These guys are dropped dead gorgeous, with their multicoloured feathers and little tail-streamers. As the name suggests, Bee-eaters do indeed eat bees. Most birds don’t go after bees, because they are A) hard to catch and B) have a tendency to string things. Bee-eater don’t care. Not only are they immune to bee stings, but they also take the added precaution of rubbing the stinger off on a branch before they eat them.
In a surprise twist, Bee-eaters are also borrowing birds. They make their nests underground. The females do the excavation, while the males keep watch and bring food. They deliberately make their borrows tight and snug, so tight that when they enter and exist their bodies press up against the side of the tunnel and act like a piston, forcing out old stale air and letting fresh air in.
For my fellow Canberrans, I’ve got some good news, Bee-eaters are one of our local birds and there are a couple of places along the Murrumbidgee River up near Coree and down past Tharwa where you can spot them hangout on the highwire, hunting prey. Friend of the Bird, Jade Donney, was kind enough to share a pic of our local residents, and you can see more of her wildlife photography here.
But for my money, the best thing these birds do is huddle.
Seven rainbow bee-eaters in a row. by Gary Meredith
Sometimes the look like a great big green caterpillar when they do it, and it’s pretty fab.
We all know cats are the polar opposite of birds. It’s a well-known fact, cats and birds are like chalk and cheese. So, have you ever asked yourself what would happen if you merged them together? Would they just annihilate each other in a blinding flash of light, like an electron and a positron? Quite possibly. But in my opinion, the more likely scenario is that you would get the Whiskered Auklet (Aethia pygmaea).
I’m going to throw it out there, I love Auks. It’s a shock twist, right. Those of the family Alicidae. And I love them because they’re kinda freaks. One day I’ll do a proper deep dive; but an Auk is what you get if you had a Seagull that wanted to be a Penguin, but then changed its mind mid-transformation. Auks like diving and chasing their meals underwater. And so, they evolved to be great little swimmers, with their wings adapting to do the job of flippers. Unlike penguins though, Auks wanted to stay airborne. What you end up with is a half-way house, where their wings changed to facilitate the life aquatic, while hanging on to the bare minimum needed to get into the air. As a result, they have super stubby wings, and they have to flap them very quickly to get off the ground.
This is true of our little whiskered friend. But it has the added bonus of being an extra weirdo with those fine feline facial features. Now, these little guys live up in the way northern Pacific between Alaska and Russia. As such, almost nothing is known about them. They live on isolated rocky outcrops and no-one has gone out to do much research, because it’s a bugger out of the way.
The only thing we do know, is that just like a cat, they use their whiskers as an extra sensory organ to help find their way in and out of their borrows and rocky hidey-holes in the dark.
But is that enough? What else do these moustachioed marvels get up to? Are they working for the Russians or the Americans? Or did they go halfway between those two as well? Are they the avian Switzerland of the Northern Pacific? Until we do more research on their political leanings, I’m not sure we can trust them. Let’s face it, they’re one moustache twirl away from being a cartoon villain. Unless that’s just their cover…? So many unanswered questions.
Who are you Whiskered Auklet? With your crazy beady eyes.
Today I’ve got one of the cutes little birds that ever did live, and it’s got an adorable name to boot: the Short-tailed Pygmy Tyrant (Myironis ecaudatus).
These birds are aptly named, for not only do they have almost no tail to speak of, but they are also one of the smallest birds in existence. Fully grown they are just 6.5cm long and weigh around 4.2g, which is within a rounding error of nothing. Here’s one sitting on a hand so you can get an idea of how hard it is for them to buy good fitting gloves.
The only birds that are smaller are the super tiny Hummingbirds, so yeah, they’re itsy-bitsy.
Although they’re quite a distinctive bird, in the field people frequently mistake them for beetles, both because of their size and their unusual way of flying. To make up for their diminutiveness they make disproportionally large nests that hang from trees, so you know … they’ve got ambitions.
by Laura Erickson
Now, that’s all good and well, but there is one thing that bothers me about this bird. Why is the tiniest, cutest bird you ever did see called a Tyrant? Because let’s be honest, I don’t see this bird lording over anything. Or are they just jerks to dragonflies? Do they say hurtful things to them? Hey buddy, you look like a fly someone tried to suck through a straw.
People who have been with me for a while may recall that this isn’t the first time I’ve come across a Tyrant and idly wondered what the bird had done to earn that name. Well, this time I have gone on a mission and I have found the answer. So, if you too are curious about just how tyrannical this family of birds is then I invite you to join me on a journey here.
