Aviary (birds birds)

Smarter than the average bird.

More kakapics:



Not the same one.

here are some birds from my cousin's house in canberra

what's this guy hanging around outside every day

Lots of birds today!

Okay, a few. A few birds today.

Common ones.

Shut up.

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First up is a golden-crowned sparrow. He was very wary of me through the whole shoot.

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SpoilerThen there's an evening grosbeak!



"Quit takin' pictures of me."

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"I mean it. Get outta here!"

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"... Fuckin' kids."

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American finch party! This gaudy fellow gets alllll (both) the fine ladies.

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These juvenile males on the other hand are finding the club a disappointing cloacafest.

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Just a starling, but I thought it was a funny picture. Where's the face certificate, Obirda?

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Get out of here, Cassin's finch! This is grosbeak territory.

Interesting to note: evening grosbeaks show strong sexual dimorphism, so all of the ones I saw today were male. This is unusual, since they usually travel everywhere in mated male-female pairs. Has society's decay brought us so low that even the birds are living in sin? Write your congressman today.

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SpoilerBut enough of that. I've long felt that this thread is too exclusionary. Why only focus on half the story? This thread has plenty of birds, so now it needs some...



Bees!

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Beeees!

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Bees covered in pollen!

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Bees may not be the wisteria's preferred pollinator, but that just means they have to work harder.

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Go home, bee, you're drunk.

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This is a yellow-and-black bug on a flower, so it's a bee. QEB.

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SpoilerSpeaking of, here's the wisteria that appears in a couple of these pictures.



It's a pretty reasonable plant.

Bees! <3

so yeah this has turned from an aviary to an apiary

any objections? Keeping in mind Schazer has a very sharp stabbing implement right over there.

On behalf of the sanctity of the sacred aviary thread, I object!
I challenge all heretics and blasphemers to a duel
of drop.notch.net!

WINNER TAKES THREAD.

Gnauga shouldn't we be going on duelingnetwork.com for this

the theme is Winged-beast type monsters

but Schazer gets to use insects

mostly because she reminds me of this

also my computer won't let me download Unity web player so i can't go on drop.notch.net :/

I cannot say I approve of this chicanery (chick-aviary? Chickenry?), considering you're going up against a registered seagull, apiarist, and a lady whose name literally means "bird". We will crush you with an iron wing and an indomitable exoskeleton is what I'm saying.

I suggest ducking out of this while you've stilt got a chance.

Ah yes, seeds.

My mother wanted some deulkkae in our garden and took pains to obtain the plant. Specifically, she wanted the seeds. Now, the leaves are nice, too, but we can only go through so many; they have a fairly strong taste and personally I am not so fond of them. These plants have a pretty decent seed yield (with such a low germination rate, they kind of need it).

The problem with cultivating this plant in northern Virginia, it seems, is that birds will not leave any seeds for you. The day they were ready for harvest is the day they were eaten.

I don’t know if Mom and Dad will try this little experiment again this year, but if they do, they really ought to have a camera ready, because photos are all they’ll get out of it.

Yeah I just repeat my jokes a lot

A bee came by and startled my AP chem class while we were playing VSEPR Hold 'Em.

So there's a Blackbird with a knackered wing in our back garden. I saw it this morning milling around the place then it sorta hopped off into the neighbors garden. I thought nothing of it at the time but skip 7 hours forward to the now and it's still here. Apparently it was also hanging around yesterday, the 'rents say it's a regular user of our birdbath (though to be honest I question their ability to recognize it as the same bird). I'm a little worried about it considering there's like eleventy billion cats living around here, including our own.

Birds birds birds

I went to Travis Wetlands (again) with obliging gentleman friend; remembered to take my camera this time. (incredihuge images under spoilers yo)

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Scaups are my favourite kind of duck. They dive and forage on the river/pond/swampbed! I was making frustrated noises for over twenty minutes trying to video them diving.

Little Shags/Little Pied Cormorants. Their plumage is quite variable, but you can always tell a shag by the way it rests with its wings outstretched as if it's airing them out.


Waxeyes aren't swamp birds, but the replanting around the wetlands features lots of cabbage trees. I saw a couple of flocks of these feeding on whatever fruit/seeds they could still scrounge in midwinter.


Probably my best photo I took that day. Pukekos/purple swamphens are a pretty common sight around Christchurch; they forage on grass so they were one of a handful of species that actively benefited from European settlement.


You look that sucker in the (sadly not-as-well-photographed) face and tell it its grandfather wasn't a dinosaur.

We went to the beach afterward! By which I mean we went to the pier because neither of us really wanted to trek a whole lot of sand everywhere for the rest of the day. For some reason I took, like, forty photos of the two types of gull that frequent the area.









Red-billed gulls are the smaller seabird. Southern black-backed gulls (aka Kelp Gulls, Domincan Gulls, or Karoro) look positively majestic by comparison, which is probably in part because they don't squabble over discarded food.





These two obliged me slowly inching towards them for ten minutes or so. I could hear a girl behind me asking her mother what kind of bird that was - I really should've clarified that it wasn't an albatross and I'm the kind to be easily fixated by otherwise-mundane things, but I had a photographic golden hour to be making the most of.


Burd feet


Uncomfortably close for everyone involved. The bright red spot on the underside is to encourage nestlings to tap it, invoking a regurgitatory reflex in the parent. Fish dinners!

yayyyy schazer i love all your pictures~

oh my goshhh you can see clean through both nostrils on the last one

So it turns out alpine swifts don’t actually need to touch down too often during migration.

This post leaves out the best part of killdeer:

The Delicious Dance

Why do they call it a killdeer, anyways? Is there a particular reason for it? Is it the sound they make, is there some story about them being involved in deer deaths, or what?

Plovers are total assholes and divebomb the shit out of everything here. They're a pest because they chase away hawks, which keep other pest populations in check around crops!

There used to be a flock of them behind my dad's house, and they would get into turf wars with the black backed seagull flock. It was interesting to watch.

[The killdeer] is named onomatopoeically after its call.

I am rubber
You are glue
Whatever curse there is will bounce off me and stick to you

hello birdthread I haven't been here in a while

here are some photos I took when I was home during the easter break

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also here's a video

A birdie



A ladybird



Former First Lady "Lady Bird" Johnson

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A birdie



A ladybird



Former First Lady "Lady Bird" Johnson

KWALITEE
FOTTOSHUP