Although the term “bird of prey” could theoretically be taken to include all birds that actively hunt and eat other animals,[3] ornithologists typically use the narrower definition followed in this page,[4] excluding many piscivorous predators such as storks, herons, gulls, skuas, penguins and kingfishers, as well as many primarily insectivorous birds such as passerines (e.g. shrikes), nightjars and frogmouths. Some extinct predatory birds had talons similar to those of modern birds of prey, including mousebird relatives (Sandcoleidae),[5] Messelasturidae and some Enantiornithes,[6] indicating possible convergent evolution in some cases, and common descent in others.
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Grammatically speaking, “prey” comes before “of” and is a genitive
Many languages, including Latin, English, and French, use the genitive to denote possession. However, in this instance, the genitive signifies a description, as in “the day of reckoning” or “a man of honor.”
The term “bird of prey” is derived from the medieval Latin “avis praedae.” It might be taken directly from Latin or from the French phrase “oiseau de proie.”
The sentence fragment “bird of prey” has a clear, readable meaning.
The meaning of “birds of prey” is “the bird is preying” because the preposition “of” indicates that the subject is carrying out the preposition’s object.
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Common names edit
The Latin word rapio, which means “to seize or take by force,” is the source of the English term raptor. [7] Common names for different prey birds are determined by their structure; however, many traditional names do not represent the evolutionary relationships among the groups. Variations in shape and size.
Certain names, like “merlin” (Falco columbarius), refer to single species or groups of closely related (sub)species and have not been generalized.
Migration edit
Migratory behaviour evolved multiple times within accipitrid raptors. An obliged point of transit of the.
The first known event happened between 14 and 12 million years ago. In the case of birds of prey, this finding appears to be among the earliest dates that have been released to date. [11] That study, for instance, corroborated an earlier reconstruction of migratory behavior in a single Buteo clade[16] that arose from migration approximately 5 million years ago.
Given that all of the major lineages within Accipitridae appear to have originated in one of the biogeographic realms of the Southern Hemisphere, raptors that migrate may have had a southern origin. Alongside migratory species’ range expansion into temperate habitats, migratory behavior first emerged in the tropics. [11] The literature contains comparable findings of southern origin in other taxonomic groups. [21][22][23].
The origin of migration in raptors is largely determined by their distribution and biogeographic history. Some comparative analyses suggest that diet breadth has an impact on how migratory behavior has evolved in this group [11], but more research is necessary to determine the significance of this finding. There are still a lot of unsolved questions regarding the complexity and difficulty of animal migration evolution.
New links between migration and the ecology and life history of raptors were found in a recent study. An overview of the published paper’s abstract reveals that “the most significant factors in determining distribution areas have been shown to be clutch size and hunting strategies; additionally, geographic dissimilarities may obscure significant relationships between life history traits and migratory behaviors.” Due to the existence or lack of ecological barriers, the migratory systems of the West Palearctic-Afrotropical and North-South American differ significantly from the East Palearctic-Indomalayan system. [24] The question of why some species winter in one place while others do so elsewhere can be addressed with the aid of maximum entropy modeling. Different factors related to temperature and precipitation limit the distribution of different species. This implies that the three primary migratory routes for these species differ in their migratory behaviors[24], which could have significant conservation implications for the preservation of migratory raptors.
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