Every now and again I come across a bird that raises questions. For example, the Jamaican Mango (Anthracothorax mango). This cute, little Hummingbird is native to Jamaica, as the name suggests.
But then … there’s that second half of its name: mango. What’s up with that? Well, you might think to yourself, it probably has something to do with mangoes. So, you do a little googling and discover mangoes aren’t native to Jamaica. You dig deeper and learn they weren’t even introduced to the island until after the bird was officially named. And suddenly, right there, my friend, you’ve got a mystery on your hands.
Now, I’m not here to talk about the Jamaican Mango. I solved that riddle some time ago and you can find the answer here. No, the mystery I want to talk about begins with a different bird, the Many-colored Rush Tyrant (Tachuris rubrigastra).
It has one hell of a name, and it is one hell of a cutie. And really, its name says it all: they have many colours, they live in rushes, and they’re … tyrants?
Hmm… Nothing about them is really indicative of a tyrant. They’re a South American bird, they live mainly in marshlands and build adorable little mud-nests that attach to the reeds and rushes.
I guess, they do have intense, really arched eyebrows which suggests a shifty nature, but surely that ain’t it.
And so, with questions aplenty, I set out in search of answers.
Anyone who has read my previous essay on how birds are named will know that generally a bird’s last name will point to the larger family group it belongs to. In this case, the patterns holds. Our many-coloured friend belongs to a family of birds known as Tyrannidae, or more colloquially, the Tyrant Flycatchers.
Now, this family is massive. In fact, it is the single largest family of birds, with well over 400 individual species. So that means, there are all sorts of tyrants kicking around. You’ve got the Great Shrike-tyrant, the Short-tailed Pygmy Tyrant, the Streamer-tailed Tyrant; hell, I’ve even previously featured the Cattle Tyrant as a Bird of the Week.
Each one more diabolical than the last.
There’s even one known as the Yellow Tyrannulet… I’m sorry, Tyrannulet? Is that like a little baby tyrant? I love it.
So okay, our bird is called a tyrant because it belongs to this family. But that just kicks the question up another level and now the problem is even bigger. Now we have hundreds of birds known as tyrants and they’re all tiny and cute. In fact, you can go another step up the taxonomic tree and there you find the suborder Tyranni. Now, we are talking about over 1000 birds that belong under the umbrella of this broad family. Why? Why is this a thing? I couldn’t for the life of me find the answer anywhere.
Usually, it’s quite straight forward to see why birds have the names they do. Take for example the family Oriolidae. That’s an odd word, right. But it derives from the Latin ‘aureoles’, which means golden. And lo and behold, if we look into this family we find some really golden birds. Mystery solved. (They’re also a key player in the Jamaican Mango riddle as well.)
A Golden Oriole, doing what its name suggests.
We have a similar situation here. Tyrannidae comes from the Latin, Tyrannus, meaning tyrant. But still … why are these birds tyrannical? Like … are they just jerks to other birds? Do they see a Tyrant Flycatcher heading their way and think, great there goes the neighbourhood, it’s time to move before they subjugate us to their will? I mean … maybe?
Because usually, it makes sense, right. The animal we naturally think of when we hear the word tyrant is the Tyrannosaurus Rex. They are (were?) the tyrant-lizard king. We’ve all seen Jurassic Park, they terrorise everything that crosses their path. Name earned.
Feel my terror
Funnily enough, as theropod dinosaurs, they are distant cousins to birds. Sadly, T-rex’s linage didn’t lead directly to birds, though. You can tell, because the T-rex famously only has two digits on its forelimb, whereas modern birds have three. Birds are more closely related to the Allosaurs or Velociraptors, their fellow three-fingered brethren. But I seem to have strayed from my point…
Here you can see the three digits pointed out. Bet you never thought of a bird as having fingers.
By this stage I was defeated. I had googled everything I could think to google, I had read every page I could find on the Tyrant Flycatchers, and nowhere did anyone at any point say why that family had the name it did.
But maybe it was time to pause and approach the problem from a different angle. I said this group of birds belongs to the suborder Tyranni. What happens if we move one more step up the taxonomic tree? Here we finally hit something different. We reach the order Passeriformes. Within the world of birds there are about 40 or so different orders. Pigeons belong to the order Columbiformes, Ducks to the order Anseriformes, Chickens to the order Galliformes and so on and so on. Now, the Passerines are far and away the biggest order of birds. Half of all birds belong to this huge group. Crows, Magpies, Butcherbirds, Honeyeaters, Warblers, Wrens, Tits, Finches, and yes, even Tyrant Flycatchers … we’re talking over 6000 birds here.
