Salt Flat Flamingos

I returned from another adventure that took me to The Italian and French Rivieras.  I got an unexpected surprise while traveling from San Marino to Bologna.  We stopped in a seaside town called Cervia where there is a salt flat.  The salt here is used at the Vatican and is known as the "Pope's Salt".  It is considered a sweet salt, not because it is sweet, but because it lacks a bitterness that other salts posses.  As we were getting a talk on how they produce this special salt, I noticed some flamingos coming in for a landing in the distance.  I walked quickly down the dirt walkway to get as close as I could without scaring them off in order to get a few shots.  I like the way the birds reflect in the water.

Flamingos usually stand on one leg while the other is tucked beneath their body. The reason for this behaviour is not fully understood. One theory is that standing on one leg allows the birds to conserve more body heat, given that they spend a significant amount of time wading in cold water.^[17] However, the behaviour also takes place in warm water and is also observed in birds that do not typically stand in water. An alternative theory is that standing on one leg reduces the energy expenditure for producing muscular effort to stand and balance on one leg. A study on cadavers showed that the one-legged pose could be held without any muscle activity, while living flamingos demonstrate substantially less body sway in a one-legged posture.^[18] As well as standing in the water, flamingos may stamp their webbed feet in the mud to stir up food from the bottom.^[19]
Flamingos are capable flyers and flamingos in captivity often require wing clipping to prevent escape.Young flamingos hatch with greyish reddish plumage, but adults range from light pink to bright red due to aqueous bacteria and beta-Carotene obtained from their food supply. A well-fed, healthy flamingo is more vibrantly colored and thus a more desirable mate; a white or pale flamingo, however, is usually unhealthy or malnourished. Captive flamingos are a notable exception; they may turn a pale pink if they are not fed carotene at levels comparable to the wild

Ireland/England Birds 2017

I want to share the pictures of the birds I saw while traveling in Ireland and England.  I'm sure they are nothing special, but I like all birds and like keeping a record of what I see while I am out and about.  Ken and I took this adventure with my high school friend and her husband in April, and really enjoyed the trip and their companionship.  It started off a bit rocky as far as the flight connections were concerned, but all worked out in the end.  Our flight from SFO to London Heathrow was delayed 3 1/2 hours because of a loose screw.  This made our connecting flight to Dublin precarious because of having to go through customs and security, but we made it.  It was probably because I was wearing my lucky earrings and necklace!

This was taken in York on April 20th.  I had three weird dreams the night before.  One was that my friend Kristin was pregnant.  I will have to ask her what that means since she belongs to a dream group.  We spent the day walking around the museum park near our hotel and walking over to the Railroad Museum across the river.  This is a wood pigeon.  S/he looks very pleased with the find probably for a nest.  Here is some information on wood pigeons.
The common wood pigeon (Columba palumbus) is a large species in the dove and pigeon family.  . It is locally known in southeast England as the "culver".   The common wood pigeon is gregarious, often forming very large flocks outside the breeding season. Like many species of pigeon, wood pigeons take advantage of trees and buildings to gain a vantage point over the surrounding area, and their distinctive call means that they are usually heard before they are seen.  Young common wood pigeons swiftly become fat, as a result of the crop milk they are fed by their parents. This is an extremely rich, sweet fluid that is produced in the adult birds' crops during the breeding season.

This is a coot, and this picture was taken on April 28th.  As usual we arose at 7:30 am and met Marty and Marsha at 8:30 am for breakfast.  This was our last day in London before flying home.  We were all getting a little tired and anxious to return, and get back to a daily routine.  We wandered around London visiting famous sights.  We took advantage of the Underground to get to the various places.  The palaces and parks were beautiful.  Spring was a perfect time to visit.  This bird was hanging out at Kensington Palace and Gardens.  The feet really are quite unique.
An aquatic bird of the rail family, with blackish plumage, lobed feet, and a bill that extends back onto the forehead as a horny shield.OR

a foolish or eccentric person, typically an old man.  Ha,ha - I wonder which it is.  

Coots have prominent frontal shields or other decoration on the forehead, with red to dark red eyes and coloured bills. Many, but not all, have white on the under tail. The featherless shield gave rise to the expression "as bald as a coot," which the Oxford English Dictionary cites in use as early as 1430. Like other rails, they have long, lobed toes that are well adapted to soft, uneven surfaces. Coots have strong legs and can walk and run vigorously. They tend to have short, rounded wings and are weak fliers, though northern species nevertheless can cover long distances. Ah! mystery solved.

Coots are omnivorous, eating mainly plant material, but also small animals and eggs. They are aggressively territorial during the breeding season, but are otherwise often found in sizeable flocks on the shallow vegetated lakes they prefer.

