Bird of the Week

Bird 104 – Common Cuckoo

When talking about avian parasites, there is one bird that demands attention above all others — the Common Cuckoo (Cuculus canorus)

We all know they lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, but did we also know this is called brood parasitism? Well … it is, and that’s why we’re here.

If I’m going to be honest, I can’t blame the Cuckoo. I mean, babies are a huge hassle, always demanding food, leeching off their parents, creating all sorts of fuss … and noise. Wouldn’t life be so much easier if you could just dump them on someone else so you could get on with the business of being a London socialite? I know what I’d do.

For some strange reason though, the Cuckoo’s favourite host, the Reed Warbler (Acrocephalus scirpaceus), is never keen on volunteering for the job, so you’ve got to trick them.

So here is the Cuckoo’s 3 step guide to offloading the kids.

Step 1: You need to scare the host parents away from their nest. To do this, the Cuckoo has evolved to closely resemble a Sparrow Hawk (Accipiter nisus). They have the same grey colour and barred breast. When a little Reed Warbler sees what it thinks is a Hawk it’ll momentarily flee its nest providing the Cuckoo with the chance it needs.

Step 2: Eat one of the host’s eggs, because, hey, why not?

Step 3: Lay your own egg in the nest. The whole process takes about ten seconds. Craftily, they’ve also evolved so their eggs look very similar to that of the host, making it hard for them to spot an alien. Then, you’re done and your baby is on its own.

But don’t worry, because once the blind baby Cuckoo hatches it picks right up where its mother left off. The first mission is to push any other eggs out of the nest. Have those eggs already hatched? No problem, push your foster brothers and sisters out as well.

Somehow the blind baby knows to eliminate the competition, and uses its back to force anything else that’s in the nest up and out.

After all that you’re on easy street, my friend. The baby Cuckoo has a great knack for sounding like an entire nest of babies, and its begging calls make the host parents super motivated to feed it up. Within 14 days the chick is generally bigger than its hosts, and it kinda makes you wonder if they ever notice their baby is a monstrosity…?

After that the Cuckoo moves out and starts going about its Cuckoo life, trying to pick up work in the clock industry.

It does raise one interesting question though. How does the Cuckoo know it’s a Cuckoo, even though it was raised by other birds? Why doesn’t it think it’s a Reed Warbler? Such are the mysteries of the bird world.

24/11/2019

Bird 103 – Rusty Flowerpiercer

So let’s begin our exploration of parasitic birds with this little cutey.

They’re a fairly unassuming bird that lives in the tropical jungles of South America, alongside out friends the Hummingbirds. But whereas our happy chap the Sword-billed Hummingbird lives in a mutualistic relationship with their flowers, this fine fellow does not.

Take note of the sharp down turned tip at the end of its bill. This is its weapon of choice when it comes to feeding, and is the attribute which gives it its name: the Rusty Flowerpiercer (Diglossa sittoides). (Also its rusty underbelly…)

Much like the Hummingbird, the Flowerpiercer has a powerful hankering for nectar. But it watched what the Hummingbirds had to go through to get it, and didn’t like what it saw. It’s a lot of flapping … seems like a lot of work, you know, and the whole having to constantly eat or you die of starvation thing … that’s a whole hassle.

So the Flowerpiercer came up with a different strategy: grow a pointy break that can break the base of the flower and you can drink all the nectar you want without the trouble of doing crazy acrobatics in the air, or growing a needlessly long bill.

And the Flowerpiercer does pretty well for itself, thank you very much. It can just perch at the base of a flower, tap a keg, drink its fill and move on. Of course, this is what makes it a parasite. It’s getting a free feed from the flower, without providing anything in return. In fact, the flower is really worse off, because not only does it not get its pollen picked up, but it loses the one thing that attracts other animals that can do the job.

The Flowerpiercer is the leech of the bird world, freeloading off flowers, while the Hummingbirds do all the real work.

God, I respect that.

17/11/2019

Bird 102 – Sword-billed Hummingbird

To take us through to the end of the year I’d like to do something a little different. For a couple of months now I’ve been intrigued by parasitic birds. When you think of birds, “parasite” may not be the first thing that comes to mind, but they’re out there, let me tell you. So for the next 7 weeks I’d like to take you on a little tour of a rarely visited corner of the bird world.

