Don’t listen to them Tawny Frogmouth you’re beautiful
I LOVE these birds! They’re beautiful, and incredibly soft and great to work with.
Their personalities are great, they don’t get all aggro to handle like many other birds of prey do, if they get confused they just sort of freeze which is great in a veterinary setting. They might snap at you but they rarely care enough to connect and their tendency to sit still means you can actually treat them for a bunch of injuries easier than other birds.
Tawny Frogmouths are a joy to work with and I love them.
Hummingbirds are incredible acrobatic fliers, capable of hovering for more than 30 seconds at a time, even in windy conditions. Their feeding habits are equally impressive. Many species of hummingbirds have a forked tongue, each half of which curls over like a partial straw. As the bird extends its tongue, its beak compresses the space inside the tongue’s curls. Once in the nectar, both halves of the tongue re-expand, pulling liquid in along the full length of the tongue. For the birds, this is a much faster technique than simply sucking the nectar up like a straw. Hummingbirds can lick nectar more than ten times a second this way. For more gorgeous imagery of hummingbirds, be sure to check out National Geographic’s full feature. (Image credit: A. Varma, source; via Aarthi S.)
Mod post: as some of you know, my doves, Vexation&Vendetta, recently died, and a friend had some rescue doves that needed a new home. You guys were super supportive when that happened, so I figured I’d introduce you to these guys! The white one is the female and the speckly one is her mate. Since lady dove has such cool red-orange eyes, I’ll be naming her Arson, but I’m still thinking of names for the gentleman. His name should start with an A because alliteration, and preferably not be a people-name. Suggestions welcome!
I don’t know what kind they are. The mother is a larger songbird-frame bird, with a grey back and a dull yellow belly. She flies kind of oddly, with her wings sort of cupped and fluttering. I’ve seen more birds like her, and they all fly like that. They’re really agile and can hover well, but they aren’t fast across open air. I can’t remember ever seeing them before, and I would remember that flight pattern, but they’re all over the place, always in pairs, this year.
The nest was clinging to the side of the tree. You can see a lot of webbing in the photo- I think that’s either webworm (tent caterpillar) webbing or spider webbing, and it was worked all into the nest. I’d imagine “builds its nest out of webbing and sticks it to a tree trunk” is a pretty distinctive bird thing.
@lookatthisbabybird and general @birdblr, anyone wanna take a stab at IDing? Googling and those “find that bird” websites haven’t gotten me anywhere so far. I’m in Central Texas, and sometimes we get birds that are supposed to only live in Mexico, so it could be some of them came up from there.
BettSplendens Tumblr Evac 