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Green-rumped Parrotlets: from egg to adult Text and photographs copyright Nick Sly (except Rae Okawa where indicated) and are used with his permission. You don’t really know a bird until you’ve studied it on its breeding grounds. I present here an annotated collection of photos documenting the entry of new parrotlets into this world.
The early threats of guano harvesting and eggcollecting have been replaced by the more ominous threats of oil pollution and overfishing of their favorite food source – pilchards. On the mainland they face predation from domestic cats, dogs, genets, mongoose and Cape Gulls which steal their chicks and eggs.
Preparing for the perfect landing Brakes on, landing gear down The Gannets are present at Bempton from the end of February through to October, for their breeding season is an exceptionally long one. There were typically four teams of Climmers at Bempton, with each team taking 300-400 eggs a day.
Perhaps the most curious thing about the Great Spotted Cuckoo is its distribution, for it is both a non-breeding Palearctic migrant to Africa, and a trans-Africa migrant. According to The Birds of Africa Volume III , “In much of the tropics present throughout the year, with breeding and non-breeding birds usually indistinguishable”.
It is listed as vulnerable, though its rather rigorous treatment of the second, smaller chick in a clutch (it starves to death within 1 week, rarely a month, according to the HBW) offers the potential for collecting second-hatched chicks for reintroduction programs. When breeding, the female finds a cavity in a tree and seals the entrance.
With populations plunging dramatically over the last decade, researchers from the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, Birds Russia, and a number of other conservation organizations made the always-controversial call to pluck eggs from the imperiled wild population and establish a captive breeding program as a final hedge against extinction.
En route they will be “birding in nearly every country in mainland North and South America,” and, as they say on their excellent blog , “Our journey is about collecting valuable data on bird species, their status and distribution, current conservation issues, and more along the way.
Egg harvesting to sell as food was intensive then, with thousands taken annually from the breeding colonies in Chile. Eggcollection for local consumption still continues at lower scale. The initial decline in the Andean Flamingo’s population appears to have started as early as the mid 20th Century.
It has been a few years since I could share some good news about the Pied Oystercatchers breeding along the coast near Broome. Hopefully you won’t mind me writing a bit more this year about Pied Oystercatchers during the breeding season! The two eggs normally hatch at least a day apart and sometimes longer.
Heermann’s Gulls form large breeding colonies on arid islands in the Gulf of California, Mexico, from March through July. The largest colony exists on Isla Raza, where an estimated 90–95% of the total world population breeds 1. This photo by Basar from Wikipedia Commons shows the adult in breeding plumage.
After 28 days of sharing the duty of sitting on three eggs we finally had the arrival of our first Pied Oystercatcher chicks for 2012 on Friday August 3rd. It is unusual for three eggs to be laid here in Broome and many eggs do not even hatch due to predation each season.
However, the lockdown forces me to go deeper and deeper into my photo collection, if I want to write anything at all. Contrary to alleged preferences among humans, the golden-headed cisticola has a shorter tail during the breeding season ( source ). It breeds in tree holes, presumably explaining the more commonly used name for it.
The breeding ecology of the Yellow-bellied Warbler was actually studied exactly here at Nonggang in 2019 by 3 Chinese researchers. Some Thai researchers looked at the breeding ecology of the Buff-breasted Babbler and published their findings in the somewhat unsuitable-sounding journal “Agriculture and Natural Resources”.
Each year 120,000 birds visit the island to breed from March through August in burrows that riddle the landscape. After mating, a single egg is laid and incubation duties are shared by both parents. If you liked this post, why not check out the large and growing collection of galleries at 10,000 Clicks.
Also from BirdLife International: In general it prefers areas where vegetation, boulders or other landscape features at ground level provide tunnels in which to shelter and to breed. So desirable was it, however, to find out what this flightless rail was like that he left collecting material with the late Rev.
As a Northeast birder I am familiar with the alarming decrease in the number of Red Knots along Atlantic shores and have signed petitions and written e-mails calling for legislation and rules that will limit the overharvesting of the horseshoe crab, whose eggs Red Knots depend on. million in the late 1990’s. Should the gulls be controlled?
In the non-breeding season, male Baya Weavers sometimes enter the basket-making trade, often with considerable success. Meanwhile, the females seem to have a much more relaxing life, at least in this early stage of the breeding season. You can see why here.
Image by Adam Riley Of the 115 African species now listed as Endangered or Critically Endangered, nearly half occur on the islands surrounding Africa or are non-breeding migrants to Africa. In this blogpost I will discuss ten of the 60 endangered species that are resident on the African continent.
Oil begins to wash up on the beaches throughout May and June of 2010 May 6, 2010 Oil washes ashore on the Chandeleur Islands off the Louisiana coast, an important nesting and breeding area for many bird species. The babies that hatched from these eggs were released on Florida’s east coast.
Do not buy these books, unless you are collecting old bird books. Even during the breeding season the birds appear to be quite unwary of humans. Robin Restall is principal author of the two-volume Birds of Northern South America and was executive director of the Phelps Ornithological Collection, Caracas, Venezuela.
She also monitors Pied Oystercatchers breeding along a 23km stretch of beach by bicycle and on foot. Speaking of pregnant snakes, do sea snakes lay their eggs ashore like sea turtles or do they keep them internally until the young are ready to hatch/ be born, like some sharks? It seems like there is great diversity in this continent.
