AAREY MILK COLONY PLANTATION - 27th JUNE 2010

YOU ARE STILL MAROONED :-) THE FAB 10: BEST BIRDS

In continuation to my earlier article .......

(Do post your comments in the end of the article)

Situation 2 -

You are stuck in Island for long and you get to take only 10 species of Birds. Which ones would you like them to be?

Rule –

1. You have shelter, food etc etc. You have list down your ‘Top 10 birds’ entertainment / beauty wise only as in your Top 10 birds of all time.

My call on a list like that is as follows. I like to call it ‘The Fab 10’. ‘Fab 10’ stands for birders pinnacle, the best 10 birds across continents with beauty as the only parameter.

(Note – In this ‘Fab 10’ list, birds are not in any particular order)

1. Indian Peacock / Peafowl

Truly a National Bird.

Prominent in many cultures, the peacock has been used in numerous iconic representations, including being designated the national bird of India in 1963. The peacock, known as Mayura in Sanskrit, has enjoyed a fabled place in India since and is frequently depicted in temple art, mythology, poetry, folk-music and traditions. Many Hindu deities are associated with the bird, Krishna is often depicted with a feather in his headband, while worshippers of Shiva associate the bird as the steed of the God of war, Karthikeya (also known as Skanda or Murugan). In Buddhist philosophy, the peacock represents wisdom.Peacock feathers are used in many rituals and ornamentation. Peacock motifs are widespread in Indian temple architecture, old coinage, textiles and continue to be used in many modern items of art and utility. In Greek mythology the origin of the peacocks plumage is explained in the tale of Juno and Argus. Charles Darwin wrote to Asa Gray that the "sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail , whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!" as he failed to see an adaptive advantage for the extravagant tail which seemed only to be an encumbrance. Darwin tried to develop a second principle of "sexual selection" to resolve the problem.

Adult peafowl can usually escape ground predators by flying into trees. Leopards are however able to ambush them and in some areas such as the Gir forest, peafowl are common prey. Foraging in groups provides some safety as there are more eyes to look out for prey. They are sometimes hunted by large birds of prey such as the Changeable Hawk-eagle and Rock Eagle-owl. Chicks are prone to predation. Adults living near human habitations are sometimes hunted by domestic dogs or by humans in some areas (southern Tamil Nadu) for folk-remedies involving the use of "peacock oil".

2. Black Necked Stork

This bird shows the beauty of BLACK as a color. The Black-necked Stork, Ephippiorhynchus asiaticus is a large wading bird in the stork family Ciconiidae. It is a widespread species, which is a resident breeder in southern Asia and Australasia, from India east to New Guinea and the northern half of Australia. In Australia, it is also given the common name Jabiru in Australia. It is spectacularly plumaged. The head, neck, wing bar and tail are jet black, with the rest of the plumage white. Sexes are identical except that the female has a yellow iris, while the male's is brown.

3. Oriental Dwarf Kingfisher

If you have to see numerous shades of blue, black, pink, orange, yellow, red all in one, theres no better bird then Oriental Dwarf Kingfisher. The Oriental Dwarf Kingfisher also known as the Black-backed Kingfisher (Ceyx erithaca) is a species of bird in the Alcedinidae family. Small red and yellow kingfisher, yellow underparts with bluish-black upperparts. This is a widespread resident of lowland forest. It is found in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Republic of India, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam. The preferred habitat is small streams in densely shaded forests.[3] In southwestern India, it begins to breed with the onset of the Southwest Monsoon in June. The nest is a horizontal tunnel up to a metre in length. The clutch of 4-5 eggs hatches in 17 days with both the male and female incubating. The birds fledge after 20 days and a second brood may be raised if the first fails. The young are fed with geckos, skinks, snails, frogs, crickets and dragonflies.

