Categories
Nature

Top ten animals – #6, Kiwi

Depending on whether you ask a lumper or a splitter, there are somewhere between three and six species of kiwi. I’m not going to specify one. This is a picture of a Little Spotted Kiwi, Apteryx owenii, the smallest of the kiwis, taken from the website of the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary. In Maori it has the fabulous name kiwi-pukupuku.

In some ways the kiwi is an odd choice to get into the top ten – it’s just a drab brown bird the size of a chicken. I guess it’s mainly the fascination of a bird that is so un-birdy; penguins and anhingas have the same appeal. Not only are kiwis flightless and without obvious wings, they don’t even appear to have feathers. They also get bonus points for living in New Zealand – i.e. a very long way away from where I live, and somewhere I’d love to go some time.

A few facts about kiwis. They’re nocturnal – hence the picture above. They have their nostrils at the end of their beaks, uniquely among birds, presumably to help them find food – they have rubbish eyesight. In fact, I think it’s the only nocturnal bird that has moved from eyesight to another main sense (although the oilbird, which nests in caves, does have primitive sonar). They are in the same family – ratites – as other famous flightless birds like the ostrich, rhea, emu and cassowary. As they shrunk to their present size from their larger ancestor, the egg shrank more slowly then the overall body size, as can be seen in this uncomfortable-looking x-ray:

Categories
Culture Nature Other

Birdstrike wing

A photo my brother took of the mark left by a bird hitting his window. You can see the whole bird in this one.



Birdstrike wing

Originally uploaded by rutherfordfamily.

Categories
Nature

Top ten animals I’d most like to see

It’s the season for lists. I’m not going to do a review of 2005 in music or films of poetry or anything. I’m going to do a list of ‘top ten animals that it would be really really cool to see’. One ground rule – they can’t be extinct, so no Dodo, no Great Auk, no moas, no phorusrhacoids, no baluchitherium, no pteranodons, no plesiosaurs, no seismosaurus or tyrannosaurus. Not even a giant prehistoric dragonfly. *sigh*

Still, even without a time machine there are some pretty great things to see.

Before I get onto the final list, here’s a list of ten that might have made it onto the list if I hadn’t already seen them. In no particular order:

Stellar’s Sea Eagle

Giraffe
Black and White Colobus Monkey
Giant Anteater
Amazon River Dolphin
Carmine Bee-eater
Skimmer
Hoatzin
African Elephant
Leopard

Categories
Culture Nature Other

Flickr field guide

There’s a group on Flickr called Field Guide: Birds of the World. Pretty self-explanatory, really – they’re trying to form a collection of photos that can be used to help identify birds. It’s a great idea and they’ve already got a lot entries, though it’s weighted towards European and N American birds, not surprisingly. But it quickly exposes the failings of Flickr as a content-management system. Although it’s possible to search within the group pool for photos tagged with a particular name, it’s not obvious how to do it. More crucially for a field guide, it’s not easy enough to add information to a photo in an organised way – for example, to provide a link from a species to any confusion possibilities. Or to give distribution info.

In some ways, like most reference works, it’s a good candidate for a wiki; there’s a network of people who are very enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the subject, it’s naturally modular and so on. The internet would allow for many pictures attached to each species, as well as audio and even video. You could easily establish a standard template for an entry, to encourage people to include all the useful information – distribution, easily confused species, call, and so on. I suppose I could set it up – the Wikimedia software which Wikipedia runs on is open-source and I think I could set it up on my server space, although I suspect there would be a bit of a learning curve to cope with. More seriously, if it ever really caught on, especially with a lot of audio and video, it would be quite bandwidth-heavy.

With mobile broadband on the verge of becoming widespread, people might even start using it in the field to complement traditional field-guides.

Categories
Culture Me Nature Other

Happy Birthday to me

I’ve got an iPod shuffle. It weighs 22g; about as much as a reasonably fat nightingale.

Categories
Nature

Redwings

There were a couple of redwings in the garden this morning. It almost makes it worth having winter, but, you know, not really. This is someone else’s redwing, via Flickr:



Redwing, Rosehearty (Scotland), 3-Jan-02

Originally uploaded by Dave Appleton.