Bird of the Week

Bird 94 – Lake Duck

Today we’re covering the one subject I know you’ve all wanted, but no one has been brave enough to ask for. That’s right, we’re going to talk about bird penises.

Funnily enough, the subject of bird penises doesn’t come up very often, mostly because birds don’t tend to have them. About 97% of birds are penisless. But when they do have one … wooowee, you better strap yourself in. Fun fact, a bird actually holds the world record for longest penis by ratio to body size. And which bird lays claim to that auspicious title?

Why, it’s the humble Lake Duck (Oxyura vittata) of Argentina.

Just how big can that penis get? 42.5cm is the official record (actually longer than the bird itself). And not only that, they’re also a crazy corkscrew shape.

Pretty insane, right! So, what’s going on here?

Well, these Ducks don’t have great mating practices. I don’t want to say the male Ducks rape the females (because I don’t think animals can make that distinction in their behaviour like we can) … but I also don’t know another way to put it.

Essentially, male and female Lack Ducks are in an evolutionary arms race with each other. So, the males are very sexually aggressive, and will try to forcibly mate with the females. The lady Ducks don’t like that, so they evolved complicated corkscrew-shaped vaginas to stop it. They even have dead ends in them. In response, the males grew their penises to match. This process has delightfully been termed ‘antagonistic coevolution’. But here’s the kicker: the females actually twist their organ in the opposite direction to the males. Because of this … ‘strange geometry’ … it mostly means mating will only result in successful insemination if the female is a willing participant.

So, in this gender battle the lady Ducks have managed to get one over on their jerk partners.

Good stuff, you lady Ducks.

15/09/2019

Bird 93 – Amazonian Royal Flycatcher

So I know last week was a bit heavy, so this week lets dial it back with a bird that is just a little bit of fun. And to do that we’re dipping into true royalty with the Amazonian Royal Flycatcher (Omychorhynchus coronatus)

Without a doubt this is a bird that wears the crown.

Image result for amazonian royal flycatcher

Bird of the Week is about a lot of things. But sometimes, just sometimes, the only thing it’s about is looking at a pretty bird.

And this little jungle flycatcher is a pretty bird.

So let us admire it in the way it so justly deserves.

It’s actually hard to find pictures of them with their crest up in their natural environment, because they almost never do it when they’re just hanging out in the jungle. But when they’ve been caught and are held in the hand they pop them up straight away.

People aren’t sure why they do that… It could be a threat display, but they don’t do threat displays in nature, so it’s a little mystery.

08/09/2019

Bird 92 – Tristan Albatross

Today we have a break from our normally scheduled bird to bring you the Tristan Albatross (Dimedea dabbenena).

Tristan Albatrosses live on a small speck of land called Gough Island, in the middle of the Southern Atlantic Ocean. They were only recognised as a species distinct from the Wandering Albatross in 1998; they’re quite similar except for being a touch smaller. Nevertheless, they’re pretty impressive. They have a wing span of 3 metres, and can even drink sea water! How exactly they manage that will be a story for another time.

Childhood is a bit rough for them though. It takes 8-9 months for a chick to fledge, and they have to endure gale force winds racing over the island, not to mention up to 3 metres of rainfall every year. Unsurprisingly, not every chick makes it.

But life has been getting pretty shitty for the birds of Gough Island. Over a hundred years ago, sailors accidentally introduced the House Mouse to the island. You know the ones, tiny little fluffy things, wouldn’t hurt a fly.

For a long time they weren’t much of an issue, because during the harsh winters most of them would die off. But over the years natural selection has bred them bigger and hardier. These days they’re pretty butch, about twice the size of a normal mouse. And what with global warming making winters gentler, they’ve had something of a population boom.

But the real problem is that these mice have learnt a new trick. Each night, they climb onto the chicks and slowly, over a period of hours and days, will nibble into their flesh, break open a wound and feed off the live chick. The chicks will try to fend them away, but the mice are many and persistent, and eventually the chicks just get exhausted and are unable to knock them off. In the end, the mice gnaw right into the bird’s body cavity and completely kill them.

It’s estimated that each year the mice kill up to 2 million chicks on the island (they even attack adult birds). Some colonies simply won’t raise a single chick to adulthood. Without action it’s believed the Tristan Albatross, along with other birds like the Atlantic Petrel (Pterodroma incerta) and the Gough Finch (Rowettia goughensis), will be extinct within 20 years.

