When you’re at the beach this summer, be careful of nesting shorebirds.
This beautiful seven minute video by Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and Maine Audubon shows the challenges facing piping plovers all along our coasts.
I’m glad to see they’re working hard to save them in Maine.
(video from Maine IFW and Maine Audubon on YouTube)
22 May 2012
Did you know these facts about black kites (Milvus migrans)?
If you want to see black kites in Pittsburgh, your opportunity is coming soon. The National Aviary’s Sky Deck show features trained black kites who swoop and wheel to catch food in the air.
Sky Deck opens Memorial Day weekend and runs through Labor Day, weather permitting.
(photo of a black kite from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photo to see the original)
Here’s a very small bird with a very large eye ring.
Native to Australia and New Zealand, he’s a migratory bird called a silvereye (Zosterops lateralis). He’s only the size of a kinglet.
This month in the southern hemisphere silvereyes are gathering in flocks because winter is coming. They’ll fly north to warmer climates eating fruit along the way.
Here’s a video of them preening after a bath.
The eye ring is amazing…
(This photo by JJ Harrison was Picture of the Day on Wikimedia Commons 23 March 2009)
I thought March Madness was all about basketball until I stumbled on a recent RSPB headline, The Gloves Are Off at RSPB Reserves:
“With spring approaching, the brown hares of the UK are starting to ‘box’, and we’re encouraging people to head to our nature reserves to see the opening bouts of these amazing seasonal matches.
Unlike the male parties of the well-publicised recent heavyweight fracas, the dramatic sight of hares ‘boxing’ is actually the females fighting off the unwanted attention of overly amorous males.
The males gather together vying for the female’s attention and if not impressed, she uses fisticuffs to fend them off.”
The article was accompanied by a photograph but that was tame compared to this video from Scotland.
He chases, she boxes, they tumble, the fur flies. She’s really letting him have it!
Clearly he doesn’t get it that when she says no she means no!
Mad as a March hare, no doubt.
(video by LuckyGavia from YouTube)
This is what love does for a great egret.
In February the great egrets come back to the Alligator Farm in St. Augustine, Florida and begin a frenzy of spring cleaning.
Like all the males, this bird chose a nest platform and collected some sticks. Then for a couple of days he stood on the platform and bowed and croaked and displayed his beautiful feathers to attract an unattached female.
Finally she landed but it took another couple of days for them to confirm, “You’re the one! Let’s finish the nest.”
Now he collects sticks and brings them back with a flourish, “For you, my dear.”
He’s found his mate and he’s walking on air.
(photo by Chuck Tague)
Lesser Flamingos, flying at Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania.
Look closely and you’ll see they have red armpits (axillaries). So cool! More stunning than the average bird.
In this case, unlike the stark architecture, lesser is more.
(photo by Charles J Sharp on Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photo to see the original)
Sandhill cranes and snow geese at Bosque del Apache.
A beautiful reason to visit New Mexico in the winter.
(photo by Kim Steininger)
This amazing block of ice floated to the sea in Iceland.
Its beauty tempted two photographers to try to capture its image. Click here to see what happened when they set up their tripods.
(photo by Andreas Tille, a featured picture on Wikimedia Commons)
Here’s a bird that surprised everyone.
White ibises usually live along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts from North Carolina through Florida, south to Central and South America. They also breed in Louisiana and southern Arkansas but in winter they move further south.
Not all of them do. This immature white ibis showed up at Kaercher Lake in Hamburg, Pennsylvania on November 11 and has spent the early winter there.
Though surprising, this out of range behavior is not unheard of. Cornell’s Birds of North American Online says that white ibises are highly nomadic. Their “postbreeding dispersals often take individuals outside normal nonbreeding range” as far north as New York, Vermont and Quebec, as far west as Wyoming, Colorado and North Dakota.
Young birds are more likely to go north and inland. Banded individuals have been found as much as 1,540 miles from home. That’s the distance from Altoona, PA to Denver, CO. These birds really travel!
Interestingly, white ibises don’t nest until they’re three years old so immature birds have a couple of years in which to wander.
Who knows where this ibis came from or where he’ll end up? For now he’s unusual. As of Tuesday (Dec 27) he’s still at Kaercher Creek Park.
(photo by Charlie Hickey)
Standing alone like a “wolf tree” in a farmer’s field, this tree looks quite odd.
Grandidieri’s baobab (Adansonia grandidieri) grows only in the western part of Madagascar, an island off the coast of Africa. As is typical for baobabs it has a very wide trunk compared to its crown. Of the eight baobab species on earth, six are endemic to Madagascar.
If surrounded by a forest this tree would not stand out. At 80 feet tall it’s about the height of a red oak and would blend in from a distance. But its trunk is 10 feet wide, three times the diameter of a red oak. This is one fat tree!
The IUCN says that Grandidieri’s baobab probably occurred in dry deciduous forests close to water but is now found in degraded agricultural land. Sadly this is typical of Madagascar where deforestation is a huge problem.
That’s why this baobab is endangered … and more unusual than it ought to be.
(photo by Bernard Gagnon on Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photo to see the original.)