Tag: birds

Kangaroo and King Island Emus

One of the things I’ve learned from the great book The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions by David Quammen is that funny things happen on islands. Species get smaller or larger, or weirder and more complex. Islands are where you find hundred of lemurs, giant tortoises, dwarf elephants, gigantic flesh-eating lizards, and other exotic creatures. Both…

New Zealand Quail

  The New Zealand Quail (Coturnix novaezelandiae) has been officially extinct since 1875. Sir Joseph Banks was the first westerner to describe it; he was an illustrious naturalist, mostly interested in botany, who accompanied Captain James Cook on his famous sea voyage from 1768–1771, exploring the globe and dispersing invasive species around the world. Cook took several jaunts around the globe, often…

Hoopoe Starling

We’re back to birds now that the new year is over. Without further ado, I give you the Hoopoe Starling. The Hoopoe Starling also goes by the names Bourbon Crested Starling, Huppe, Crested Starling, or Réunion Starling. The Hoopoe Starling was discovered in 1669 and first described 1783 by the Dutch Naturalist Pieter Boddaert, who found it in its home on the island of Réunion in…

Bonin Islands Grosbeak

Back to birds! Bonin Island Grosbeaks were technically not Grosbeaks, and technically only found on one of the Bonin Islands, (though maybe at one point it had lived on more than one). So let’s start at the beginning: 1. Where are the Bonin Islands? The Bonin Islands are also known as the Ogasawara Islands, and are an archipelago of over…

Choiseul Crested Pigeon

Described as having a beautiful rising and falling whistling call. From Choiseul, one of the Solomon Islands off the coast of New Guinea. Choiseul had no carnivorous mammals (other than man, who sometimes hunted it for food) before the introduction of feral cats by visitors to the islands; the indigenous population on the island told researchers that the pigeon was…

Hats and Feathers

Collectors in the nineteenth century weren’t just interested in raiding nests for eggs, or collecting birds to be kept on mantelpieces. There was also the exploding market for hats with birds on them: Hats adorned with real feathers, wings, and stuffed whole wild birds were the height of fashion in the late-19th century. Woodpeckers, blue jays, waxwings and quails: all…

App vs. Paper

So, as I started this project partly because  paper field guides are one of the kinds of printed books that are probably going to disappear (like dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, travel guides, etc.) to be replaced by easily portable, easily updated apps. One of things that apps are better at is recording and communicating birdsong. I love the ways that writers…

Ula-ai-Hawane

  A small Hawaiian honeycreeper. It liked the seeds and flowers of a particular sort of palm tree, and when those started to disappeared, so did the bird. Its name means “the red bird that eats the fruit of the hawane palm”. Last seen in 1892.

Guadalupe Caracara

“No kid is safe from their attacks. Should a number be together, the birds unite their forces, and, with great noise and flapping of their wings, generally manage to separate the weakest one and dispatch it….The birds are cruel to the extreme, and the torture sometimes inflicted upon the defenseless animals is painful to witness. Even when food is plenty,…