But, before we begin we should understand what the opposite of a parasite is. This would be a mutualistic relationship, one where two species rely on and benefit from each other. And there is no better (or extreme) example than this week’s bird, the Sword-billed Hummingbird (Ensifera ensifera)

Image result for sword billed hummingbird

Take a gander at that god dang nose.

This is straight up, one of the most outrageous birds there is. Before even seeing them, they’re readily identifiable in the wild by the distinctive calls of ‘en garde’ they make when challenging other birds to duels, so they may lay claim to the prettiest flowers.
It has the longest beak as a ratio to body size. By extension, they also have the longest tongue of any bird.

Having such a ridiculous bill naturally has it’s draw backs. For starters, whenever they perch they have to hold their bill angled up to keep it from causing too much strain on their necks. And they also can’t preen themselves with their bills, so instead they’ve learnt to do the job with their feet.

Image result for sword billed hummingbird preening

But of course, you can’t talk about the Sword-billed Hummingbird, without talking about the flower they feed on, the Passiflora mixta. These two co-evolved together, the flower has a very long corolla (I call it a flower tube), and our little long-nosed friend is the only bird with a bill big enough to reach the sweet sweet nectar at the base. In exchange for its meal, when it feeds the Hummingbird picks up pollen and spreads it to the next flower it visits.

Thus we have our mutalistic relationship, the bird get a meal, and that’s how flowers do sex … everyone’s a winner.

But there’s a dark twist. You see, many Hummingbirds pollinate many types of flowers in this fashion. But those other flowers with shorter tubes take a risk. Because there’s a chance that after feeding on their nectar a Hummingbird may visit a different type of flower and thus waste the pollen. So, the Passiflora has evolve in such a way to guarantee that only one bird can feed off it, thus ensuring all of its pollen will always go to the right place. In a way, it has tricked our Hummingbird to evolve into the freak that it is and has trapped it in a position where it can only feed on one flower.

Call it what you will, that flower is diabolical.

10/11/2019

Bird 101 – Stresemann’s Bristlefront

Today I felt like it was time to introduce you to what may well be the rarest bird on Earth, Stresemann’s Bristlefront (Merulaxis stresemanni)

Image result for stresemann's bristlefront

They’re a sweet little long-tailed, ground dwelling bird. The males are all grey, while the females have a splash of cinnamon on their under side. They make their home in the Amazon Rainforest. You may remember that pesky place, it’s just so damned flammable these days, it’s like you turn around for one second and, boom, it’s on fire again.

Stresemann’s Bristlefront is so named because of a little tuft of feathers it has on the front of its face (and also presumably for some chap named Stresemann).

The Bristlefront is famous for being one of the most illusive birds. It was only discovered in the 1960s and then promptly vanished until 1995. In that time people thought it had actually gone extinct, but no no, it was just hiding. The 1995 survey only found 15 birds, and since then their numbers have only dwindled further.

Almost nothing is known about them, because no one has ever had a good chance to study them. In 2018 an extensive search was carried out of the one place in Brazil where they were known to live, and just a single female was found. From then until October this year none were sighted, until again they found a single female, which researchers suspect is the same bird.

It’s now believed that she is the last of her species. Something which is technically known as an Endling.

This one is particularly sad. It is unlike some other famously rare birds, like Spix’s Macaw (Cyanopsitta spixii) or the Guam Kingfisher (Todiramphus cinnamominus), where we have small captive breeding populations of them. There is still hope they could be saved. For Stresemann’s Bristlefront, the game is already over. There are no others. She’s still out there, alone, for now, but there can be no coming back for this species.

She’s already lost to us.

To end on a more lighthearted note, the Guardian’s Bird of the Year competition is back on, so make sure you get in and vote for your favourite bird. If you’d like to make a symbolic gesture against Adani, the Black-throated Finch (Poephila cincta) is currently doing very well in the polls.

But of course, Bird of the Week neither endorses nor recognises the Guardian’s arrogant assertion to proclaim a bird for this year, or any other year for that matter. There is only one bird of the year, and that’s the bird this publication will announce on December 31, as is tradition. So make sure you tune in for that not to be missed New Year’s Eve event.