Guys, that’s a lot of birds.
To try and organise this mess, they are split into two groups. On one side we have our mystery birds, the Tyranni, and on the other we have the Passeri. These two groups do differ from each other. Passeri are colloquially known as song birds. They have specially developed vocal organs that allow them to make the sweet twittering sounds we associate with birds. The Tyranni don’t have this and they kinda just squawk. So I guess we could ask the same question: why are song birds known as Passeri, and does that word even mean anything?
Well, if we descend the taxonomic tree we find the family Passeridae and if we go down another step we find the genus Passer. And so … where does that get us? What bird has the high honour of being the representative of the largest group of birds? Who is the standard bearer for over 6000 diverse, beautiful and unique species? It’s the House Sparrow (Passer domesticus).
Hello, I am a common Sparrow, the representative bird for over 6000 species for reasons that are too obvious and numerous to point out.
And indeed, the word ‘sparrow’ translates directly into the Latin passer. And so Passeriformes means, that which has the shape of a Sparrow.
So … that got me thinking. Does that mean, out there somewhere, there’s a bird whose Latin name has somehow gotten attached to this broad group and now they’re all known as tyrants? And if so, is that bird tyrannical?
If we go back to our family Tyrannidae we will find that there are over 100 genera of birds in this single family. But after going through each in turn, I found one known simply as Tyrannus. In theory, our representative bird should be in that genus somewhere.
Following the trail, I discovered that this smaller group of birds are known as Kingbirds. Ah-ha, here the penny dropped. Maybe I had been thinking of the word in the wrong way. Did they mean tyrant as a type of leader…? A king if you will. There are 13 birds in this genus and one of them, the Easter Kingbird, has the taxonomic name, Tyrannus tyrannus. So here, we have found, finally, the bird responsible for this whole family’s name. And here it is:
I’m not going to lie, on first glance it’s a little disappointing. We have a rather plain looking flycatcher. Why would this bird be known as a king? Well, it has a secret feature. Although it may look plain, it does in fact have a crown. It’s just hidden. When the Easter Kingbird becomes excited it can flare apart the feathers on top of its head to reveal a brilliant red or orange crown.
It’s a really odd feature and I can’t think of another bird that has something similar. But do you know what else is amazing? These birds, these little, pint-sized birds are major jerks. Yes! That’s right, they actually have a tyrannical nature. I have never been so happy to find out an animal is a dick in all my life.
Eastern Kingbirds are highly territorial and they will attack pretty much anything that comes anywhere near them. Crows, Hawks, Herons, anything. Even Squirrels, why not, take them down, too. They don’t care how big or mean it is, they are going to attack it, and chase it out of their land because no-one messes with an Eastern Kingbird.
Yeah, get that Hawk!!
They have been known to dive-bomb unsuspecting Blue Jays and knock them off branches, flashing their bright head flare all the while just to make sure everyone knows who’s boss.
That Bald Eagle is going after a fish. You’re too small to even eat a fish. Eastern Kingbird don’t care.
So there’s the answer as to why so many little birds are known as tyrants. They just happen to be related to this massive jerk. All hail the king!
Is that an anticlimax…? I think it’s a fun bird. Shut your face.
Okay, I know why you to come to Bird of the Week. It’s to see bland, boring birds. Well, this week we are delivering. Meet the Fieldfare (Turdus pilaris).
This rather unremarkable bird is from Europe. They are migratory and hang out in family groups where they help each other raise and protect their young. They live a quiet bird life, putting in their hours at the office, trying to bring in enough grub to keep the kids quiet, and saving for that overseas holiday.
And that’s the Fieldfare. Catch you all again next week.
Wait a second, what am I say? You come here for hard core birds getting up to zany antics. Well, the Fieldfare is all that with a helping of Caesar salad on the side. Ideally, they would like to live the quiet life, but when you’re a small bird danger lurks around every corner. Your life is basically like being in Jurassic Park. There’s always a bigger, meaner bird who wants to eat you, or your babies.
This is where there’s safety in numbers. With a large family working together, they always have extra eyes on the lookout for potential threats. While one bird could never take down a predator, all together they can. If a Raven comes knocking, hoping to dine out on their young, the whole family will mob it. They start up a screeching racket, flying at it from every direction, until it is overwhelmed and cowed into submission.
But this isn’t what makes the Fieldfare unique. They have one special trick up their sleeve. Or rather, up their butt. As they swoop and chase their enemy, they will also poop all over it. Literal divebombs. And they have scary accurate aim as well.
I don’t have a good picture, but you can see it in this short video narrated by David Attenborough.
