All posts tagged with birds

210 years ago, in an autumn not unlike our own today, Alexander Wilson set out with two companions on a 1,300 mile trek, mostly on foot, from Philadelphia to Niagara Falls. Enchanted by the natural beauty of his adopted homeland, Wilson, Scottish by birth, detailed his two-month-long adventure in an epic 2,219 line poem entitled The Foresters: A Poem Descriptive of a Pedestrian Journey to the Falls of Niagara in the Autumn of 1804.

Deep within the rainforest canopy of the Aru Islands, just west of New Guinea, two male Greater Birds-of-Paradise dance among the branches in carefully coordinated steps, their magnificent yellow, white, and maroon plumage undulating gracefully to the rhythm of their own unique song.

As part of our BHL & Our Users series, we recently interviewed Denis Lepage, Senior Scientist at the National Data Center, Bird Studies Canada and creator of Avibase, an impressive online resource on the birds of the world.

New Zealand is an exciting place to study biodiversity for a number of reasons. First, its unique set of plants and animals, evolving in the context of an active geologic history, results in several model systems that are ideal for testing ideas about how evolution works. Second, the country still has areas of its natural environment that are relatively undisturbed, something of which the wider public is very proud and which means that many people are interested in and aware of many native species.

Beauty can be too much for words. So it is with the charm of what many consider the loveliest of the world’s birds, the hummingbirds: Overcome by the dazzling colors of those first tiny skins, early European naturalists reached to the limits of their vocabularies to describe them. The result, nearly five centuries after the first specimens were brought back from a then truly New World, is a large set of remarkably evocative names, hillstars and woodstars, helmetcrests and plumeleteers, jacobins and incas, metaltails and thornbills, emeralds and sapphires and topazes and rubies.

The birds, of course, are every bit as fantastic as their monikers.