Aviary (birds birds)

Originally posted by a deleted user

---

Since Schazer and Sadgi seem to live in places where exotic birds are so common as to be unavoidable whenever a camera goes off, as if some secret guys with pulleys and cages are effortedly dumping birds at/around them whenever they are trying to take pictures of animal-free landscape (afterward they say, "aww man this is ruined, there are now birds in the pic"), I thought I would make a thread for bird pictures.  Everyone can join in. I cannot take fancy bird pictures but I can post fat mourning doves a thousand times.

Show Content

Spoiler 

who is this bird


it's the FAT BIRD, the MOURNING DOVE



they're fat because they like to eat





it has a food storage area in their neck called a crop and it takes a lot of food in at once, storing some in the crop then when they fly off and perch and bob their heads they digest what they have stored



sometimes


it looks like a kiwi bird



now play us away with some mourny-coo organ blUEEEEEEEEES

cooodlYcooodlYcooodlYCO^OOO_OOOOO^OOOOOO_OOOOOOO^OOO

I've posted this before elsewhere but here again: a tufted titmouse. They take a single seed, fly off with it to a branch, and hammer down on it to crack open the sweetmeats and then repeat

My next post in this thread will contain: more birds. different birds.


everybody post birds

Yaaaaay birds

below are all the things I saw on Tiritiri Matangi Island. Tiri is a predator-free island sanctuary, onto which endangered birds have been introduced. Some of these (the seabirds, mostly) are self-introduced, but that is a minor quibble for a thread like this.


Black-backed Gull.


Stitchbird!


Tui!


Takahe. Super-endangered. Super-fluffy when chick.


Variable Oystercatchers. The gull above was harassing them from an escarpment, threatening to snatch the chick if they didn't keep up shrieky vigilance.


Saddleback.

ooh i took a geology field trip

ok so those layers look like a sedimentary rock, probably some sort of sandstone made under the sea? at one point an earthquake thrusted them out of the ground to make like a cliff, and then erosion wore them down to their cool shape. what's really crazy is that the layers are nearly perpendicular to the ground, so like, at some point they must have turned that way. maybe at one point this rock fell off of a bigger rock? i'm not really sure

I'm no geologist myself, but here's what I can tentatively tell you after lumbering about the internet. GNS tells me the island's rock is Jurassic era; I can't figure out the key exactly so can't get better details than that.

Tiritiri is an island not far off the coast, which sports Miocene origins (more recent than the outcropping island!) and the region as a whole is a volcanic field. Earthquakes might've pushed it out of the sea, but I'm not 100% on that.

I'm inclined to agree with Nopad - it does strongly resemble a sandstone of some description. The weird splintering and fractioning is a geological process, exacerbated by weathering (it's exposed at low tide and covered at high).

I need a better picture, but this isn't a "cliff". It's more like a low and tiny spit off an island. I'm uploading one now which might give a better idea.

E: Found one! The picture links to the image on flickr (caution: 2040 px wide)

The outcropping in question is right behind the wharf in this picture. This was taken earlier in the day and the tide was "low but on the way in again". The beach to the left of the outcropping was getting covered with water by the late afternoon when we made our way back round again.


Detailpic of the stuff when you're standing on top of it (bloody glad I took this now):

Maybe a volcano like pushed stuff out around it

I fucking love birds. Stop talking about rocks go get a rock thread you rocklovers.
My area mostly just has city birds like pigeons and sparrows and starlings. They're greedy as hell, but I carry around bird seed in emptied tic-tac boxes for them anyway.

birds?

birds.


baby magpie


kookaburra


galah


rainbow lorikeet


I hope you enjoyed birds.

Tiri is really really great. I visit there every time I'm in Auckland since my aunt volunteers there, and once my family stayed overnight and went looking for kiwis :>

During this time their most well-known takahe Greg (who has sadly since passed away) tried to eat my shoelaces.

I have no photos to offer, i am sorry :<

MAKE WAY FOR THE MIGHTY PELICAN

That's the mightiest pelican I ever did see.

You know what's funny? In Brisbane you don't see sparrows too much. Just rather injured pigeons (I've seen pigeons with only one foot before). I think the pigeons chased away all the sparrows ><

I like sparrows.

MAKE WAY FOR THE MIGHTY PELICAN

I love that nonchalant walk.