Now, if I’m getting pooped on, I’m probably going to get out of that situation, asap. But as gross as it is, for birds it comes with an added risk. The Fieldfare can shoot enough poop with such accuracy and at such volume that they can completely saturate their target’s feathers, even to the point of preventing them from flying. For a bird, this could have lethal consequences. So … you know, it’s a pretty effective deterrent.
Today let’s meet a favourite of the Australian bush: the Powerful Owl (Ninox strenua). These big birds are Australia’s largest owl, but they’re also one of the least owl-like looking owls getting around. With their long body and small head, they don’t exactly cut an owly figure. These features make them look a lot more hawk-like, but don’t let that fool you, these beauties are all owl.
They frequent the bushland of Australia’s east coast. Their favourite prey are possums, brushtail and ringtail, and with urban creep bringing these animals closer to our homes, the Powerful Owl is itself sometimes spotted in the suburbs. They like to hide high in the shade of a tree during the day, often still clutching their kill from the previous night.
You think your hangovers are bad, that possum had a rough night.
They nest in big old hollows and usually have two babies. The Powerful Owl baby is like a white fluffy little furby. They’re kinda cute … in a freaky sort of way.
Although they don’t much look like a traditional owl, they do have one thing going for them that most other owls don’t. They are the only owl in Australia that makes the classic ‘who who’ call. So, if you’re out wondering around, alone, in the bush, in the dead of night and you hear someone say ‘who’, it’s probably the Powerful Owl… Either that or you’re about to have a really unpleasant run-in with some creep in the bush. But in their defence, that would be your fault for wondering around in the bush, alone, in the dead of night. Who does that? Who indeed…
Silly possum, don’t wonder around, alone, in the bush, in the dead of the night. That’s how you end up murdered.
Way back in 2017, when Bird of the Week was just a fledgling gag email, we received our first ever request. Someone asked for North Korea’s national bird. But because I’m incredibly changeable, I decided the bird that really need to be featured was Kiribati’s national bird. But never let it be said that we don’t get around to fulfilling requests, so Hugh, this one goes out to you.
Perhaps ironically, North Korea, that famous hermit state, has selected one of the most cosmopolitan birds in the northern hemisphere to be its standard bearer: the Northern Goshawk (Accipiter gentilis) … found pretty much everywhere across northern Europe, Asia and America.
But to be fair to glorious leader, it is a handsome bird that projects power and majesty. It’s also great at killing stuff, which seems like an added bonus for a bomb-toting megalomaniac.
Take that America!
Now, the best Korea isn’t the only nation that noticed our fine friend. If you were to skip over to the Azores and take a gander at their flag you would find the Northern Goshawk again.
Which is strange, because although they are spread all over the world, the Azores is one of the few places where they just don’t live… The word Azores actually comes from the Portuguese açor, meaning Goshawk. It turned out they had misidentified the Common Buzzard, but by the time the mistake was picked up it was too late to change, so they just doubled down and went for it. “Goshawk… what, yeah totally, we meant to do it.”
Azores imposter on the left
The word Goshawk comes from the Old English for Goose Hawk and these bids were a great favourite during medieval times for falconry, hence their Latin name gentilis: they were a bird for the gentry. Now, there’s a whole history around falconry, but we’ll leave that as a story for another time.
So to finish up we’ll leave you with a picture of the Goshawk doing its thing.
What’s this? A bird on a Tuesday, have the gods gone mad? Well, as long-time subscribers may know, it is Australia Day, and that means we need to take a moment to acknowledge New Zealand’s Bird of the Year. And this year they selected the Kakapo (Strigops habroptilus).
Now, this is a little break in tradition, because we have previously featured the Kakapo as Bird of the Week 18, and we all know how loathed I am to repeat a bird that isn’t the Common Pigeon. But you know what, the Kakapo is the only bird to have won New Zealand’s Bird of the Year twice (the first time was in 2008), so I guess everything is fair.
The Kakapo is an amazing bird. It is the world’s heaviest parrot, it is the world’s only flightless parrot, and it is one of only two nocturnal parrots (the other is the Australian Night Parrot). On top of which, they are one of the rarest birds in the world. This of course has a lot to do with the fact that they’re flightless. You see, New Zealand is a land resplendent with flightless birds. This is because until Europeans turned up there were no mammals on the islands, so the birds didn’t have to worry about predators, so many of them kinda gave up on flying. I mean, to be fair flying is hard work, you try it.
Note its stubby wings and zygodactyl feet.
