Year: 2009

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Nature

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 17: Green-tailed Sunbird

Still on the dinosaur thing, because it is genuinely fascinating, I think. Yesterday I picked a bird that looked like a bit like a dinosaur to illustrate the point, but of course they’re all evolved from dinosaurs, even ones like the Long-tailed Tit, or this Green-tailed Sunbird:

And it’s not a distant relationship, in evolutionary terms; birds fit right into the middle of the family tree of dinosaurs. Here’s something I just learnt from Wikipedia, which I don’t think I’d appreciated before: Velociraptor, the predatory dinosaur made famous by Steven Spielberg, had feathers. Indeed it had stiff, quilled ‘wing feathers’ on its arms, although it didn’t use them for flight. It had hollow bones. It brooded its eggs. Some of the smaller species in the same family probably used their feathers for gliding.

However, the other scary predatory dinosaur in Jurassic Park, the Tyrannosaurus rex, did not have these kind of quilled feathers. Which means that Velociraptor shares a common ancestor with modern birds which it does not share with T rex. Velociraptor is more closely related to the Green-tailed Sunbird than it is to Tyrannosaurus.

And Tyrannosaurus, in turn, shares a common ancestor with the sunbird which it does not share with Iguanadon, or Stegosaurus, or Diplodocus.

It’s an extraordinary thought.

» I didn’t want to get too sidetracked because the details are complicated and I’m only getting most of this stuff from Wikipedia myself, but just a couple of pedantic points. Firstly, the velociraptors in the film are much too big, apparently, although there is a larger related species called Deinonychus which is the right sort of size. The real Velociraptor was about turkey sized. Still too big to glide though.

And secondly: it’s true that T rex did not have quilled feathers. But apparently, some of the smaller tyrannosaurids do show signs of having had primitive, downy feathers for insulation. It may be that the only reason T rex doesn’t have these is that it is too big to need insulation, and like elephants, rhinos and hippos, it has lost it. Or maybe the hatchlings were downy but they grew out of it.

Wikipedia has an article about feathered dinosaurs. The whole business is mind-boggling, in the best possible way.

Photo credit: Green-tailed Sunbird (male) – Aethopyga nipalensis is © Mike (NO captive birds) in Thailand and used under the CC by-nc-nd licence.

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Nature

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 16: Red-legged Seriema

In the comments for the last entry, Tricia said:

Just…look at its DINOSAUR EYE, Harry!

seriema

The reason why some birds look, from the right angle, rather dino‑saurian is that they are dinosaurs.

Red-legged Seriema

Many people think that the dinosaurs went extinct. This is NOT TRUE.

They just grew feathers.

» The headshot of the Red-legged Seriema is © Sarah and Iain but used under the CC attribution licence. The other Red-legged Seriema is, as far as I can tell from the Wikimedia information, © James Faraco Amorim and used under the CC by-sa licence.

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Nature

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 15: Stone Curlew

This is the [Eurasian] Stone Curlew, Burhinus oedicnemus:

A goggle-eyed beauty of a bird.

» Alcaravão is © Joaquim Coelho and used under the CC by-nc-nd licence.

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Nature

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 14: Wilson’s Storm-petrel

The tubenoses — the petrels, shearwaters and albatrosses — are a wonderful group of birds saddled with a slightly unfortunate name. It’s true that they do have tubular nasal passages on top of their beaks, presumably to help them sniff out food at sea, but it’s not exactly a name full of the romance and mystery of the open ocean.

But then you or I might not look at horses, tapirs and rhinoceroses and feel the most interesting thing about them is that they have odd numbers of toes. That’s taxonomists for you: they concentrate on what’s most distinctive, not what’s most exciting.

And for me, what makes the tubenoses so wonderful is that connection with the sea. They are genuinely sea-birds; to watch a shearwater or an albatross skimming between the waves is to see a bird completely inhabiting a world that we can only visit. The open sea is where they are at ease; for them, dry land is where the danger lies. Most species only come to land to breed, and even that, only at night. I visited Skomer last year, the Welsh island with about 120,000 pairs of Manx Shearwaters — 30% of the world’s population — and if it wasn’t for the bodies of those who had fallen prey to the Great Black-backed Gulls, you would never have known they were there at all. To see them, I had to take a boat trip out as night fell, to watch the flocks building up offshore.

But shearwaters and albatrosses, with their stiff-winged, banking flight, have a sort of purposeful quality, a robustness that seems fitting for a life at sea. What’s amazing about the storm-petrels is how completely unsuited to that life they seem. This is a group of Wilson’s Storm-petrels:

They are little, delicate, fluttery birds, and when they are feeding, they flutter along close to the water and patter their little feet on the surface. Supposedly the name, petrel, is a diminutive of Peter because, like St. Peter, they walk on the water.

It’s not so surprising that they feed at sea, perhaps, but the idea that they make their whole lives at sea, that they spend the winter out among the big rolling grey waves of the open ocean, is astonishing.

It’s not just storm-petrels, of course. Puffins, those comical little birds which look like cuddly toys, or earnest, permanently surprised clowns: they overwinter out in the middle of the north Atlantic. Writing this at night in London, with a cold breeze coming from the window, it’s an extraordinary thought, all those little birds sitting out there on the water somewhere in the cold and the dark.

» Both photos of Wilson’s Storm-petrels (1, 2) are © Patrick Coin and used under the CC by-nc-sa licence. Incidentally, check out this hypnotic video I found while looking for photos.

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Nature

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 13: Long-tailed Tit

Familiarity breeds contempt, and it’s hard to get excited about even the most attractive of birds when you see them for the 20,000th time. But there are a few birds which are dirt common but which never fail to give me a little thrill of pleasure every time I see them. Like long-tailed tits:

They are just so adorable, like little feathery lollipops.

They travel around in restless groups, constantly talking to each other with little sree sree noises; outside the breeding season it’s not unusual to see groups of 25, 30, 40 birds, and you can stand in a gap between a couple of trees and see them fly over, one after another, half powder-puff and half tail, and they just keep on coming and coming. If it wasn’t for all that tail, they’d be one of the smallest birds in Europe, and they are Just So Cute. Even their nests look like something a flower fairy would live in.

» Long Tailed Tits is © SteveB!; Mésange à longue queue (Aegithalos Caudatus) Long-Tailed tit is © Luciano Giussani. They are both used under the CC by-nc-sa licence.