The Yellow-billed stork

08 Wednesday Mar 2017

Tags

African birds, birding, birdwatching, Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Mycteria ibis, stork, Yellow-billed stork

Today’s World Wildlife Wednesday comes to you from Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia, though that is not the homeland of the Yellow-billed storks (Mycteria ibis). I found these storks in KL’s world-famous Bird Park but they are natives of sub-Saharan Africa, though most numerous in the swamps and marshlands, lagoons and mudflats of the east African countries of Zambia, Zimbabwe and Madagascar.

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The storks in my photos may look a bit odd, as if they’re drinking an awful lot of water, but they are, in fact, fishing. Rather than using their vision to see their prey, of small fish and frogs, crustaceans, worms and insects, they use their sense of touch, detecting movement and vibrations through their bills and then quickly snapping shut those bills to secure their food before gulping it down whole.

The Yellow-billed stork – also known as the Wood stork or the Wood ibis – stands about a metre tall when fully grown, and, just like us humans, their foreheads seem to get more and more wrinkly with age. The bird shown below left is a juvenile, so it is still wearing its mottled brown baby feathers.

Walk like an Egyptian

27 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by sconzani in birds, nature, nature photography

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

African birds, Alopochen aegypticus, birding, birds, birdwatching, British birds, Egyptian Goose, Serengeti National Park, Tanzania

It might look like a goose and be called a goose but the Egyptian Goose (Alopochen aegypticus) is not really a goose at all. It’s more closely related to the Shelduck and occasionally shares that duck’s habit of nesting in a burrow or hole in the ground, though it has also been known to build a nest as high as 80 feet above the ground in a tree. The bird was introduced to Britain as an ornamental wildfowl species, for the king’s collection of birds in St James’s Park in London in 1678, but has since established itself in the wild, though it does still have a penchant for the grounds of large halls and estates, with their perfect habitat combination of old woodland and extensive areas of water.

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My first photo here was taken at just such a place, the wonderful Tatton Park Estate, near Knutsford in Cheshire. But the second photo was taken in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. Although it’s called an Egyptian Goose, it is actually native to Africa south of the Sahara and the Nile Valley, but it was considered sacred by the ancient Egyptians, which I presume is how it got its common name.

160227 egyptian goose (1)