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The Animalist radio audition with Dominik Chrzanowski

So it happened – I will be in the Radio! :).

On July 15.I kindly invite all of you to listening the Radio dla Ciebie (RDC) radio. I will have a great pleasure to talk with Łukasz Biżycki about grebes, bee-eaters and bird photography in general. The radio program is called the Animalist.

The podcast with recording will be also available at: http://www.rdc.pl/publicystyka/podcasty/animalista/
How to choose a partner wisely? – interesting lectures at The University of Warsaw Botanic Garden
Feel invited to a series of interesting lectures organized by the University of Warsaw Botanic Garden. On February 13th our friend Paweł Pstrokoński will be talking about intimate life of birds. It seems a great topic just before the Valentine's Day :).

The meeting is free of charge and open for everyone. It will took place at The Copernicus auditorium in the Astronomical Observatory located in the University of Warsaw Botanic Garden, Ujazdowskie avenue nr 4, Warsaw.

Among pictures setting up a background for the lectures you will find my images of the Bee-eaters and Grebes. Exactly this kind of pictures that we will be hoping to get at our photography workshops :).
Are birds able to dream?
Lately, you can hear a lot about dream researches. Science has made significant progress in this field of studies. Its results became available to average people. For instance, each of us can install and use phone applications for monitoring our sleep and helping to wake up easily and painlessly. By the way, I’ve already tried out such an app , but it turned out that getting up at 3 AM is a little to early even with this application 😉

In general, people have two main sleep phases: REM (rapid eye movement) and NREM (non-rapid eye movement). The REM phase is the time of the increased brain activity. When you wake up someone during the REM phase, it is very likely that he or she will report dreaming. It turns out that birds have quite similar sleep stages. The main difference to mammals is that birds’ sleep phases are very short and rapidly changing. Some bird species are even known to have frequently interrupted sleep what allows the vigilance against potential predators. Unfortunately, scientists cannot wake up a bird during the REM phase and ask: “What were you dreaming about?”, so we cannot say definitely that birds dream. However, there are some interesting researches performed at male Australian birds called Zebra Finches (Taeniopygia guttata). Scientists have found some bursting patterns of neuron activities during the REM phase in parts of a brain which are responsible for singing. It is supposed that this kind of dream-like „replay” can help learn to sing and additionally improves birds' memory!

ertainly, the nearest future has in store many interesting discoveries about birds’ sleep. For more pictures of sleeping birds visit http://birderscorner.com/en/
We will be a part of the exhibition at the Bird and Nature Festival (du Festival de l’Oiseau et de la Nature)
Today I’ve received some good news. One of my pictures will be a part of the exhibition after the “International Wildbird Photo Competition” organizes as a part of the Bird and Nature Festival (du Festival de l’Oiseau et de la Nature) that will be held from April 8th to 17th in France.

By the way – congratulations to all winners! Your pictures are amazing. Everyone who is interested can find them here

Few numbers about the competition:
- 847 wildlife photographers participated;
- 5,712 pictures submitted from all over the world divided into several categories:
Birder’s Corner starts soon
Birder’s Corner starts in January 2017. For now a sneak peek of what we will be about.
See more at http://www.birderscorner.com/EN/