground voluntarily - it eats, drinks, mates, and may even sleep while flying. While sleep walking can be problematic in humans, many birds have the ability to enter a state called unihemispheric slow-wave sleep, where one half of the brain sleeps as the other remains alert. This method of “sleeping with one eye open,” is a great way to avoid becoming another animal’s meal, and has led to the suspicion that these birds, who almost never willingly land, also sleep while in flight!
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