Living World Photography

Photo Spotlight: Vidua macroura - Pin-tailed Whydah

Finally we reach the end of the bird families I have to show. The last is the family Viduidae, the Whydahs. This is another strictly Old World groups, and one of the coolest-looking birds we saw in Kenya. was the Pin-tailed Whydah, Vidua macroura. It's pretty easy to see where it go t it's name. The bird itself is only about the size of the sparrow, but it's enormous tail makes it look much bigger. I don't know much about this group unfortunately, other than it's a seed-eater.

I hope you've enjoyed this tour of birds, I think I'll do insects next.

Photo Spotlight: Lamprotornis superbus - Superb Starling

We're getting near the end of the series on birds, we've arrived at the Starlings, in the family Sturnidae. Yes, amazingly enough, this is in the same family of the ubiquitous and ugly European Starling - Sturnus vulgaris. In the tropical regions of the Old World, the starlings are among some of the most stunningly colored birds you'll find. This individual is called the Superb Starling - Lamprotornis superbus. The eye color is a good way to distinguish this from the extremely similar Hildebrandt's Starling - Lamprotornis hildebrandti.

In the US there is one species of Starling, the imported European Starling. This was and is perhaps the greatest bird-introduction incident in the history of the US. The European Starling was originally imported by a very eccentric gentleman who decided that all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare. While most of the species he imported floundered and died out, the European Starling did not. In fact, the small number that were imported were so phenomenally successful that the European Starling is one of the most numerous birds in the country, and that is a very bad thing.

The European Starling was successful because it is extremely adaptive and opportunistic. These birds nest in holes, and have set up in anything remotely resembling one, such as cavities in street lights and unfortunately in the nests and holes of native species. This has caused a large decline in a great many species of native birds, particularly birds like Woodpeckers. Alas, there numbers are far too great to ever remove them from there new home. When their nests are found, they are often removed, so every little bit helps. Hopefully our native fauna will learn to adapt to curtail this extremely successful invasive species.

Photo Spotlight: Nectarinia venusta - Variable Sunbird

Next up are the Sunbirds, in the family Nectariniidae. These fill the same ecological niche in the Old World as hummingbirds, nectaring on flowers. Unlike Hummingbirds, which are in the order Apodiformes, Sunbirds are in the order Passeriformes with the other songbirds. The Sunbirds have a wide distribution throughout the Old World and are very plentiful in Africa. The vast majority are fairly small, brightly iridescent and multicolored. They hall have a decurved bill with which to nectar with. The Variable Sunbird - Nectarinia venusta, comes in two distinct color morphs, the yellow color morph is shown here, the white color morph has white on its belly instead of yellow.

Photo Spotlight: Macronyx croceus - Yellow-throated Longclaw

Continuing on with the Passerines, the next family is Motacillidae - the Pipits and Wagtails. In the US, there are two species of pipit, American and Sprague's as well as Red-throated Pipit from Asia that appears now and then. We also have several Wagtails. but they are mostly found in Alaska. Of Long-claws, we have none in the US. This individual is not an Eastern Meadowlark, but a Yellow-throated Longclaw - Macronyx croceus, and was found on the Masai Mara in Kenya.

Some members of this group are highly migrotory, like certain Wagtails and will travel great distances, other, like the American Pipits have relatively short journey. Bugs and such make up the majority of their diet and  some ave distinctive behaviors, such as the tail bobbing of the Wagtails 

Photo Spotlight: Lanius ludovicianus - Loggerhead Shrike "The Butcher Bird"

The Shrikes are probably the only family of Passerines that can wear the title of raptors along with the hawks and owls. The Shrikes, in the family Laniidae, are known colloquially as "Butcher Birds". With a fearsome countenance and hooked bill,shrikes are voracious predators. Usually not much larger than an American Robin, shrikes feed on insect, lizards and small rodents such as mice. A fully grown shrike can take on prey as large as itself. The moniker of 'Butcher Bird' is well deserved. When a shrike catches and kills its prey, it flies to a 'Larder Stash", and impales it on something sharp to leave for later. Before people showed up, they used thorn trees, but now you can prey impaled on anything sharp, including barbed wire fences.