4. Scarlet Macaw

The Scarlet Macaw (Ara macao) is a large, colorful macaw. It is native to humid evergreen forests in the American tropics. Range extends from extreme south-eastern Mexico to Amazonian Peru, Bolivia and Brazil in lowlands up to 500 m (1,640 ft) (at least formerly) up to 1,000 m (3,281 ft). It has been widely extirpated by habitat destruction and capture for the parrot trade, but locally it remains fairly common. Formerly it ranged north to southern Tamaulipas. It can still be found on the island of Coiba. It is the national bird of Honduras. The Scarlet Macaw can live up to 75 years in captivity, although, a more typical lifespan is 40 to 50 years

5. Red bird of Paradise

Red Bird-of-paradise (Paradisaea rubra, also Cendrawasih Merah), is a bird-of-paradise in the genus Paradisaea, family Paradisaeidae. An Indonesian endemic, the Red Bird-of-paradise is distributed to lowland rainforests of Waigeo and Batanta islands of West Papua. This species shares its home with another bird-of-paradise, the Wilson's Bird-of-paradise. Hybridisation between these two species is not recorded but is expected because it is recorded for many other birds of paradise. The Red Bird-of-paradise is depicted on the front side of 1992 edition of Indonesia 20000 Rupiah banknote.

6. Blue Bird of Paradise

The Blue Bird-of-paradise, Paradisaea rudolphi, is a medium-sized with a bluish-white bill, dark brown iris, grey legs, broken white eye-ring and bright blue wings. The male is adorned with violet blue and cinnamon flank plumes and two long ribbon-like tail feathers. The female has a chestnut brown below.

The Blue Bird-of-paradise is endemic to Papua New Guinea. It is distributed to mountain forests of southeastern New Guinea. ITIS recognizes only one subspecies, but additional subspecies margaritae and ampla have been described. The male is polygamous and performs a breathtaking courtship display. But unlike all other Paradisaea species, he performs solitary with attending female nearby. In display, the male hangs from a branch upside down. The black oval with red margin at the centre of his chest is rhythmically enlarged and contracted. His violet blue plumes spread out in a fan, swaying its body back and forth while the central tail feathers form two impressive arches down to either side. Throughout his performance he vocalizes softly in a low but harsh vibrating voice.

Regarded by some ornithologists as the loveliest of all birds, the Blue Bird-of-paradise was discovered by Carl Hunstein in 1884. The scientific name commemorates the ill-fated Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria.

Due to ongoing habitat loss, limited range, small population size and hunting in some areas for its highly prized plumes, the rare Blue Bird-of-paradise is classified as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

7. Goldies Bird of Paradise:

The Goldie's Bird-of-paradise, Paradisaea decora is a large, approximately 33 cm long, olive-brown bird-of-paradise. The male has a yellow and dark green plumage with a lavender grey breast, yellow iris and grey colored bill, mouth and feet. It is adorned with large crimson ornamental flank plumes and two long tail wires. The male is distinguished from other Paradisaea species by its lavender grey breast plumage. Unadorned female has an olive-brown plumage with cinnamon-brown below.

Endemic to Papua New Guinea, the Goldie's Bird-of-paradise is distributed in the hill forests of Fergusson and Normanby Island of the D'Entrecasteaux Archipelago, eastern Papuan Islands. The diet consists mainly of fruits.

The name commemorates the Scottish collector Andrew Goldie, who discovered the bird in 1882.Due to ongoing habitat loss, limited range and overhunting in some areas, the Goldie's Bird-of-paradise is evaluated as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

8. Pink Flamingoes

Flamingos often stand on one leg, the other tucked beneath the body. The reason for this behavior is not fully understood. Some suggest that the flamingo, like some other animals, has the ability to have half of its body go into a state of sleep, and when one side is rested, the flamingo will swap legs and then let the other half sleep,[citation needed] but this has not been proven. Recent research has indicated that standing on one leg may allow the birds to conserve more body heat, given that they spend a significant amount of time wading in cold water. As well as standing in the water, flamingos may stamp their webbed feet in the mud to stir up food from the bottom.