Sadly, though, when your survival strategy is ‘looking like a boulder covered in moss’, it isn’t really effective against things like cats and weasels. Especially when you have a scent that is sometimes described as being like an old violin case… Apparently, it’s a unique musk. The cats found them, the cats ate them, and now they only live on three tiny islands that are still predator free.
Pay no attention to the ball of moss.
It also doesn’t help matters that the Kakapo has an unusual breeding schedule. They only mate every two to seven years, and they try to line it up for when the local trees have a bonanza of berries on offer. At certain intervals, the trees have boom years where they put out a lot of fruit (these are called masting events) and the Kakapos only breed then. Presumably because there is a ton of food to help bring up baby.
The males also have an odd mating ritual. They will gather together, clear out the forest floor, make a ditch and then sit there all night making booming noises to attract the ladies. We’ve all been there.
It must be working though, because although their number are still very low at 209, this is rather an increase from 2014 when there were only 126. New Zealand takes caring for these big old parrots very seriously and I have every faith their future is in good hands.
So, from all of us here, I wish you a very grand New Zealand bird appreciation day.
This week we’ll be taking a sneaky peak at a bird from a family I’ve never featured before, the Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias), once again an unacceptable oversight on my part. But in my defence, there are a lot of birds.
Like all large, wading birds, Herons have a kind of elegance to them. Which is surprising for something so seemingly long and gangly. They spend their days, quietly walking the shallows, looking for fish and any other such thing that they might spear. Their head streamers and neck tassels give them a little extra ornamentation, and they would make a fine addition to any water hole.
And when I said they spear things, I wasn’t kidding. They’re a stabby-stabby bird. I mean, fish are slippery customers, so if you can get it on a skewer, all the better.
Now, this is also the last week that I’ll be introducing you to an odd bird-related word. And our word for today is ‘pectinate’. To be fair, this word isn’t exactly bird specific, but it is a fun one. Pectinate is a broad zoological term usually applied to teeth that are serrated. But what’s that you say? Birds don’t have teeth? Stoutly observed, my friend. But they do have claws, and Herons have something called a pectinate claw.
Looks a little bit like a comb. And that’s actually our best guess for what they use it for: grooming. It’s believed they use these serrated claws to help keep their feathers neat and to rake out mites and other parasites that they can’t reach with their beaks. But the feature is really odd among birds, it pops up in a variety of families, including nightjars, owls, frigatebirds, terns, grebes, and cormorants, but not in any consistent way (even among individual birds of the same species) so ornithologists aren’t sure if it offers a strong evolutionary advantage, but nevertheless, there it is: pectinate. From the Latin ‘pectinatus’, something which resembles a comb.
Today I have a rather handsome boy for you, the Eurasian Golden Oriole (Oriolus oriolus).
These are little migratory birds that winter in South Africa and summer in Europe. The word ‘oriole’ derives from the Latin aureolus, meaning golden. So, technically they’re the Golden Golden. Given their taxonomic name is Oriolus oriolus, I guess someone really wanted us to know they’re golden.
And to be fair, they are pretty golden. The females are less distinctive, having more of a green tinge. Nevertheless, they’re quite shy birds and despite their bright colours are famously difficult to spot as they hide high in the upper canopy.
The Golden Oriole did, however, help us better understand migratory behaviour in birds. For a long time, the concept that birds migrated at all was controversial. People knew they disappeared during winter, but there was no agreement on if they were hibernating or migrating. It wasn’t until the 1700s that the consensus shifted to migration.
In part, this was thanks to the work of German ornithologist, Johann Andreas Naumann. He kept a small number of Golden Orioles in an aviary and noticed that in July they would becoming increasingly agitated and restless. They would fly back and forth within their cage of an evening and continued to do this night after night until November. Then, when March rolled around the next year, they would do it all again.
Based on this restlessness, Johann believed the birds were displaying an urge to migrate. Given how long this restlessness lasted, he speculated that wherever it was they wanted to go, it must have been a long way away. He predicted Africa and today, we know that to be true.
Here we see their summer and winter ranges.
The word he used to describe this restless urge to migrate was ‘zugunruhe’. Today, it is still the term ornithologists use. Of course, many questions remained: how did they know it was time to migrate; how did they know where to go; if you put a bird on a plane and flew it to its destination would it still display zugunruhe? The story of how we learned about migratory behaviour is a long and fascinating one, and maybe one day I’ll get around to telling it. But for now, you only need to know one thing:
Zugunruhe: from the German ‘zug’ to move, and ‘unruhe’ restless anxiety. And that is our fun word for the week … zugunruhe.
Bird of the Week 