The Loggerhead Shrike - Lanius ludovicianus is a medium sized shrike, one of two species found in the US and Canada. You can often find them hovering over a field like a kestrel, or perched on a fence or telephone line, waiting for something to run or fly by. This individual caught a mouse and hung it on the fence it was perched on. We saw it grab the mouse in its bill and fly away to places unknown. This group ranges about as far North as Nebraska, north of there the Northern Shrike takes over.

Photo Spotlight: Zonotrichia querula - Harris's Sparrow

Sorry again for the delayed posting, but I'm starting up again and moving on. Continuing in the theme of small brown birds, today's group are sparrows and buntings in the family Emberizidae. Ironically enough, this species, the Harris's Sparrow - Zonotrichia querula, is one of the more distinctive members of this group, and is definitely one of the largest.

The Emberizid sparrows are are generally small with cryptic colors; browns, whites and blacks. A few have yellow or red markings, but they're definitely the exception to the rule. Many novice birders, myself included start out thinking the are impossible to identify, but they're actually quite distinctive (again, there are exceptions). Considering their lack of coloration, it's amazing how diverse the patterning is. The sparrows are seed eaters, and are consequently a common site at bird feeders in winter. Many of these birds have pretty distinctive habitats, some of the more interesting are below:
Bachman's Sparrow - Aimophila aestivalis  lives in pine/scrub woods in the southeast
LeConte's Sparrow - Ammodramus lecontei lives in wet meadows
Grasshopper Sparrow - Ammodramus savannarum - is a common site in fields and its grasshopper-like trill can be ubiquitous in some areas

Today's sparrow, Harris's Sparrow has a range that cuts a narrow swath straight down through the Great Plains, and extends down into southern Kasnas. The large size is typical of the genus Zonotrichia, but these are larger than usual. The males are very distinctive with their black face patterning, even in winter. This individual was hiding in some rather unpleasant cover, definitely a deterrent to predators.

Photo Spotlight: Cisticola robustus - Stout Cisticola

Many are the lamentations and lacrimations I've heard from American birders like myself about identifying certain groups of the  New World birds. The Empidonax flycatchers, sparrows, shearwaters (legitimate) are the most commonly heard of as being hard to identify. British birders who come here don't understand what we're complaining about, because they have Phylloscopus warblers, which looks incredibly like each other and often a very close look is necessary to ID them. Birders from Africa come to Britain and ask what they're complaining about because they have Cisitcolas. If you were to ask me to define the quintessential little brown job, I would tell you to go look at Cisticolas.

The members of the family Cisticolidae are about as cryptic a croup as you'll ever find. Every single one looks almost exactly the same. They're very small, brownish, with short little bills, short tails and very robust personalities. Cisticolas can usually be identified by those that aren't intimately familiar with them, by their call, which are luckily quite distinct. The Stout Cisticola - Cisticola robustus (above) is actually pretty distinctive in appearance comparatively. I photographed this individual on the Masai Mara and spent a good hour trying to identify it. We finally decided on Stout Cisticola, partly because it looked and sounded like one, and partly because we were tired of trying to ID it.

So for your enjoyment, I present the most nondescript bird  group in the world. The Cisticolas

Photo Spotlight: Aegolius acadicus - Northern Saw-whet Owl

Moving away from the rather esoteric groups that I've been covering lately, we are now at a group that is familiar to everyone, the Owls. Owls are predatory raptors in the order Strigiformes. There are several families, but we're going to see the most common of them: the Typical Owls in the family Strigidae.

Owls come in all sizes, from the diminutive Elf Owl - Micrathene whitneyi, of Arizona, the size of a sparrow, to the Great Gray Owl - Strix nebulosa, that reaches 28 inches in size, with a hug wingspan. They also vary greatly in their ecology. The Elf Owl, for instance, lives in holes made by woodpeckers in Saguaro Cacti. The well-known Great Horned Owl - Bubo virginianus makes huge nests of branches or even take over the nests of raptors, including the Bald Eagle. The ethereal-like Snowy Owl - Bubo scandiacus builds its nests on the ground of the arctic tundra.

Owls are perhaps best known from their calls. Anyone who has gone camping can attest to hearing the eerie sounds of the owls as the call to each other after dusk. The calls are so distinctive that owls can be identified by their call alone. While the call of some owls, like the Great Horned Owl, will frighten off other birds, the calls of other species actually draw songbirds in close to try and drive it off. Birders imitate the call of the small Eastern Screech Owl Megascops asio, which is a rolling, soft call, not the violent shriek so often attributed to it. That call is actually that of a Barn Owl Tyto alba. The Barn Owl is actually in another family, Tytonidae, and is ubiquitous on all continents save Antarctica.

