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The lush pastures of the Aripo Livestock Station sustained herds of happy Buffalypso , a special breed of T&T beef cattle named for their Water Buffalo heritage and Calypso-happy country. Last but not least were not one but TWO new species of blackbird for me, both Yellow-hooded and Red-breasted ! In fact, it was.
But the way it is, familiarity breeds (relative) contempt. The Cattle Egret (or Eastern Cattle Egret , to be exact, but that would mess with my alphabetic order) can be seen in farmland around Shanghai. Instead of cattle, it nowadays often follows tractors ploughing the fields and thus stirring up small animals.
Striated Heron in breeding plumage – extra plumes and blue lores. The cows and their entourage of Cattle Egrets sloshed through the pastures, each time they moved we lurched forward hoping to see a disturbed Grey-breasted Crake hop into view – but alas, no such luck even though we were hearing the little skulkers consistently.
And then there are those startling bright red eyes, which distinguish them from all other blackbirds in my region, and make them look quite capable of peering into your soul and taking over your will. I’m not particularly proud of these photos. But all this changed with the arrival of Europeans, and their cattle.
Cattle Egrets have perfected that smudgy look. Breeding in Northern Japan and wintering in the Phillippines, some seem to take a migratory rest stop (and slight deviation) at the Shanghai coast. A juvenile Chinese Blackbird. ” This is probably an Eastern Crowned Warbler. But do we really care? ” Hm. .”
Ferruginous Hawks breed in the grasslands of eastern Montana, but they are rare in the mountains and in winter, so this bird was certainly a surprise. A vast congregation of Bald Eagles kept watch over a herd of cattle about to calve, up to seven in a single tree — no doubt awaiting delicious placentas.
Such programs are somewhat inefficient anyway – in one study , the breeding success of wild male pheasants was 2-5 times higher than for hand-reared and released ones while for females, hand-reared birds were 3 times as vulnerable to predation as the wild ones. Wait, the study was not done with people but with Eurasian Siskins.
Brewer’s Blackbirds often joined the hordes of Red-winged Blackbirds flitting in and out of the taller grasses and few shrubs. Since 1966, when the Breeding Bird Survey first began monitoring, numbers have declined 79 percent.
Although they breed on the west coast of Florida, Snowy Plover is a rare stray to this part of the state. Several species, all more or less annual winter visitors from the western United States, also made an appearance: Western Tanager, Brown-crested Flycatcher, Western Kingbird, Yellow-headed Blackbird, and Rufous/Allen’s Hummingbird.
In my homeland, some 800 km / 500 mi further north, these ducks are common on migration but very rare in the breeding season and I realized that these are my first young birds – ever. A few Lesser Kestrels by the dyke wall, then a Black-eared Wheatear at some cattle fencing. Eurasian Blackbird – Turdus merula 3.
. … Nest dismantling by the Hair-crested Drongo may be an adaptive behavior to increase fitness by reducing risk of future predation and competition for nest sites in the following breeding season” ( source ). When Cattle Egrets go to the local discotheque, they tend to overdo their makeup a bit. ” ( source ).
The fields near the Tiaozini mudflats look very much like a lunar landscape, but this does not seem to keep a number of species from breeding there, sometimes directly on dirt roads. But now back to birds … Little Ringed Plovers also seem to like to breed directly on the road. Blandness sells. Also available as a set of two.
These include Little Corellas , Red Wattlebirds , Little Wattlebirds , Common Mynas , Common Blackbirds , Galahs , Australian Magpies , Superb Fairy-wrens , Grey Fantails , Crimson Rosellas and Red-browed Finch. There had been quite a few Cattle Egrets in the area until recently and so it was good to see them for the first time in 2020.
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