64/366 ‘A wonderful bird’

04 Wednesday Mar 2020

Tags

#WorldWildlifeWednesday, American white pelican, Great white pelican, Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, pelican

A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican,
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week,
But I’m damned if I see how the helican.
~ The Pelican, Dixon Lanier Merritt, American poet

I met the stunning Great white pelican (Pelecanus onocrotalus) above at the Kuala Lumpur Bird Park in Malaysia in May 2013. The great thing about the bird park was its huge aviaries, where the birds had plenty of space and a relatively natural environment to roam in. The American white pelicans (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos), below, were gathering to roost on the Fox River, in De Pere, in the US state of Wisconsin in July 2015.

200304 american white pelican (1)

I can’t help but wonder what the pelican with its beak open is doing – scratching an itch?

The Yellow-billed stork

08 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by sconzani in birds, nature

≈ 4 Comments

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.

170309-yellow-billed-stork-1

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.

Superb starlings

06 Wednesday Jul 2016

Posted by sconzani in birds, nature

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

birding, birdwatching, Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Lamprotornis superbus, starling, Superb starling, Tanzania

The Superb starling (Lamprotornis superbus) is native to many east African countries – Uganda, Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania, where most of my photos were taken – but you only have to google their name to discover how widely they’ve spread throughout the world, either as specimens in zoos and bird parks (one of my photos was taken in the Kuala Lumpur Bird Park in 2013) or in the aviaries of bird collectors.

160706 Superb starling Kuala Lumpur (1)

And it’s easy to see how they got their name – what truly stunning colours they are, from their iridescent blue backs and breasts and those glorious turquoise wings to their orange-red tummy and legs, all rounded off by a snowy white bottom! Like the starlings I’m more familiar with in Britain and New Zealand, Superb starlings are sociable birds, often to be heard chattering and singing their loud quavering songs in the company of others. Unlike their British and New Zealand counterparts, which are inclined to be nervous of people, the Superbs are quite bold and brassy and easily tamed.

Black-crowned night heron

13 Wednesday Apr 2016

Posted by sconzani in birds, nature

≈ 5 Comments

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Angkor Centre for Conservation of Biodiversity, birding, birds, birdwatching, Black-crowned night heron, heron, Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Lincoln Park, Nycticorax nycticorax

For this week’s World Wildlife Wednesday we have a bird that can be found almost everywhere in the world (though it’s neither partial to the cold nor to Australasia), and my images go some way to showing that.

160413 Black crowned night heron cambo ACCB

My first photo of the Black-crowned night heron (Nycticorax nycticorax) was taken at the Angkor Centre for Conservation of Biodiversity (ACCB) not far from Siem Reap in Cambodia. Like so many species of wildlife in poverty-stricken Cambodia, this heron is considered by many locals to be a food item, and hunting has dramatically reduced its numbers. The ACCB operates a captive breeding programme that aims to rebuild the local population.

160413 black crowned night heron chicago

My second set of photos was taken in Chicago and shows immature night herons roosting in the trees in Lincoln Park, just north of the city centre. Due mainly to habitat loss, these herons are endangered in Illinois, so the Chicago Parks, Lincoln Park Zoo and Department of Natural Resources are working together to encourage and support the 400-odd birds that breed in Lincoln Park each year.

160413 black crowned night heron kl

The location of my third photo is the Kuala Lumpur Bird Park in Malaysia. According to the Malaysian Birds website, the Black-crowned night heron is faring rather better in Malaysia, where the bird is widespread and the populations in local heronries frequently number in the hundreds.