✷ blue jay ✷

Baby owl

(via)

the tits speak for themselves

today's bird is this green heron inspecting a bug

Hes inspecting that bug real well

{Barn Owls in The Oak} by {Mike Rae}

Black-capped Chickadee at Tupelo meadow ,Ramble ,Central park.

Banded Kingfisher (Lacedo pulchella), male, family Alcedinidae, Sumatra, Indonesia

photograph by JJ Harrison

Eurasian nuthatch/nötväcka. Värmland, Sweden (December 3, 2023).

Quacks in the ice

(via)

thinking about that kakapo egg that got crushed but the conservation team patched it up and it survived

life will persist against all odds

For those who don’t follow kakapo conservation, they are critically endangered parrots who only breed on years where the rimu tree they rely on meet a certain threshold of fruit production. One breeding season in 4 years can be typical, and about half of all eggs laid by kakapo are infertile (they still aren’t completely certain why, it could be a recent population bottleneck) so each fertile egg is worth its weight in gold.

This was one of only 5 fertile eggs laid on the Whenua Hou island population in the 2014 breeding season and it got crushed by its mother on accident. It was mended with glue and tape and incubated by the rangers until hatching.

At 150 days old kakapo chicks are officially added to the population total and given a unique name, until then they are given their mother’s name and a number for birth order laid in the clutch. This chick was known as Lisa-one before officially being given the name Ruapuke by local indigenous Ngai Tahu people.Here he is grown up:

It’s sad when a species is so rare we know them all individually but at the same time I love that you can point at this one bird and say oh that’s Ruapuke, his mom sat on him too hard

Blue-footed Booby

Photos: Libor Vaicenbacher

Love that the car at the back is like 'WTF is wrong with these losers? I'm gonna overtake!' Then it see the baby swans and it like, 'Oh! My bad.' And pulls in again.

@elodieunderglass

I find swan parenting so interesting and relatable. Although they’re closely related to ducks, their strategies are entirely different. A mother duck is usually typified by being “careless” with her babies, meaning that she just goes wherever without consideration for them, and they struggle to keep up; ducks don’t really comprehend what terrain or situations are inaccessible for ducklings, so you’ll often see a mother duck carelessly using stairs, or flying off a building or cliff, while her babies literally die trying to follow. Ducks aren’t noted for their situational awareness, but this is really shocking to watch in the case of Mama Duck. She doesn’t usually check behind her, can’t manage them through complex situations, and gives no impression of even having any idea of how many babies she has (that’s why it’s a good thing she often has 14 in babies a clutch, and can pull off 2 clutches a year; in the wild, most of these are expected to die, as a sort of background protein link in the food web.) (On a farmyard, you might give them to a broody hen to raise, as they’ll have a more attentive parent that way.)

Swans, by contrast, take two parents about a year to raise about seven babies, and they RAISE them. They’re very attentive and conscious of their children’s safety. Even in this short video you can see that one parent is leading the children while the other keeps an eye on the card, using body language to communicate with partner and cars. The straight fixed glare at the car not only gives the swan a better look, but is also the polite first indication that the swan wants space (blowing past this signal is one reason why human/swan interactions quickly become antagonistic.) they’re walking very slowly and deliberately, which (unintentionally) forces the cars to treat them like pedestrians, but is an unusually slow pace aimed at making it very easy for the very young babies to follow properly.

I don’t know. I just like swans. I like their confidence in the human world, and their firm belief that everyone can follow the Swan Rules and behave properly if they try. I like that they relate to us and therefore have expectations that we’ll follow Swan Rules. They cross at the crosswalk because that’s what is Done and they expect everyone to respect how things are Done. In every post about swans on social media there will always be several comments about how swans are violent and it will always be down to: “they expect us to know how things are Done, and get mad when we don’t.”

Tree Swallow (Tachycineta bicolor), peering from the entrance to a nest box, family Hirundinidae, found across most of North America

photograph by em_photography22

@please-give-me-birds

Awww shit yall know what it is

Welcome to Around the World Wednesday.

What predators see:

What humans see:

Mountain bluebird, Birdchick

Great eared nightjar

this is a dragon

How is it possible for an animal to resemble a bird, a mammal, and a reptile simultaneously?

Those ARE great ears.