It’s a similar story to what happened on Guam, where among its many birds there were three that were unique to the island: the Guam Rail (Gallirallus owstoni), the Guam Kingfisher (Todiramphus cinnamominus) and the Guam Flycatcher (Myiagra freycineti). But when Brown Tree Snakes were introduced to the island they had no defences and were all wiped out. Now the Rail and the Kingfisher only exist in captivity and are two of the rarest birds in the world, and the Flycatcher is lost to us forever.

The birds of Gough Island could be about to go the same way. But here’s the good news — there are plans afoot to launch a mouse eradication program next year. They plan to do a mass bait drop, and as no other mammals live on the island, only the mice will be affected. But here’s the bad news: they still have a funding shortfall.

If you’ve got the time and a spare penny or two, please go to their site and give a bird a helping wing: https://www.goughisland.com/

For many years now, people have held a powerful position where we can choose to make space in this world for other animals to live, if we want. Often, though, through our carelessness we push them closer and closer to extinction. The birds of Gough Island are beautiful and important animals that deserve a safe place to live. We only have to choose, actively, to make it happen. And surely that’s something we want to do.

Image result for tristan albatross chick

Sorry for the longer than normal edition this week, but the Tristan Albatross needed space for its story to be told.

01/09/2019

Bird 91 – Many-colored Rush Tyrant

Over the months we’ve featured many birds who are nasty killers. Hawks that start bushfires, Seagulls that attack whales, Eagles that steal children, even Terror Birds.

But there is perhaps no more tyrannical bird than the Many-colored Rush Tyrant (Tachuris rubrigastra)

Image result for many-colored rush tyrant

‘Look upon mine many colours and tremble,’ sayeth the Tyrant.

It is a bird that rules the rushes with an iron wing. When a Tyrant invades all other creatures flee before it. Insects would rather splat on a windscreen than be subjected to the Tyrant’s will. Lizards burrow into the muddy earth and hibernate for years on end. All other birds scatter to the wind, migrating in hope of finding greener pastures free from subjugation. Frogs just tend to ignore them, they’re cool like that.

From merely looking at their fearsome form you can tell this is a bird that means business. Look at that determined eyebrow, so arched, so evil.

Photos - Many-colored Rush Tyrant - Tachuris rubrigastra - Birds of the World

In actuality, the reason this bird is called a Tyrant is because it belongs to the Family Tyrannidae, the single largest Family of birds within the huge Order Passeriformes (about half of all birds are Passeriformes). But then again, why this family of wee tiny little Flycatchers are collectively known as Tyrannidae, I have no idea. I guess the answer is, ‘language just be weird, yo’.

But always remember, there is a super cute, tiny bird called a Tyrant. And it probably hates you.

25/08/2019

Bird 90 – Emperor Penguin

So we come to Bird of the Week 90: the beginning of the march to 100. And let me tell you, I have some special birds lined up for the next ten weeks. What am I saying!? The birds are always special.

To kick off the march, though, what better bird than the one most famed for marching: the Emperor Penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri)

I’m just going to say it straight up, the life of an Emperor Penguin sucks, it sucks big time. In no small part because they’re the only animal that breeds in Antarctica during the winter.

To really wrap your head around how much of a bad time that is, I want you to imagine the following. Picture yourself in an elevator. Now, picture that elevator crammed to capacity, with everyone pressed up against you. You imagine there’s a power failure, the elevator is suck between floors and all the lights are out … for three months.

BBC - Earth - In the frigid Antarctic winter, emperor penguins get too hot

Now I should also mentioned that it’s negative 80 degrees in the elevator, and you have no food. Oh yeah, and everyone has a baby … that they’re balancing on their feet.

Image result for emperor penguin chick blizzard on feet

Now, if you can grasp that scenario, I think you’ll start to have an idea of how much it sucks to be an Emperor Penguin.

But is there an upside, I hear you ask. Well, you are an ace swimmer. If you look like an ungainly fool on land, under the water you’re basically a little torpedo zipping around having a grand old time. You can dive up to 500 metres deep and hold your breath for 18 minutes — not too shabby. (Just try not to get eaten by a seal.)

Emperor penguin smashes world record for longest dive in Antarctica | Daily Mail Online

Not good enough? You also get to toboggan on your stomach as a legitimate means of locomotion.

Image result for emperor penguin tobogganing

And I guess your babies are pretty cute, too.

18/08/2019

Bird 89 – Pigeon Guillemot

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you took a Pigeon and a Seagull and kinda just smooshed them together? No, neither had I. But if it’s one thing we do at Bird of the Week, it’s answer the questions that no one asks.