03/11/2019

Bird of the Week 100

Guys! We did it — Bird of the Week 100. I thought for a long time about what bird would be worthy for such a milestone, but in the end I decided to do something a little different. For about a year now I’ve been working on my own version of a Bird Field Guide; think one of these emails just at novel length. Those who know me well will be aware that about 50% of my writing projects die a sad death without ever seeing the light of day. So no promises it ever gets finished. Until then though, I present a little taster: the Introduction of Dr Finger’s Bird Field Guide.

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In the opening scene of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), Dr Alan Grant terrorises a child who dares to question the prowess of the Velociraptor — “That’s not very scary, more like a six-foot Turkey”. Okay, couple of things, kid. Ain’t no one allowed to talk smack to Sam Neil; and second, Turkeys are freaking terrifying*. Grant plays it cool though, and explains that while they are similar to birds, they’re also total bad-asses. “Velociraptor doesn’t bother to bite your jugular like a lion. No, no. It slashes at you with a six-inch retractable claw, slashing you […] across the belly, spilling your intestines out. The point is, you are alive when they begin to eat you.”

It’s a good reminder that birds are basically dinosaurs that learnt how to fly, and they would totally murder you in your sleep if they had half a chance.

Of course, what with movies being what they are, certain liberties were taken to make the Velociraptor more cinematic. In actuality, the Velociraptor is more like a six-foot … ah, rather 1.5-foot Turkey. Although they were heavily feathered, they couldn’t fly, so it probably spent a lot of time darting about the forest floors, eating whatever happened to fit down its gullet. So pretty much a prehistoric Chicken.

But while the Velociraptor didn’t quite live long enough to make it to today, their ancestors did, and what with an extra couple of million years’ worth of evolution they’ve developed into a range of fascinating, beautiful and sometimes hilarious creatures. Join me, as we wade (flap?) into the wacky world of birds to discover just what these fine-feathered folks are all about.

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What comes next? Probably some nonsense about birds or something. I’ll let you know if I ever finish it. In the meantime, the birds will continue to fly every week as they have without fail for the last 100. It has been my pleasure to bring you the birds, and I would like to thank you all for continuing to indulge me in this silly journey.

Until our birds next bird again, I wish you good bird.

27/10/2019

Bird 99 – Jacobin Pigeon

Today, before we hit 100, I wanted to offer a slightly longer edition of your weekly bird, if you’ll indulge me? But what am I saying, you don’t have a choice.

Now, you may have noticed I have a bit of thing for Pigeons. Those gross skyrats that crap everywhere. I must say, they don’t have a great reputation.

Image result for poorly drawn lines pigeon

The comic makes a important point … they do get a bad rap. I could tell you many things about Pigeons, because they have been entwined in the human story for a long time. I could tell you how their homing ability made them excellent messengers; I could tell you about B. F. Skinner and how he used Pigeons to study learning, positive re-enforcement and gambling addition; I could tell you about how some Pigeons were awarded medals for gallantry during the First and Second World Wars; I could tell you how the US navy even trained Pigeons to find people lost at sea. I could tell you all those stories, and one day I will. But today, I want to tell you the story of this pigeon:

World birds on Twitter: "Fancy Jacobin Pigeon #painting #art… "

The Jacobin Pigeon (Columba livia)

Truly, this is an outlandish bird dripping with flare and drama. The Jacobin Pigeon is characterised by a large hood and mane which flares out from its neck and over its head. They are one breed of a wider group of pigeons collectively known as Fancy Pigeons (see Bird of the Week 24).

Image result for jacobin pigeon — He’s a fancy boy.

Why are they called that? Because Pigeon be fancy, yo. And there are many, many Fancy Pigeons, some of which are truly bizarre to behold. Pigeons like the English Pouter, which I feel shouldn’t exist.

Image result for english pouter pigeon — What’s wrong with your neck?

It’s just not right…

And just as all dogs are descended from wolves, so too are all Fancy Pigeons descended from, and indeed, genetically the same species, as the Common Rock Dove – aka the skyrat.

bird, birds, city pigeon, dove, doves and pigeons, plumage, street ...

No one knows where the Jacobin Pigeon came from. Some accounts say India, some say Cyprus. The only thing we know for sure is that they arrived in Europe during the 1600s and they’ve been with us ever since. The name, ‘Jacobin’ was given to the bird, not because of their tendency to ferment insurrection in revolutionary France, but because people found their feathery hoods reminiscent of the garb warn by Jacobin monks.

