As if dressed in its finest clothes, this Eurasian spoonbill steps through the marsh and scans the water with its bill — but it doesn’t soil its feathers.
In fact these are its finest clothes. It’s in breeding plumage.
How elegant.
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(photo by Andreas Trepte, www.photo-natur.net, via Wikimedia Commons where it was picture of the day on 31 Dec 2011. Click on the photo to see the original.)
12 August 2011
What a cute baby bird … but look at those feet! Each toe is as long as his tiny body.
This is an African jacana chick and his lifestyle is as odd as his feet.
He hatched in a floating nest built by his father on a shallow tropical lake. Not only did his dad build the nest but he incubated the eggs and raised the chicks.
His mother had nothing to do with the family. After she laid the eggs she went off to spend time with the other males in her harem as is typical in the jacanas’ female-dominated society.
Dad’s nest building skills were acceptable but a floating nest does get wet. Fortunately the eggs are waterproof and the chicks precocial — they can walk and find food as soon as they hatch.
And that leads back to this baby’s feet.
Since jacanas live on lakes they have to be able to walk across very flimsy floating vegetation. Their big feet can do this because they act like snowshoes, distributing the birds’ weight across a wide surface. This earned African jacanas the nickname “lily trotter.”
He walks on water.
(photo from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photo to see the original, taken at a zoo in Japan)
There are many kinds of starlings but not in the western hemisphere. The only kind we have is the European starling, introduced in New York’s Central Park in 1890.
Unfortunately they’ve given starlings a bad name. They spread across the continent in less than 100 years, displaced native cavity-nesting birds, and now boast a population of 200 million. They’re ubiquitous in cities, noisy, and oily-looking. There’s not much to love about a starling…
…unless it looked like this!
This is Hildebrandt’s starling (Lamprotornis hildebrandti), a native of Kenya and Tanzania. Like our starlings it lives in relatively open areas and nests in cavities. The male and female look alike and the young are dull brown.
If only our starlings looked like this, perhaps we’d like them better.
(photo by Noel Feans from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photo to see the original)
Last week when I wrote about the Avian Architecture book, Sharon Leadbitter commented on two amazing nests she’d seen on the web. Here’s one of them.
Sociable weavers (Philetairus socius) are sparrow-sized birds who live in the Kalahari desert in Namibia, Botswana and South Africa.
Unlike most birds who build a nest for their own babies and then abandon it when the young have flown, sociable weavers build a permanent structure that functions as a communal nest and roost. It’s the size of a small car, the largest nest found anywhere, and can house up to 100 pairs of birds, their children and grandchildren.
The top of the nest is basically flat while the underside, shown above, is dotted with entries to the chambers. The weavers build it entirely of straws which they shove into the structure. This BBC video by David Attenborough shows how the weavers do it.
Sociable weavers are such good builders that other species, such as the pygmy falcon, nest in the empty chambers while the weavers live there.
It’s an amazing feat for a small bird. They’ve built a city in a tree.
(photo BBC Worldwide video posted on YouTube.com)
These rare James’s flamingos live in the Andes mountains of South America.
Though only three feet tall, their colors are stunning with pale pink bodies, yellow beaks, black wingtips, and bright carmine accents on their necks and backs. They look as if they were painted.
Until I found this photograph on Wikimedia Commons, I had no idea these birds existed. They’re so beautiful I had to share them.
“The world is so full of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”— Robert Louis Stevenson
(photo by Christian Mehlführer on Wikimedia Commons. Click on the caption to see the original)
Today’s blog is an opportunity to improve your bird identification skills and it’s a challenge.
What bird is this?
To level the playing field, I’ve picked a bird I’ve never seen.
Let’s go through the normal identification clues in order of importance. These are the questions I ask myself when birding. Many of them will help here. (Yes, the order of the clues really matters.)
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Here are the clues applied to the bird in this picture. In some cases I’ll tell you more than you could know from a random photo.
So…
This bird has a beak like a woodpecker (a distant relative) but its whiskers indicate it eats flying insects. Those who have seen this bird in the wild have called it “a glittering hummingbird the size of a starling.”
Ready for the answer? See the link in the photo credit.
(photo by Dario Sanches via Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photo to see the original. Click here for the answer to this quiz.)
Today I’m back from a four-day weekend with my family in Smithfield, Virginia.
While there I took long walks in Windsor Castle Park, a beautiful park with new boardwalks easily accessible from the historic downtown.
The park has a variety of good habitat for birding: woodlands, fields and saltmarsh. At low tide thousands of small crabs crawl the muddy banks of the saltmarsh, looking for food and becoming food themselves. There’s a heron rookery near the Cypress Creek overlook where the “baby” herons are now nearly as tall as their parents and quite loud when they’re hungry. I bet they eat crab for dinner.
I was happy to see many species that I never see in Pittsburgh including laughing gulls, royal terns and black vultures but the best birds by far were the summer tanagers.
The summer tanager (Piranga rubra) is a bird of southern forests. They do nest in the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania but you have to go out of your way to find them. At Smithfield I could hear them singing and a pair even came down to see me!
The male is all red and the female all yellow-green. They have larger, longer beaks than scarlet tanagers and their head feathers stand up a little, giving them a Jimmy Durante look. (Their back feathers don’t stand up. The bird in this photo has a feather out of place.)
They’re famous for eating bees and wasps and will even take the grubs out of wasp nests. (Brave!) They winter in Central and South America where they eat fruit as well.
(photo taken in Manizales, Columbia by Julian Londono. Image is from Wikimedia Commons licensed under Creative Commons Share Alike 2.0. Click on the photo to see the original.)
Early this month I spent six days in Nevada and never saw a roadrunner. It was the one disappointment of my trip.
To compensate, Steve Valasek sent me photos of the roadrunners near his home in New Mexico.
What does a roadrunner do before he crosses the road? He looks for cars. 😉
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(photo by Steve Valasek. Click on the photo to see his roadrunner series.)
Fifteen years ago I learned about Best Bird from Chuck Tague when I took his Spring Warblers class at Presque Isle State Park.
As the class wrapped up two intensive days of birding Chuck asked each of us, “What was your best bird?” Mine was a least bittern, a life bird(*) who flushed from the reeds when I stepped alone to the edge of the marsh.
Best Bird is now a tradition with me. At the end of every outing I think back on the birds I’ve seen and their behavior. Who was most beautiful? Who did the most interesting thing? Which bird took my breath away? I enjoy thinking back on the birds that made the outing worthwhile.
My trip to Nevada was so full birds that it’s hard to pick the best. I saw 127 species, nine life birds and thousands of individuals. Rather than pick a single Best Bird, here are some of the many “bests” of my trip:
(photo from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photo to see the original)
(*) A life bird is a species seen for the first time in my life.
My two favorite species at Henderson Bird Preserve are American avocets and black-necked stilts. Both are long-legged wading birds with delicate bills but the stilts’ bodies are so small and their legs so long that they look fragile.
When I visit Henderson in April the avocets and stilts have arrived from their wintering grounds and they’re courting. They fly by, ignoring me, so intent on their social interactions that I’m able to get quite close.
This video from Cornell Lab of Ornithology gives you an idea of what it’s like to be at the Bird Preserve on an April morning (though I’ve never encountered a flock as large as shown here). It perfectly captures the beauty and grace of the black-necked stilts.
I’m glad I came to Nevada to see them. And now I’m coming home.
(video from Cornell Lab of Ornithology)