Young flamingos hatch with grey plumage, but adults range from light pink to bright red due to aqueous bacteria and beta carotene obtained from their food supply. A well-fed, healthy flamingo is more vibrantly coloured and thus a more desirable mate. A white or pale flamingo, however, is usually unhealthy or malnourished. Captive flamingos are a notable exception; many turn a pale pink as they are not fed carotene at levels comparable to the wild. This is changing as more zoos begin to add prawns and other supplements to the diets of their flamingos. Alice is invited (in 'Alice in Wonderland') to play a game of croquet with the Queen and the rest of her subjects but the game quickly descends into chaos. Live flamingos are used as mallets and hedgehogs as balls

9. Osprey

A Jet White Raptor. The Osprey (Pandion haliaetus), sometimes known as the sea hawk or fish eagle, is a diurnal, fish-eating bird of prey. It is brown on the upperparts and predominantly greyish on the head and underparts, with a black eye patch and wings.

The Osprey tolerates a wide variety of habitats, nesting in any location near a body of water providing an adequate food supply. It is found on all continents except Antarctica although in South America it occurs only as a non-breeding migrant.

As its other common name suggests, the Osprey's diet consists almost exclusively of fish. It has evolved specialised physical characteristics and exhibits unique behaviour to assist in hunting and catching prey. The sexes appear fairly similar, but the adult male can be distinguished from the female by its slimmer body and narrower wings. The breast band of the male is also weaker than that of the female, or is non-existent, and the underwing coverts of the male are more uniformly pale. It is straightforward to determine the sex in a breeding pair, but harder with individual birds. Ospreys usually mate for life. Rarely, polyandry has been recorded

10. Humming Bird

King of Small birds. These birds represents the beauty which lies even in smallest of birds. They can hover in mid-air by rapidly flapping their wings 12–90 times per second (depending on the species). They can also fly backwards, and are the only group of birds able to do so. Their English name derives from the characteristic hum made by their rapid wing beats.Hummingbirds drink nectar, a sweet liquid inside flowers. Like bees, they are able to assess the amount of sugar in the nectar they eat; they reject flower types that produce nectar that is less than 10% sugar and prefer those whose sugar content is stronger. Like the similar nectar-feeding sunbirds and unlike other birds, hummingbirds drink by using protrusible grooved or trough-like tongues.Hummingbirds do not spend all day flying, as the energy cost would be prohibitive; the majority of their activity consists simply of sitting or perching. Hummingbirds feed in many small meals, consuming many small invertebrates and up to five times their own body weight in nectar each day. They spend an average of 10–15% of their time feeding and 75–80% sitting and digesting.

Hummingbird flight has been studied intensively from an aerodynamic perspective using wind tunnels and high-speed video cameras. Among the better-known North American species, the average lifespan is 3 to 5 years. By comparison, the smaller shrews, among the smallest of all mammals, seldom live more than 2 years. Hummingbirds are restricted to the Americas, from southern Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, including the Caribbean. There are between 325 and 340 species of hummingbird.

(As on today i have just seen 2 of the 'FAB 10' - Peacock and Flamingoes. Gearing for the rest 8 - black necked stork and oriental kingfisher in particular as they are residents of India)

BIRDS LIST : 1) MAROONED ON AN ISLAND

(REQUESTING YOU ALL TO COMMENT WITH YOUR TAKE / SUGGESTIONS/ YOUR BIRDLIST ETC ON THIS ARTICLE – Scroll below to Comment or press the Comments Link below)

This Article is taken (edited and modified) from the following Yahoo group threads by Praveen J (paintedstork@gmail.com) and by me. Also the pictures used are taken from Google Images. Numbers are purely denoting series and not ranks i.e. within the list there are no specific ranks given.

