An American Robin, sweet…

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Last year I caught this shot in an old abandoned shop I was looking at.

A sweet little chickadee-dee-dee … one of my favorite birds…

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I took this one from the kitchen window at my grandmas house, you get pretty close and the birds can’t see you.

Birds certainly do like windows, don’t they?

Me too.

Look at the birdy in the window…escaping, hiding, drying?

The American Finch is soooooooo sweet. I love it! They come in groups generally and they are so cute chattering about. I really adore these birds. This person caught one hanging outside their window, what a lovely little shot.

What a beautiful little birdy and the thistles are lovely!

Is that wire thing to keep birds out or to keep them safe? Guess this pigeon made it work for him.

This post will focus on the Northern Gannet, also known as the “Solan Goose” or Morus bassanus. Northern Gannets are the largest seabird in the North Atlantic with a wingspan of 6 to 6.74 feet long!! Quite a big and impressive bird.

According to Wikipedia,

Gannets hunt fish by diving from a height into the sea and pursuing their prey underwater. Gannets have a number of adaptations which enable them to do this:

• they have no external nostrils;
• they have air sacs in their face and chest under their skin which act like bubble wrapping, cushioning the impact with the water;
• their eyes are positioned far enough forward on their face to give them binocular vision, allowing them to judge distances accurately.

Gannets can dive from a height of 30 m, achieving speeds of 100 km/h as they strike the water, enabling them to catch fish much deeper than most airborne birds.

The gannet’s supposed capacity for eating large quantities of fish has led to “gannet” becoming a disapproving description of somebody who eats excessively, similar to “glutton”.

Gannets are colonial breeders on islands and coasts, which normally lay one chalky blue egg. It takes five years for gannets to reach maturity. First-year birds are completely black, and subsequent sub-adult plumages show increasing amounts of white.

The most important nesting ground for Northern gannets is the United Kingdom with about two thirds of the world’s population. These live mainly in Scotland and the Shetland Isles. The rest of the world’s population is divided between Canada, Ireland, Faroe Islands and Iceland, with small numbers in France (they are often seen in the Bay of Biscay), the Channel Islands and Norway. The biggest Northern gannet colony is in the Scottish islands of St Kilda; this colony alone comprises 20% of the entire world’s population. Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth, Grassholm in Pembrokeshire and Bonaventure Island, Quebec are also important Northern gannet breeding sites.

In Popular Culture, 

• In many parts of the United Kingdom, the term Gannet is used to refer to people that steadily eat vast quantities of food especially at public functions.

• The Gannetwhale is a hypothetical descendant of the gannet seen in the television show The Future Is Wild.

• The Cape Gannet is featured in the 2008 film Wild Ocean.

Some photographs of gannets by Andrew Green at http://www.flickr.com/photos/polandeze

Photo by Andrew Green (http://www.flickr.com/photos/polandeze)

Photo by Andrew Green (http://www.flickr.com/photos/polandeze)

Photo by Andrew Green (http://www.flickr.com/photos/polandeze)

Read on to see more photos of the Northern Gannet…

Red-tailed black cockatoo

Originally uploaded by dark orange

The bird of the day today is the Red-tailed black cockatoo (Calyptorhynchus banksii). It is also known as Banksian- or Bank’s Black Cockatoo. It is found in Australia, those Australians, they get to see all the cool and rare birds. =) This is a big bird folks, about 24 inches LONG! Wow, two feet of bird. Despite its size, this very noisy bird prefers to eat mostly Eucalyptus seeds. A bird after my own heart. =)

They can live up to or even longer than 50 years! Wow, a long-living, seed-eating bird. Nice.

Growing up, my grandmother often had cockatoos but hers were white with yellow or red tufts. These are the more common type of cockatoo pets. They were noisy too but they were not as colorful or interesting.

The males and females look different. This is known as sexual dimorphism, in case you didn’t know. =) I didn’t before now. They are also being smuggled illegally into the U.S. and other countries. This is illegal and wrong. People always want to have exotic pets, don’t they?

Eastern Rosella

Originally uploaded by ianmichaelthomas

Today’s bird of the day is the Eastern Rosella, also known as Platycercus eximius. It is native to Australia and Tasmania but now is also found in New Zealand.

I read you can have this bird as a pet but it is not very “cuddly”. Hahahaha.

This bird photograph is from flickr user ianmichaelthomas. Here is what he had to say about this photograph (direct copy and paste):

Another wild and free Australian native parrot! Australia can rightly be called the land of parrots.

There are about 80 species in Australia.

Eastern Rosella

Another iconic Australian native parrot, the Eastern Rosella is spectacularly coloured, and similar in size to the Crimson rosella.
Eastern rosellas are the mascot/emblem of Aussie food company, Rosella – A beautiful eastern rosella was featured on tins of jam, soup etc – a joke I used to tell my friends is that the secret ingredient is the eastern rosella – they give zest to the jam! Purely a joke…
Eastern rosellas are quite common within their range on the eastern Australian seaboard, but I have found them a VERY difficult bird to get good photographs of!

They are usually extremely wary of people, very flighty and easily spooked by other birds in the area, let alone people.

This day was most unusual at Pound Bend, Warrandyte State Park – I found this Eastern Rosella happy to stay still and pose for my photos! And I took heaps! This was the first and only time in 2 solid years of trying to take photos of these birds in the wild that I found one who co-operated! Unfortunately, where it sat was in very deep bush, and my camera had great trouble getting proper focus. Manual focus stopped working months ago – so I am forced to rely on auto-focus – which is unreliable at best in such busy and complicated backgrounds such as this found in thick bushes.
Even so – it was a thrill, nearly beyond works to have this time.