For me though, the story of the Jacobin is less about the bird, than it is about us. There are few things that better capture the essence of humanity than the Jacobin Pigeon. If there is one consistent thing about people, it’s our desire to bend the natural world to our will. Couple of hundred years ago, a group of people were probably sitting around and someone said, “you know what would make this Pigeon cool? If it was, like, wearing a really fancy coat, you know.”

There was no reason to do it, it didn’t make the Pigeon better or more useful. In fact, it made them decidedly less useful, as its hood cuts out a lot of its vision making the bird disinclined to fly as they tend to run into things.

But we did it anyway, because we thought it looked nice, and because we could. And to be fair, they do look rather nice.

But it’s the same story everywhere. Grass was fairly plain, until we turned it into corn. Wolves were fierce, until we made it so you could fit one in your bag. Banana seeds were annoying, until we got rid of them, now every banana you eat is a clone because they literally can’t sexually reproduce anymore (it’s actually a huge problem, there is no genetic diversity among bananas). And even today, new technologies like CRISPR are giving us ever greater powers to edit and modify genes and change life like never before.

Some of what we have done has been positive, some has been negative and some is really neither here nor there. But fundamentally, ironically, nothing about our nature has changed. A thousand years ago, we were working on making a Pigeon fancy, just ’cause. And today, well, maybe we can edit a mosquito’s genome so it can’t carry malaria. How we change life now might be different, faster, but we’re still basically doing the same thing.

For me, the Jacobin Pigeon is a reminder of that human nature: of our desire to change things, sometimes just because we wanna. We just can’t leave nature alone. After all, we are now living in the Anthropocene, a geological period defined by humanity’s ability to alter the world. The trick for us now is to learn how to make changes that will be for the best. For our little Pigeon though, as far as changes go, making it fancy probably hasn’t impacted the world all that much.

But my word, they are fabulous.

20/10/2019

Bird 98 – Common Poorwill

This week I thought we’d take a look at one of the real curios of the bird world.

Did you know, in medieval Europe there was an long debate about whether birds hibernated or migrated during the winter? There was even a theory that Swallows hibernated on the bottom of frozen lakes. The below image from Sweden in the 16th Century shows fishermen pulling up Swallows from the bottom of a frozen lake (so I guess they’d be Swallowmen?)

Of course, today we know that without exception there is no bird that hibernates. That is except for the one exception, and this week’s bird, the Common Poorwill (Phalaenoptilus muttallii)

These little guys belong to the order Caprimulgiformes, which is the same Order Tawny Frogmouths belong to (as a bird you may be familiar with).

The Poorwill is native to North America, and during the winter months, when food gets scares and the temperature drops, rather than migrate like their fellow feathered friends, they bed down and go into an extended torpor, which can last for weeks to months. In this state their metabolism goes to about zero, their heart all but stop and they hardly breath.

You’ll notice their mottled feathers. Well, to keep safe while sleeping away the season, they just curl up in a pile of rocks on the ground and let their camouflage hide them.

Common Poorwill Identification, All About Birds, Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Native Indians have a name for them, Holchko, which translates to ‘the sleeping one’.

Image result for common poorwill hibernation

Order Caprimulgiformes actually has a few fascinating birds. Subscribers who have been with me for a long time may recall the Oilbird (Bird of the Week 22), which are able to navigate through caves by using echolocation like bats.

There are just so many marvels in the bird world.

13/10/2019

Bird 97 – Blue-footed Booby

Bird of the Week has never been above smutty humour, and sometimes birds have names that are unavoidably sex jokes. We’ve had some real pearlers: the Cock-of-the-Rock (23), the Blue Tit (43) and Abbott’s Booby (69).

Each one more sexy than the last. Well, this week the Boobs are back, but we have a very special one indeed: it’s the Blue-footed Booby (Sula nebouxii)

This is a very aptly named bird, for I’m sure you’ve noticed their most distinguishing feature … it’s their feet … they’ve got really blue feet.

And their feet are indeed quite amazing. For starters, they’re one of the few animals that use a blue pigment to produce a blue colour (most animals use nanostructures to cancel out other wavelengths and produce a blue. As a result, blue pigment is one of the rarest pigments in nature). The pigment comes from carotenoids from their diet. These carotenoids actually stimulate the Booby’s immune system. Which means the bluer a Booby’s feet the healthier it tends to be.