Source:

Threads

Link 1 – http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/keralabirder/message/10

Link 2 – http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=64834

Situation 1 -

You are stuck in Island for long and you get to take only 10 species of Birds. Which ones would you like them to be?

Rule –

1. You can’t eat the Birds

Job K Joseph replies (modified for the article): -

1. A Bengal Florican – It is amazing to watch specially the gait.

2. A Brown headed stork-billed kingfisher. I like its call very much. Very sweet to ears like a music

3. A Swan for me to feed during the day.

4. A tame cockatoo to keep me company in my make-shift hut

5. A hunting falcon to give me some meals

6. A rooster to wake me up and give warning signals

7. A hen – Eggs are tasty

8. An ostrich - bigger eggs are tastier

9. Racket-tailed drongo - more for the price of one?( hear animal

Sounds)

10. A hummingbird - Let it contribute to pollination.

Special birds featured in Discovery's new show - LIFE

(Source - wikipedia)
1) Humming Bird:

Hummingbirds drink nectar, a sweet liquid inside flowers. Like bees, they are able to assess the amount of sugar in the nectar they eat; they reject flower types that produce nectar that is less than 10% sugar and prefer those whose sugar content is stronger. Hummingbirds have long lifespans for organisms with such rapid metabolisms. Though many die during their first year of life, especially in the vulnerable period between hatching and leaving the nest (fledging), those that survive may live a decade or more. Among the better-known North American species, the average lifespan is 3 to 5 years.

2) Ethiopian lammergeier

The Lammergeier or Bearded Vulture, Gypaetus barbatus ("Bearded Vulture-Eagle"), is an Old World vulture, the only member of the genus Gypaetus. It breeds on crags in high mountains in southern Europe, Africa, India, and Tibet, laying one or two eggs in mid-winter which hatch at the beginning of spring. The population is resident. The Lammergeier has been successfully re-introduced into the Alps, but is still one of the rarest raptors in Europe.[2]

Like other vultures it is a scavenger, feeding mostly from carcasses of dead animals. It usually disdains the rotting meat, however, and lives on a diet that is 90% bone marrow. It will drop large bones from a height to crack them into smaller pieces. Its old name of Ossifrage ("bone breaker") relates to this habit. Live tortoises are also dropped in similar fashion to crack them open.

3) Red Billed Tropic Bird

The Red-billed Tropicbird, Phaethon aethereus, also known as the Boatswain Bird is a tropicbird, one of three closely related seabirds of tropical oceans. It occurs in the tropical Atlantic, eastern Pacific and Indian Oceans.The Indian Ocean race of the Red-billed Tropicbird, P. a. indicus, was at one time considered a full species, the Lesser Red-billed Tropicbird from Pakistan and the western Republic of India.

The Red-billed Tropicbird breeds on tropical islands laying a single egg directly onto the ground or a cliff ledge. It disperses widely when not breeding, and sometimes wanders far, including an amazing record from Great Britain. One has recently been found in eastern Nova Scotia, Canada. They feed on fish and squid, but are poor swimmers.

4) Frigate Birds

The frigatebirds are a family, Fregatidae, of seabirds. There are five species in the single genus Fregata. They are also sometimes called Man of War birds or Pirate birds. Since they are related to the pelicans, the term "frigate pelican" is also a name applied to them. They have long wings, tails and bills and the males have a red gular pouch that is inflated during the breeding season to attract a mate.

Frigatebirds are pelagic piscivores which obtain most of their food on the wing. A small amount of their diet is obtained by robbing other seabirds, a behavior that has given the family its name, and by snatching seabird chicks. Frigatebirds are seasonally monogamous, and nest colonially. A rough nest is constructed in low trees or on the ground on remote islands. A single egg[citation needed] is laid each breeding season. The duration of parental care in frigatebirds is the longest of any bird.