Here is a magpie.  We saw these birds in both Ireland and England.  They really have gorgeous coloring.  I snapped this photo on April 10th while we were staying in Dublin.  Leaving the hotel around 9:00 am that morning, we all walked over to Trinity College and bought the tour of the campus and library.  Our guide was a student, and he had many interesting stories about the campus and some of the people who had attended. . Tim Westoll 1919–1999 Ornithologist I think is one good person to mention since the focus here is on birds.  A. A. Milne 1882–1956 Writer – Winnie-the-Pooh is another.  Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson 1809–1892 Poet – Maud, In Memoriam Sir Isaac Newton 1642–1727 Mathematician, physicist; MP (Cambridge University) Sir Francis Bacon 1561–1626 Lawyer, philosopher; Lord Chancellor all attended Trinity College.  We had to queue up to see The Books of Kells which is an illuminated manuscript of the four gospels.  Afterwards, we headed over to the Long Library.  There the books are organized from the biggest at the bottom to the smallest at the top.  How could you ever find the book you need?! By this time, we were ready for a break.  We found a very nice cafe - Costa Cafe which I figured out is a chain like Starbucks.  Anyway, we powered up with hot chocolate and coffee heading back out on our personal walking tour.  We spotted Molly Malone who was famous for her "night business".  We also discovered the statue of Oscar Wilde at the corner of a park with a children's playground.  We then ventured over and across the Liffey River, checked out the harp bridge (The harp is the national symbol of Ireland.), and discovered a memorial for the people who left Ireland due to the potato famine.  That was enough for one day.  It was time to find our way back to our hotel for a rest and dinner.
Magpies - one of the most intelligent animals in the world - With its noisy chattering, black-and-white plumage and long tail, there is nothing else quite like the magpie in the UK. When seen close-up its black plumage takes on an altogether more colourful hue with a purplish-blue iridescent sheen to the wing feathers, and a green gloss to the tail. Magpies seem to be jacks of all trades - scavengers, predators and pest-destroyers, their challenging, almost arrogant attitude has won them few friends. Non-breeding birds will gather together in flocks.
https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/bird-and-wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/m/magpie/
The information on the first two birds came from Wikipedia

 

Japan Birds

I have been away from this for a long time.  I am newly motivated because a couple of people viewed my blog.  I traveled to Japan with OAT over the summer, and just finished making a slide show of my trip, so there is no good reason I can think of not to post the birds I saw there.  So, here they are:

 This picture was taken at Kenrokuen Gardens on a hot day in July as we walked over bridges and around ponds.

 Heron at Sanjusangendo Temple captured by my camera a few days later.

 This heron was waiting to say good-bye as we parted on a ferry from Ikuchijima Island.
 Here is some information on herons:

The grey heron (Ardea cinerea) is a long-legged predatory wading bird of the heron family, Ardeidae, native throughout temperate Europe and Asia and also parts of Africa. It is resident in much of its range, but some populations from the more northern parts migrate southwards in autumn. A bird of wetland areas, it can be seen around lakes, rivers, ponds, marshes and on the sea coast. It feeds mostly on aquatic creatures which it catches after standing stationary beside or in the water or stalking its prey through the shallows.The birds breed colonially in spring in "heronries", usually building their nests high in trees. A clutch of usually three to five bluish-green eggs is laid. Both birds incubate the eggs for a period of about 25 days, and then both feed the chicks, which fledge when seven or eight weeks old. Many juveniles do not survive their first winter, but if they do, they can expect to live for about five years.(This formation came from Wikipedia)

This picture of two cormorants I took along the Katsura River as we got ready to take a boat up the river and a hike up a mountain to visit the Zen monk Obayashi san for macha tea ceremony.

The Japanese cormorant, also known as Temminck's cormorant, is a cormorant native to East Asia. It lives from Taiwan north through Korea and Japan to the Russian Far East. Wikipedia

 

What is a Cormorant or a Darter?

Pity the poor cormorant. There’s scarcely a bird in the world as unfairly maligned, deemed the world over as a bad seed due to its ungainly proportions and reportedly insatiable appetite for bait fish.  But this awkward family is of an ancient lineage, one of the oldest of all the birds and with similar ancestors reaching all the way back to the dinosaurs.  The form is a classic one – long-billed, web-footed, and waterborne – and shared in some sense with the order of birds the cormorants, and their sister taxa the darters, lie within, the newly resurrected Suliformes.  That group consists of the two families treated here, along with the boobies, frigatebirds, and tropicbirds, all highly aerial marine species.  The comparatively aquatic and frequently freshwater cormorants and darters are outliers, both in habitat preferences and panache, but we’re all about the underdogs here.  Let’s take the two families together, and then separately.

Both cormorant and darters are superb swimmers, specializing in pursuing fish underwater before returning to the surface where they sit, characteristically quite low in the water, and swallow them head-first.  Both families use their feet for propulsion, and as such those appendages are uniquely webbed across all four toes, effectively broadening the surface area they use to propel themselves.  It’s a trait they share with the other Sulids, as well as the pelicans.

Cormorants and darters are long-bodied and that, paired with feet at the far end of their bodies, makes them awkward when out of the water.  Though powerful flyers, they’re rather ungainly when taking off from the surface, but it’s on land that we see that most famous of cormorant behaviors.   Sitting atop a cliff face or piece of flotsam following a fishing outing, they’ll spread their wings wide to dry.   It’s suggested that this is because they lack the oils found in other birds to waterproof their feathers, but that’s not true.  Waterproofing is an innate characteristic of feathers due to their physical structure.  No extra oil is required.  But both cormorants and, in particular, darters are unique in having feathers that are less naturally water-resistant than other birds, an adaptation that enables them to forage underwater more easily.  However, this necessitates regular time out of the water to dry sodden feathers and regulate body temperature; the time spent in that classic crucificial position.