Tuesday, the 5th of January, 2016 is the 5th day in 2016 and in the 1st calendar week.

General Events:

National Bird Day
January 5, 2016 in the USA

National Bird Day takes place on January 05, 2016. It is an annual holiday with half a million adherents who celebrate through birdwatching, studying birds, bird drinking games including ‘bird date’ and other bird-related activities. Bird adoption is a particularly important National Bird Day activity. According to the newspaper Atlanta Journal Constitution, many bird enthusiasts celebrate by adopting birds and by educating future bird owners about the special issues involved with taking care of birds, including their “screaming, biting, constant cleanups, the need for daily interaction and a varied diet”.

Birds are feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic (warm-blooded), egg-laying, vertebrate animals. With around 10,000 living species, they are the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. All living species of birds have wings. Wings are evolved forelimbs, and most bird species can fly. Flightless birds include ratites, penguins, and a number of diverse endemic island species. Some birds, especially corvids and parrots, are among the most intelligent animal species; a number of bird species have been observed manufacturing and using tools, and many social species exhibit cultural transmission of knowledge across generations.

Though human activities have allowed the expansion of a few species, such as the Barn Swallow and European Starling, they have caused population decreases or extinction in many other species. Over a hundred bird species have gone extinct in historical times. The most commonly cited human threat to birds is habitat loss. Other threats include overhunting, accidental mortality due to structural collisions, pollution, competition and predation from nonnative invasive species, and climate change.

Governments and conservation groups work to protect birds, either by passing laws that preserve and restore bird habitat or by establishing captive populations for reintroductions. Such projects have produced some successes; one study estimated that conservation efforts saved 16 species of bird that would otherwise have gone extinct between 1994 and 2004, including the California Condor and Norfolk Parakeet.

http://www.nationalbirdday.com/

Where is the event?
Nationwide USA

 

Twelfth Night 2016
January 5, 2016 in the World

Twelfth Night takes place on January 05, 2016. Twelfth Night is a festival in some branches of Christianity marking the coming of the Epiphany and concluding the Twelve Days of Christmas. It is defined by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as “the evening of the fifth of January, preceding Twelfth Day, the eve of the Epiphany, formerly the last day of the Christmas festivities and observed as a time of merrymaking”. There is some confusion these days, however, as to which night is Twelfth Night: modern practice is often to regard the night of Epiphany itself (sixth of January) to be Twelfth Night. The older tradition of Twelfth Night being the 5 January stems from the medieval practice of the day beginning at sunset, rather than at midnight as it does now. Thus Twelfth Night falls on 5 January, ahead of Twelfth Day on the 6th. A recent belief in some English-speaking countries holds that it is unlucky to leave Christmas decorations hanging after Twelfth Night, a belief originally attached to the festival of Candlemas which celebrates the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple (2 February).

Where is Twelfth Night?
Worldwide

Historical Events on 5th January:

1477 – Battle at Nancy, Burgundy vs Switz, 7000 + killed including their leader Charles Duke of Burgundy

1554 – Great fire in Eindhoven Neth

1709 – Sudden extreme cold kills thousands of Europeans

1834 – Kiowa Indians record this as the night the stars fell

1840 – Records show 95,820 licensed public houses in England on this date

1888 – Dutch Heidemaatschappij established

1895 – French Capt Alfred Dreyfus, convicted of treason, publicly stripped of his rank; later exonerated

1896 – The Die Presse newspaper (Germany) publicly announces Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays and their potential for new methods of medical diagnoses in a front-page article

1930 – Mao Zedong writes “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire”

1972 – US President Nixon signs a bill for NASA to begin research on a manned space shuttle

1976 – Cambodia is renamed “Democratic Kampuchea”

1985 – Thousands of Jewish refugees are airlifted from Sudan to Israel

1998 – Ice storm knocks out electricity in Quebec & Ontario

2005 – Eris, the largest known dwarf planet in the solar system, is discovered by the team of Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David L. Rabinowitz using images originally taken on October 21, 2003, at the Palomar Observatory