The one thing all owls have in common though, is their diet. Owls without exception are predatory and will eat most anything it can catch. The Elf Owl eats bugs and lizards, Snow Owls lemmings and other small mammals, while Great Horned Owls will go after anything they can catch; rodents, skunks, Screech Owls, I've even heard of them killing a Red-tailed Hawk (though that's pretty atypical)

Today's bird is one of the few photos of birds from earlier days that is any good, and is actually quite amazing if I do say so myself. This is the Northern Saw-whet Owl - Aegolius acadicus. Amazingly, this owl is no bigger than my hand, about 6 inches tall. This boreal species usually nests in the coniferous forests of Minnesota and Canada. On rare occasions when food is scarce in winter, it and other boreal owls (though rarely ever the Boreal Owl - Aegolius funereus) come south and can be found if your lucky among groves of pine trees. This individual was found by a birder in a small grove of pines in western Missouri, and I and a good friend traveled out to see it. Unlike most owls, the Saw-whet Owl doesn't fly when it is discovered, it just stays put until whoever is bothering it goes away. This allowed for some great photos, but in retrospect must have been rather hard on this little guy.

Here's a closeup of this beautiful little bird's eye

Photo Spotlight: Trachyphonus darnaudii - D'Arnaud's Barbet

Moving out of Pelicaniformes, I'm going to the next group, the Piciiformes. This group includes the Woodpeckers (Picidae), the Toucans (Ramphastidae), and several others. One of which is an odd group known as the African Barbets, family Lybiidae. To my everlasting chagrin, I don't have any woodpecker photos, so I'll be doing the Barbets as the representative of this order.

Today's bird, D'Arnaud's Barbet - Trachyphono darnaudii, is a relatively common Barbet that can be found all over Kenya, they especially seem to love scrub/acacia mix, which was the main habitat type in Meru National Park. As you can see, Barbets have a very distinctively shaped bill, thick at the base and sharp at the tip, fairly short, and curved. Between this and the chunky, often heavily patterned body shape, the Barbets, and this one in particular are easy to recognize. The cropping of this photo is a little weird because I wanted to show the two other D'Arnaud's Barbets that are facing the opposite direction. I didn't even know they were there until I got the photo back. The one on the left is easy to spot, there's also one that is hidden almost completely by the thick branch in the middle. This goes to show once again how hard it can be to spot birds in this habitat.

I don't know too much about their ecology as they don't live in North America, or even this hemisphere. There are South American Barbets, but they belong to a different family.

Photo Spotlight: Morus bassanus - Northern Gannet

Were going to skip over the Passeriformes (songbirds) for now and move to Pelaciniformes. This is the group, as you might expect that Pelicans belong to. It also contains the Anhingas (Anhingidae), Cormorants (Phalacrocoracidae), and Frigatebirds (Frigatidae) as well as some others. I don't have pictures of any of them (at least none I'd display proudly). So I'm going to move to the only family in the order I have, the Gannets and Boobies - Sulidae.

The family Sulidae contains, as I've said, the Gannet and Boobies. Included in this second group is the well known Blue-footed Booby. This family is most diverse in the tropics though we get 4 other species (two rarely) in North America. These are The Red-footed Booby - Sula sula, Blue-footed Booby - Sula nebouxii, Brown Booby - Sula leucogaster, and Masked Booby - Sula dactylatra. All restricted to the Souther California, the Gulf Coast and the Sea of Cortez. The Northern Gannet is the only member to reach up the  Atlantic Coast. The Gannet, like other members of this family is a colonial species. They nest each year in the same rocky islands along with thousands of other individuals. While this does offer protection from predators, it brings other problems into sharp relief.

One of the biggest is the reason for this photo, disease has hit the nesting colonies and killed off thousands of these birds. This individual is sick and probably died soon after this photo was taken. One can only hope that being able to see these birds up close will lead to help with their conservation and making sure disease doesn't hurt their population any more. I apologize for the grim nature of this post. The next will be much lighter, I'll be introducing the Barbets.