Unsurprisingly, mates select each other based on how blue their feet are, and during courtship both males and females do dances specially to show off their feet. I would describe the dance as being like someone who has just bought a pair of snowshoes that they’re super pleased about them. It’s quite cute.

Their courtship dances really are the best. Sometimes they even synchronise.

So when a Booby’s got blue feet, you know it’s a good one. Unless it’s a Red-footed Booby (Sula sula) … their feet aren’t supposed to be like that at all…

But that’s a bird for another week.

06/10/2019

Bird 96 – King of Saxony Bird-of-Paradise

I haven’t featured a Bird-of-Paradise since Bird of the Week 04. That seems like a terrible oversight on my part, so let’s rectify it with one of the most extraordinary: the King of Saxony Bird-of-Paradise (Pteridophora alberti)*

Image result for king of saxony bird of paradise

Birds-of-Paradise always have something strange going on, and I’m sure you don’t need me to point out that these little guys have a pair of super modified feathers, usually called head wires.

The feathers are so altered that they’re hardly feathers at all. Looking at them close up, they’re more like reflective plastic tabs.

Image result for king of saxony bird of paradise head wire

They can even grow twice as long as the bird. Kinda like they’ve got a pair of antennae up there. They actually have a bit of control over the feathers. They can make them stand upright, flush them over their wings, or even flare them out in front of their body. They can also control each one independently.

Like most Birds-of-Paradise, these feathers have no practical use outside of mating rituals. (Unless you count ‘getting some’ a practical use.) During breeding season, males take up a position high in the canopy, puff out their chests, sing a song (often described as sounded like radio static, probably because the antennae can’t pick up a station in the middle of the jungle), and swing their big old head wires around.

If the ladies like what they see, and let me tell you, they like their head wires long, shiny and gaudy (but hey, who doesn’t?), then they’ll get on with the businesses of sexually selecting for this truly ridiculous, yet utterly fabulous trait.

Image result for king of saxony bird of paradise sharpe

King of Saxony Bird-of-Paradise: so stupid, yet so beautiful; so unnecessary, yet so necessary. I love it.

29/09/2019

*Interestingly, many Birds-of-Paradise are named after European royalty. In the 1800s ornithologists got obsessed with trying to discover new species, but it was super expensive to fund a trip to New Guinea, so to get financing they would promise royal patrons to name any new discoveries after them. The King of Saxony Bird-of-Paradise is named after King Albert I of Saxony (1828-1902). His wife, Carola of Vasa, also has a bird named for her, Queen Carola’s Parotia (Parotia carolae)

But that’s a little historical side note for you, and a bird for another week.

Bird 95 – Black Vulture

On January 17 this year, one of America’s greatest poets, Mary Oliver, died. I’ve never been someone who spent a lot of time reading poetry, but Oliver’s insights into life, nature, death, the crossroads where humanity meets them, and how we often fail to recognise our own connection to the natural world, never failed to touch me.

Oliver loved birds, so many of her poems featured them. So today, we have a poem from her that captures many of the themes she dealt with. And our bird for this week: the Black Vulture (Coragyps atratus)

Vultures

Like large dark
lazy
butterflies they sweep over
the glades looking
for death,

to make it vanish,
to make of it the miracle:
resurrection. No one
knows how many
they are who daily
minister so to the grassy
miles, no one
counts how many bodies
they discover
and descend to, demonstrating
each time the earth’s
appetite, the unending
waterfalls of change.

No one,
moreover,
wants to ponder it,
how it will be
to feel the blood cool,
shapeliness dissolve.
Locked into
the blaze of our own bodies
we watch them
wheeling and drifting, we
honor them and we
loathe them,

300 Vultures Circling Stock Photos, Pictures & Royalty-Free Images - iStock

however wise the doctrine,
however magnificent the cycles,
however ultimately sweet
the huddle of death to fuel
those powerful wings.

On an unrelated note, I’m sure many of you would have heard the news this week that since 1970 there’s been a 30% reduction in North American bird populations. That’s something like 3 billion birds, gone. This is quite distressing, but there are things we can all do.

Help bring birds back.

22/09/2019