5) Bower Birds

The catbirds are monogamous and raise chicks with their mate, but all other bowerbirds are polygynous, with the female building the nest and raising the young alone. These latter species are commonly sexually dimorphic, with the female being more drab in color. Female bowerbirds build a nest by laying soft materials, such as leaves, ferns, and vine tendrils, on top of a loose foundation of sticks. They lay one or two eggs, which hatch after 19 to 24 days, depending on the species.[1]

The most notable characteristic of bowerbirds is their extraordinarily complex courtship and mating behaviour, where males build a bower to attract mates. There are two main types of bowers. One clade of bowerbirds build so-called maypole bowers that are constructed by placing sticks around a sapling, in some species these bowers have a hut-like roof. The other major bowerbuilding clade builds an avenue type bower made of two walls of vertically placed sticks. In and around the bower the male places a variety of brightly colored objects he has collected. These objects — usually different among each species — may include hundreds of shells, leaves, flowers, feathers, stones, berries, and even discarded plastic items, coins, nails, rifle shells, or pieces of glass. The males spend hours arranging this collection. Bowers within a species share a general form but do show significant variation, and the collection of objects reflects the biases of males of each species and its ability to procure items from the habitat, often stealing them from neighboring bowers. Several studies of different species have shown that colors of decorations males use on their bowers match the preferences of females.

6) Red Knot

In the breeding season the Red Knot has a circumpolar distribution in the high Arctic, then migrates to coasts around the world from 50° N to 58° S. The exact migration routes and wintering grounds of individual subspecies are still somewhat uncertain. The nominate race C. c. canutus breeds in the Taymyr Peninsula and possibly Yakutia and migrates to the Western Europe and then down to western and southern Africa. C. c. rogersi breeds in the Chukchi Peninsula in eastern Siberia, and winters in eastern Australia and New Zealand. Small and declining numbers of rogersi (but possibly of the later described piersmai) winter in the mudflats in the Gulf of Mannar and on the eastern coast of India. The recently split race C. c. piersmai breeds in the New Siberian Islands and winters in north-western Australia.C. c. roselaari breeds in Wrangel Island in Siberia and north-western Alaska, and it apparently winters in Florida, Panama and Venezuela. C. c. rufa breeds in the Canadian low Arctic, and winters South America, and C. c. islandica breeds in the Canadian high Arctic as well as Greenland, and winters in Western Europe.

Birds wintering in west Africa were found to restrict their daily foraging to a range of just 2–16 km2 of intertidal area and roosted a single site for several months. In temperate regions such as the Wadden Sea they have been found to change roost sites each week and their feeding range may be as much as 800 km2 during the course of a week.

7) Birds of Paradise (Papua New Guinea Birds)
(source - Nat Geo)

The birds-of-paradise are members of the family Paradisaeidae of the order Passeriformes. The majority of species in this family are found on the island of New Guinea and its satellites, with a few species occurring in the Moluccas of Indonesia and eastern Australia. The family has forty species in 13 genera. The members of this family are perhaps best known for the plumage of the males of most species, in particular highly elongated and elaborate feathers extending from the beak, wings or head. For the most part they are confined to dense rainforest habitat. The diet of all species is dominated by fruit and to a lesser extent arthropods. The birds-of-paradise have a variety of breeding systems, ranging from monogamy to lek based polygamy.

8) Clarks Grebe (see the video)

Clark's Grebe (Aechmophorus clarkii) is a North American species in the grebe family. Until the 1980s, it was thought to be a pale morph of the Western Grebe, which it resembles in size, range, and behavior. Intermediates between the two species are known.

Clark's Grebe is black-and-white, with a long, slender, swan-like neck. It ranges in size from 22–29 inches (56–74 cm). Among its distinguishing features is its bill, which is slightly upturned and bright yellow, whereas the Western Grebe's bill is straight and greenish-yellow. It shows white around its eyes, whereas black appears around the eyes of the Western Grebe. The downy young are white, not gray.

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