pigeons Archives - usatoday24

Torrejón de Ardoz has a plan to control his geese, parrots, rabbits and pigeons. One of 150,000 euros

December 16, 2025 by usatoday24

With bird flu and the african swine fever grabbing headlines, the Torrejón de Ardoz City Council wants to protect itself against “possible health risks”. The City Council is looking for a company to help it “control” the populations of certain wild species that live in the municipality. Specifically, it has focused on four: parrots, Nile geesepigeons and rabbits, although the list can be expanded. It offers interested firms a three-year contract (extendable) with a budget of up to 150,000 euros. Its mission: quantify, control and capture. What has happened? That Torrejón de Ardoz (Community of Madrid) wants to control the wildlife that populates its fields and parks, especially parrots, Nile geese, rabbits and pigeons. “It is necessary to maintain the population and avoid possible risks to health, public safety, maintain environmental health and the ecosystem,” the Consistory states in your ad to attract companies interested in providing the service for three years. The deadline for submitting offers ended in November. Now the Contracting Platform reports that it is in the “evaluation” phase. The budget: a maximum of 150,000 eurosVAT included. But what exactly do you want to do? “Control and manage” the populations of certain species and anticipate possible “unhealth risks” or damage to ecosystems. Hence the focus is on three types of animals that stand out precisely for their ability to expand: “invasive exotic birds” (a category in which the City Council includes the Argentine parrot, Kramer parrot and Nile goose), pigeons and turtledoves and the European rabbit. “This includes any other wild animal that could cause a risk to health, safety and/or ecosystem,” they require from the Consistorywhich leaves pest control, disinfestation and deratization tasks outside the contract. The objective is for the company to carry out an annual “diagnosis” on the situation of these species and carry out health controls. If necessary, it will undertake sampling, analysis and veterinary tests to detect diseases. Just that? No. The documentation of the contest clarifies that, if circumstances demand it, the company will have to carry out work to control wildlife populations, which includes removing nests, controlling eggs, work with compressed air rifles and cages or capturing specimens. In the case of rabbits, the contract states that the company may control them with the help of ferrets and capillos, as long as it meets certain conditions. Captured healthy rabbits will be moved to preserves. When this is not possible, the contract contemplates euthanasia (in compliance with the animal welfare law), just as occurs with geese. One of the conditions placed on companies is that they have agreements with captive breeding and recovery centers. But… Is it so urgent? This is considered by the Madrid City Council, which recalls, for example, that parrots and Nile geese are “exotic species that can become invasive if control is not carried out” on the population. “Therefore, it is necessary to develop this service to reduce its distribution area, reduce the number of specimens or stop its spread,” prevents. About the rabbits, technicians remember that it is a wild species “capable of colonizing urban ecosystems” and that is already causing “damage” in green areas of the city, especially in groves, bushes, meadows and even in irrigation systems and land. “That is why it is necessary to control the population to prevent the increase and severity of damage. In addition, they can pose a risk to public safety and health,” duck. As for pigeons, the City Council recognizes that they are “adapted” to urban life, but their proliferation can cause annoyance and health problems. Images | Wikipedia 1 and 2 In Xataka | Torrejón de Ardoz thought it had found a golden opportunity by hosting the Madrid macro festivals. Now he’s canceling them.

The science behind one of the AI pillars has an origin as unexpected as unknown: pigeons pecking for food

August 20, 2025 by usatoday24

Imagine a missile guided by a dove. It sounds absurd, but it happened in the middle of war: someone proposed to train them to Picute the target from a screen and thus redirect the projectile. The system was never usedbut left something more powerful than the anecdote: A way of learning based on proof, error and reward. The comparison helps to understand logic, but it is not literal: today there are no birds in algorithms; What is maintained is the idea of strengthening behaviors through signals. That logic, simple and direct, is the one that many artificial intelligence models follow. What was previously an answer conditioned by food, is now a score, a preference or human indication that the model learns to pursue. The test and reinforcement mechanism was not lost over time. In the 1940s and 1950s, the American psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner formalized that idea with his theory of “operant conditioning”: A behavior increases its probability of repeating itself if its consequences are positive. Although behaviorism was displaced by approaches focused on mental processes, its logic found a new field in computer science. Since the end of the seventies and, above all, in the eighties and ninety, Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto applied it to the design of artificial agents capable of acting, receiving a signal and adjust ‘Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction’. As Mit Technology Review points outthe idea of molding behaviors without resorting to fixed rules became a useful tool to teach machines. From the 1980s, reinforcement learning began to be implemented in algorithms that explore simulated environments, fail, receive feedback and try again. They do not follow human instructions step by step: learn based on the result. This approach proved to be especially effective in tasks with clear objectives, such as games. And it was there that he gave one of his most visible jumps. Alphago’s story marked a before and after in artificial intelligence. In March 2016, he beat South Korean Lee Sedol 4-1 in a series of Go games. He succeeded by combining supervised learning of human games and reinforcement learning. A year later, Deepmind was one step further with Alphago Zero. Instead of training with human data, he started from scratch and learned playing against himself: each victory reinforced his strategy, each defeat the corregía. In 40 days he surpassed not only the human championbut also to all the previous versions of Alphago himself. Today, reinforcement learning is not only used in games; It is also used to refine the models behind services such as Chatgpt. The OpenAI system incorporates a technique known as Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF): people compare model responses and those preferences become a signal that guides their evolution. According to Openai, this phase seeks to align the behavior of the model with the user’s intention. It does not learn explicit rules, but patterns that maximize the reward, that is, what receives better assessments. Reinforcement works, but it doesn’t work for everything. Its effectiveness depends on the signal being well defined and represents the objective well. If it is confused or poorly designed, andThe system can adopt ineffective or even problematic strategies. This has fed a scientific debate. Some biologists have indicated the paradox: Association learning is considered limited to animals, but is celebrated in AI when it produces advanced results. It is no accident that great technology have adopted this approach. More than 80 years after that experiment with pigeons, their pecks are still present in the technology we use every day. Images | Nist Museum | Google | Xataka with Gemini 2.5 Pro In Xataka | The strange case of the diminutive AI: how tiny models are taking the colors to the mastodons of the AI

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