Birds that big scare me, or at least they make me feel very uneasy. I don't know why.

MAKE WAY FOR THE MIGHTY PELICAN

I love that nonchalant walk.

Birds that big scare me, or at least they make me feel very uneasy. I don't know why.

Probably because they are basically velociraptors.

I tested my camera's video-taking abilities

We don't get to see red-winged blackbirds in this area too often (although we get to hear their neato calls pretty frequently), so I grabbed the cheap camera because it was closer. This dubious image is the best I could get before it left.

Show Content

Spoiler

Sadgi if you can get it to focus right your camera looks like it can take some GORGEOUS video. More please.

Also, I'm pretty sure someone promised ONE THOUSAND fat morning dove pictures. I see ten.

Took this shot out my window just now. Dumb blizzard making all the birds cold. They're not fancy birds, but still.

Show Content

Spoiler

hi-ho hi-ho its off to work we go

awwww look at that red one

If I had such a bird, I would teach it to recite poetry or something worthwhile like that.
I would not teach it to say that it is birds that it is not. That is silly and foolish.

A+ post, would perch upon again

Sexual dimorphism is actually really interesting! It stems from the fact that to be biologically successful, an animal has to survive, but more importantly it has to reproduce. Living to a respectable twenty-five years or whatever won't help a passerine shit if a weird quirk of his assorted glands means he constantly smells like cats.


The other force at play is the uneven effort put in by males and females to produce offspring, which even starts at the sperm-and-egg level (eggs are basically a pre-packaged somatic cell with all the apparatus necessary (mitochondria, endoplasmic reticula, nuclear envelope, probably some other junk), other than missing half the DNA. Sperm, by comparison, are a torpedo with a data packet strapped to the front rather than explosives, which is why males can constantly produce new sperm and a female enters adulthood with all the eggs she's ever gonna have packed away in her ovaries.

At a higher level, females have to gather food and nourish the offspring while they develop, and in many cases will continue to do so after the offspring are born. (You could always have better-developed babies so they can fend for their own damn selves, but a female will have to invest more resources in the gestational stage to do so). Males might be evolutionarily predisposed to help, but that's not a given across the animal kingdom. The net result of all this is that in most (vertebrate) cases (but also in a lot of other ones), females are the choosier sex.

If females make the ultimate decision about whose sperm (and constituent genetic code) they pass on into the next generation, then clearly they're looking for good genes, because why waste your time raising substandard stock, right? Seeing as there is no easy pee-and-see test for "good genes" or "bad genes", raunchy redpolls will have to use other cues to figure out who is the damn finest of them all. Visual cues are used as an index of both "good traits that help you survive", but also "a good appearance that'll give the kids similar reproductive success".

This interplay between choosing for survivability and baby-making capacity is what causes things like male peafowl tails! The tail has no bloody use to help the peacock camouflage or not get caught in nasty places, but if his kids look as good as he does he's perceived to produce more offspring over his lifespan (the live fast, die young strategy). The alternative hypothesis is that a big stupid tail or conspicuous colouring demonstrates your good genes that help you survive despite the extra pressure. The above reason is why symmetry is sexy - asymmetry is caused by external forces (parasites, injury, disease) and maintaining your symmetry in the face of all this indicates strong genes to fight parasites/disease.

I am learning things about birds and it's fun.

I don't get to see a lot of fancy birds here, i bet there are some around the mountains but i never go anywhere near them. There's a bunch of pigeons and those super common house finches though.

This poor dumb baby flew into our sliding glass window and bonked herself silly a while back. Luckily she was fine about fifteen minutes later, but I briefly held the coveted Birdfriend title.

A couple weeks later we found a bird of the same species trapped in one of our bird feeders. She'd somehow gotten the little hatch you have to lift to pour in the food up, but couldn't figure out how to get back out when it closed behind her.

Aw poor birdie it must have panicked.

On my way to work I've seen some interesting birds in a small park I walk past by every day and every time I'm like "oh birdies maybe I should take a picture or something... Eh". I saw some small crows, some smallish dove like birds that we call tortolitas and I've never found their English name except for the scientific one and one time I saw an interesting blue chested crow like bird it was pretty neat.
Next time I'm gonna posts some pictures instead of just writing about them.