And boy oh boy, do I have an answer. It’s the Pigeon Guillemot (Cepphus columba)

Now, these guys belong to the Order Charadriiformes, the same as Seagulls, and are actually part of the Auk family, the same as Puffins. But they do bear a passing resemblance to our old friend the pigeon, and their Latin name ‘columba’ is a little nod to that (Columbiformes being the Order Pigeons belong to).

But today, I want to talk about their eggs. Because if you look at a Guillemot egg you’ll see it looks rather different to the normal chicken-type egg shape we’re used to.

So aside from being rather beautiful, they’re much more pointy. And the reason for this is because the Guillemot had to solve a problem. You see, they nest on narrow cliff ledges. As you can imagine, putting an egg on a narrow ledge above a hundred foot drop is probably not the safest thing you could do with your egg. What if it rolls away?

Image result for pigeon guillemot nest — I will put my egg here. Should be fine.

Well, the Guillemot solves this problem with a neat little trick of geometry. Whenever an object rolls, if one end has a more extreme ellipse than the other it will roll in a tighter circle. So if a Guillemot egg is knocked, it will actually curve away from the edge and be saved instead of rolling off like a Chicken’s egg would.

Of course, Chickens have solved the problem of how to stop their eggs from rolling off narrow cliff ledges by just not putting their eggs there in the first place. Once again showing there’s always more than one way to solve a problem.

Disclaimer: There are several competing theories about why their eggs are pointy. Some say it’s to do with how strong a flyer the bird is, others say it’s because a pointy egg shape is stronger. So there’s a good chance everything I said was a merry lie, but what a lie it was.

11/08/2019

Bird 88 – Common Eider

Ah with the winter season still upon us, we all look for ways to keep warm. And sometimes there’s nothing better than a bit of fluffy duck down.

But where does that duck down come from? Geese mostly. There are two ways to get down from a Goose. You can wait until it’s slaughtered for meat and then plucked, or you can live-pluck it. This is quite traumatic for the birds and leaves them bloodied and bruised. Thankfully, it’s illegal in most countries, and official reports state that only about 1% of down is sourced this way.

However, as anyone who knows anything about birds will tell you (and I’m about to), Geese that are killed for meat are killed when they’re about a year old, but Geese don’t develop quality down until they’re about 2 or 3 years old. So, there’s obviously a mismatch here, and some studies speculate that the true scale of live-plucking could be as high as 80%, with most of the world’s supply coming from China. But here’s the good news, there is one bird that voluntarily sheds its down every year. You don’t have to kill it, or pluck it.

That bird? The Common Eider (Somateria mollissima)

Common Eider Identification, All About Birds, Cornell Lab of ...

This is a large sea-duck that lives in the Arctic waters around Iceland. And every year, when they nest, they shed their down feathers to keep their eggs warm.

Since the 1600s people have been gathering up the down, and this is actually where the practice of using duck down for insulation originates from. Their Latin name (Somateria mollissima) even translates as ‘very soft body wool’.

It’s also one of the few example of people profiting from an animal without any harm whatsoever coming to the animal. People will wait until the chicks have fledged before gathering the down, or otherwise will replace the down with some other insulation to keep the eggs warm. Common Eiders also aren’t farmed or kept domestically, they’re a completely wild population. Although, these days people do build little shelters to protect their nesting sites from predators and assist with down collection.

Of course, it takes about 50-60 nests to produce one kilogram of feathers, which all has to be gathered and sorted by hand. Unsurprisingly, Eider down is super expensive and considered to be the highest grade of down available. A genuine, bonafide, certified Eider Down pillow will set you back about $5,000.

So maybe when buying some nice duck down products this year, the best option is to just go synthetic.

The birds will thank you.

04/08/2019

Bird 87 – Bald Eagle

Humans are funny creatures. Sometimes we’re drawn to particular ideas that have no physical presence in the world. Ideas like courage, loyalty, majesty, the love of nation. All things we can define, we can described, but we can’t physically grasp. Of course, this is why symbolism is so important. We pour those ideas into an image which then becomes the cultural shorthand to communicate the idea. And there is no bird more drenched in symbolism than this week’s bird.

The Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), the national bird of the United Stated of America.

Indeed, the bird has been Americanised to within an inch of its life.

The Bald Eagle became the US national emblem in 1782 when the official seal was adopted.

Since then all the virtues citizens of the US wish to associate with their nation have been imbued into this Eagle. Valour, courage, patriotism and the like. But of course, it is juts a bird, albeit, a particularly stunning bird.

