The Internet Bird Collection has over 28000 videos of birds from all over the world. The brain-child of
Josep del Hoyo (who also started the
Handbook of the Birds of the World) it contains footage of more than half of all the bird species in the world, which number around 10000. Just browsing randomly I found such charming clips as
a pair of gang gang cockatoos,
a pair of preening and feeding Siberian cranes,
a hoatzin displaying,
Temnick's tragopan displaying,
Kerguelen petrel swooping between waves,
green hermit feeding on heliconia flowers, in flight,
a pair of hamerkops mating display and
American avocets mating. Or you can just go look up your favorite bird species and see if they have videos of it. Happily they had plenty of videos of my favorite bird, sterna paradisaea, the arctic tern, and
I like this one best. Each bird has taxonomic and distribution information.
posted by Kattullus
on Jan 3, 2009 -
25 comments
"A natural history of birds. Most of which have not been figur'd or describ'd, and others very little known from obscure or too brief descriptions without figures, or from figures very ill design'd.
" [1743] and "Birds of North America" [1903]
Samples
(the last 15 from each link): [1743]:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15.
[1903]:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15.
[MI]
posted by peacay
on Sep 10, 2005 -
23 comments
Manakins (
Manacus sp.) are small, colorful sparrow-sized birds found all over Central and South America. Manakin males engage in
elaborate courtship dances, including rhythmic sounds they produce with their wings. No one really knew how the birds made this sounds, until
Kimberly Bostwick, Curator of Birds and Mammals at the
Cornell University
Museum of Vertebrates, went into the jungles of Ecuador to film the birds at 1000 frames per second. As it turns out, different species of manakin use entirely different motion to produce the sounds. The Journal of Experimental Biology has
published the results, complete with
videos.
Mark Barres, who studies avian genetic population structures at the Univ. of Wisconsin, has also filmed
the mating dance of the Manakins [.mov].
posted by monju_bosatsu
on Apr 29, 2005 -
8 comments
Screw
bigfoot. Researchers at Cornell say they have
found the ivory-bill.
[K]nown as an ornithologist's "Holy Grail," [r]esearchers from Cornell University, along with others, reportedly have found the ivory-billed woodpecker in the Big Woods of Arkansas, a rare bird that was last seen in the United States in the 1940s and was believed to have become extinct.
More on the story
here. A digression into the legend
here.
posted by piskycritter
on Apr 28, 2005 -
34 comments
