Are you a lonely princess looking for a hand with some housework? A precocious child in the Australian outback looking for adventure? A hard-working wizard with last minute travel plans? A spaceship commander with an open attitude towards relationships between humans and aliens, particularly justice-hungry former cops with sexy-sounding voice actors? Science has a solution for you: make friends with birds.

Filmed at the Kruger National Park in South Africa, this heron is having a grand old time. We can't be sure, but we think the hippo was having a bit of fun too. If you want to have some fun, try starting the video below first and playing both at the same time.

Getting Doctor Who's David Tennant to narrate your pet documentary show - best idea or best idea? Oh look, here he is talking about dogs...

Give this rude little dude a pair of tights for pants and call it a day. Somewhere in heaven, Elaine Stritch is smiling. In non-crow news, look at this little chipmunk mom and her growing chipmunk baby!

Science has known for a while that birds and dinosaurs are evolutionarily linked, but it's been difficult to establish a direct connection between today's birds and their giant, people-hungry ancestors. Now, a new study uses the existing fossil record and several recent finds of feathered dinosaurs to draw a direct connection, so now we know how they flocked this way.

A group of swallows was already living in this parking garage in Victoria, Canada, when automatic doors were installed, but judging from Grant Hughes' footage the birds adapted to the automatic sensors remarkably fast. It's always sad to see animals cope with loss of their environment, but damn, these little guys sure showed us!

"Honey, little Michael Jr is turning thirteen this year. It seems like he's starting to notice the girls in his class a lot more these days. Don't you think he needs to hear about the... you know, the 'birds and the bees' soon?" Michael Bay's wife will one day say to him.

We've all had a good laugh at the Tyrannosaurus Rex's tiny little arms. Well the joke's on us apparently. New research shows that T-Rex didn't even need its stupid little baby arms anyway. Turns out its neck did all the work.

Male canaries woo potential mates with song, and a new study shows that delivering testosterone to one part of the bird's brain increases the frequency with which the bird sings, but doesn't improve how well they sing. They can basically talk to women, but don't necessarily know what to say.

Nobody likes to see cats or birds mistreated. Mildly annoyed, though, that's like 40% of the internet right there.

Sometimes the media does this thing where it takes something incredibly fascinating and turns into a crappy game of telephone, and at the end everybody believes something completely fake. Case in point: after those gorgeous pictures of mummified Lake Natron birds made the rounds, now everybody thinks that the lake has supernatural gorgon-like powers.

Remember those "Cat friend vs. Dog friend" videos that made the rounds a while back? Imagine if you'd actually learned something about animal behavior from that series instead of just laughing at how accurate it is -- that's what this video from Pleated-Jeans is. Now you'll know everything you need to about the European Robin's territorial nature.

Meet Disco. Disco has a pretty big vocabulary for a parakeet. "Hamburger" is among the words he can say. So is "cheeseburger." Dirty Dancing quotes? Disco's on that. But "inquisition"... well, that one's a bit tougher. (via: Nerd Approved) Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

Actually they're just dancing 'cause that's what ostriches do in their spare time, even when they're being fostered by a human parent along with some four-week-younger emus. (via Hypervocal.)

It'll be okay, little... uh. What's your name? Oh, you and your nest mates were named after presidents Washington, Lincoln, and Truman? There's gotta be a joke in there somewhere. (via ZooBorns.)

We know birds can fly, because they do, but we don't know much about how they fly. It probably has something to do with their wings. Part of the problem with studying birds is that they move much faster than we do. That's why students at Stanford University have been using high-speed video cameras to capture slow motion video of birds in flight. The resulting video is really quite beautiful.

Last year, researchers found 116 dead right whales in the waters off of Argentina -- all but three of them calves, or immature whales. That marked a startling doubling of whale casualties in the area the year before, and some researchers think they know what is killing the whales -- legions of seagulls who dive bomb the huge animals as they're surfacing for air, making a meal of the whales' nutritious blubber and leaving the aquatic mammals with gashes in their hides up to four inches deep.