But a bird none the less, with no ability to even conceive of the concepts foist upon it. And as no less a luminary than Benjamin Franklin pointed out, the Bald Eagle’s own nature does not necessarily align with those we created for it:

“I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country, he is a bird of bad moral character, he does not get his living honestly, you may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labor of the Fishing-hawk, and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him…. Besides he is a rank coward; the little Kingbird, not bigger than a Sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district.”

A lazy bully and a coward … well, maybe the Bald Eagle has become an apt emblem for America and its leaders after all.

But then again, lazy, dishonesty and cowardice are just other ideas not much different from the ones mentioned above. We should just let the Bald Eagle be a Bald Eagle, it seems to do a pretty alright job at that.

28/07/2019

Bird 86 – Swallow-tailed Gull

You know what, we had so much fun with that Seagull last week, let’s keep the good times rolling with another one.

The Swallow-tailed Gull (Creagrus furcatus)

Now this is an interesting Seagull. From the name you might suspect it has something fancy going on with its tail. And you would be right, for this Gull does indeed have a tail reminiscent of a Swallow’s.

“Swallow-tailed Gull in flight” by jonasflanken

But this is a rather unique Gull. For you see, it is the only fully nocturnal gull in the world.

Just check out those giant night peepers.

Ohhh they have peepers, let me tell you. Peepers for peeping.

With its deep onyx eyes, this Gull sees all. When it looks at you it sees the very essence of your soul; and it is not impressed.

It knows what you’ve done.

Anyway, no one is quite sure why they opted to switch to an all night time existence, but they seem to know what they’re about.

Another fun fact, when they’re not cursing the ocean under a full moon looking for prey and judging souls, they live on the Galapagos Islands. Which now makes it the third time we’ve feature a Galapagos Island bird without talking about Darwin’s Finches. When will those Finches get featured? I mean who can say, probably never.

There ain’t any Finches here, and there never was.

21/07/2019

Bird 85 – Bonaparte’s Gull

Ah, it’s that very special time of the year. Probably everyone’s favourite national holiday, that’s right, it’s July 14, Bastille Day. So let me introduce you to a particularly French bird that can also teach us something about the French Revolution.

Lets all meet Bonaparte’s Gull (Chroicocephalus philadelphia)

Almost exactly like its namesake, this little seagull hangs out in Metropolitan France, is famed for its tactical military ability, and introduced the Napoleonic Code to the avian legal system. Some of those things may not be true…

Bonaparte’s Gull doesn’t live in France, it lives in North America. What are you doing over there, little guy, that’s not where your namesake lived?

Well, it isn’t named after Napoleon. It’s actually named after Charles Lucien Bonaparte, who was quite a famous ornithologist – he discovered and named several species of birds, one of which, Wilson’s Bird of Paradise (Diphyllodes respublica), we featured waaaay back in Bird of the Week 04.

Image result for wilson's bird of paradise

Charles was the son of Lucien Bonaparte, who was a younger brother of Napoleon. During the time of the French Directory Lucien was the president of what was kinda the French Senate. Using his insider influence, Lucien helped Napoleon staged the coup of 18 Brumaire, (9 November 1799 — France was using its own wacky calendar at the time, just go with it) which brought Napoleon to power.

Lucien genuinely held republican sentiments, though, and wasn’t none too pleased with the way Napoleon fashioned himself as an Emperor, so the two didn’t really get along. His son, Charles, left all that empire building and politicking behind and went into the exciting enterprise of birds; and who can blame him? Although having said that, when he named Wilson’s Bird of Paradise, Diphyllodes respublica, that ‘respublica’ is a little nod to his belief that France should have been a republic, as well*. Anyway, his travels eventually took him to America, where he’s contribution to ornithology came to be honoured in the naming of said gull.

But that’s all by the bye. Bonaparte’s Gull is one of the smallest gulls getting around, but what makes it special is this fancy little hood it has. Because sometimes it has a hood, and sometimes it doesn’t.

It’s head feathers actually change colour depending on if it’s breeding season or not. When the time comes for mating both males and females gain the black hood. This is how you can tell if gulls are in the mood for love. Well … just this gull.

France!

14/07/2019

*Interesting side note. During the 1800s, there was a great fascination with the Birds-of-Paradise from Papua New Guinea. Ornithologists all wanted to be the first to discover a new species. But this was an expensive undertaking, so to fund their research many sought royal patronage. As a result, lots of the Birds-of-Paradise are named after royalty. Charles didn’t appreciate this either, so giving the name Respublica was him thumbing his nose at that practice as well.