She explains complex and sometimes controversial topics including captive breeding, environmental toxins, feral cats and other invasive predators, Hawaiian avian extinction, avian disease, California Condor distribution and history, legal loopholes, and lead poisoning.
The clifftop habitats along rocky shores of the North Atlantic (on both sides of the pond) abound in bird biomass during breeding bouts, for instance. There are probably other major trends that depend, for example, on latitude and timing. When Albatross alight in temporal alignment anything else is swamped out.
The Achiever’s survey voyages took place from 2005 to 2008; the goal was to collect baseline data on sea mammals and marine birds. The species was seemingly killed off by feather hunters, but then, after years, reappeared at the site of one of the deserted breeding colonies, Torishima Island in Japan.
A breeding bird atlas is a special kind of book. For the nature lovers and birders who participate in breeding bird surveys, the atlas represents hours, often hundreds of hours, of volunteer time spent within a community of citizen scientists doing what they love, observing birds. So, what exactly does a breeding bird atlas contain?
Third, observing and photographing breeding birds and their young have become acts of ethical confusion as birders, photographers, and organizational representatives debate the impact of our human presence on the nesting process. And of eggs and nests and birds on nests. Cedar Waxwings exchange berries, carry nesting material, eggs.
The photographs are from VIREO, the ornithological image collection associated with the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, which licenses bird photographs to many guides and reference books. Plate 28 from Audubon Bird Guide, Eastern Land Birds, by Richard H. These are all informative and current.
The European Breeding Bird Atlas 2 makes interesting reading. Originally confined to the Arctic, breeding [of Barnacle Geese] is now confirmed throughout much of the Baltic coast S North Sea. A pair did lay infertile eggs in Iceland in 2018, but that’s about the only record I can find).
The vast majority of the 10,000+ living species of birds are passerines, and the vast majority of those have a similar system of breeding: Mom and dad bird make a nest and share parental responsibilities roughly equally, if not identically. …because cooperative breeding facilitates defense against brood parasites.
It didn’t occur to me till I started reading The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird that there was also a possible threat to the eagle herself: poachers, who steal raptor eggs and chicks. McWilliam realizes he’s dealing someone special, a career falcon egg-thief.
In Grey-backed Shrikes (at least those breeding on the Tibetan plateau), the eggs laid during one breeding attempt get larger with time – presumably an attempt to at least partly overcome the disadvantages the last chick faces ( source ). malayana had been collected. hardwickii and C.
It covers 63 odonate species: 44 breeding species (19 damselfly, 25 dragonfly), and, in a second part of the Species Accounts, 19 vagrant, potential vagrant and former breeding species (5 damselfly, 14 dragonfly). Sections on Behaviour, Breeding Habitat, and Population and Conservation offer brief but specific information.
Peripatetic ornithologist Nick Sly has long been a friend of the blog here and has contributed such classics as Green-rumped Parrotlets from Egg to Adult and Forpus passerinus and the Ornithologists of Masaguaral. Juncos breed in much of the U.S. Please read and then vote for either Nick or Maria’s research!
Once the egg has been laid, the female is chased away and the males hatch it.” A juvenile, if I am correct – and a rather rare bird in Shanghai, this being rather at the southern end of the wintering breeding range. Another swan – a Whooper Swan – showed up near Fengxian. So will the Red-flanked Bluetail.
Mt Bruce, since you ask, is the Department of Conservation’s premier endangered bird breeding centre. Long-finned Eels swam in the rivers, and in their pens the breeding Blue Ducks where whistling away. So much so that only 5% of chicks that hatch reach adulthood, which is a terrifyingly low number for such a slow breeding bird.
Even the first explorers to Australia documented there was a risk of extinction of birds and animals into the future and subsequently decided to collect as many specimens as possible! The population decline is generally blamed on habitat destruction and introduced predators, but inter-breeding may also be to blame.
When not climbing, he collected species, and thus a number of birds are named after him. The Borneo-endemic Chestnut-crested Yuhina is a cooperative breeder – the vast majority of breeding pairs (97%) in a study conducted here at Mount Kinabalu had helpers. That might help these species deal with climate change.
Mechanisation (ploughing and harvesting in particular), chemical fertilisers and pesticides, fire and predation all contribute to high mortality of eggs, chicks, juveniles and incubating females. In the last year, a broken bustard eggshell was found, but since no displaying was observed, those could have been unfertilized eggs.
Each male builds numerous nests, most of which are rejected by the female, who will eventually select a nest she is happy with, allow the proud architect who usually hangs under his masterpiece to mate with her and then begins the breeding process. Red-headed Malimbe is the most widespread species in the genus.
Most of the breeding birds returning here will arrive within the next 10 days to two weeks. Breeding is well underway and everywhere you look the Glaucous Gulls are, ahem, engaged or collecting grasses and sedges for nests. We are on the cusp of a massive influx of migrants. Well, massive being relative to where I am.
The guide covers 747 breeding residents or regular migrants, 29 introduced species, and 160 vagrants, a total of 936 species. Only one species of penguin breeds on the Australian mainland; five additional species breed on sub-Antarctic islands.
The adult Pied Oystercatchers were still at their non-breeding site at Gantheaume Point and will no doubt lay their first eggs for 2015 in the first week of July. In fact one pair has collected mud from recent rains and they have built a nest on the bottom of the ladder of the pylon in the car-park! Magpie-lark nest on a ladder!
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