Kingfishers in action

The Telegraph has these incredible shots of kingfishers fishing, taken by National Geographic photographer Joe Petersburger.

Photosynthesising sea slug

Usually only plants can make food directly from sunlight, but a sea slug has been discovered which incorporates algal chloroplasts into its own cells and is performing photosynthesis:

"Some related slugs also engulf chloroplasts but E. chlorotica alone preserves the organelles in working order for a whole slug lifetime of nearly a year. The slug readily sucks the innards out of algal filaments whenever they’re available, but in good light, multiple meals aren’t essential. Scientists have shown that once a young slug has slurped its first chloroplast meal from one of its few favored species of Vaucheria algae, the slug does not have to eat again for the rest of its life. All it has to do is sunbathe."

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/green-sea-slug/#ixzz0cfzARcr9

Thanks Matthew for the link.

Clever octopuses

For anyone who hasn't seen it, check out this amazing footage of veined octopuses in Indonesia improvising shelters for themselves out of coconut shells. Interestingly, along with cuttlefish and squid, octopuses are coleoidean cephalopods, molluscs which do without an external shell of their own.

More from the BBC:

"The shells provide important protection for the octopuses in a patch of seabed where there are few places to hide.

Dr Norman explained: "This is an incredibly dangerous habitat for these animals - soft sediment and mud couldn't be worse.

"If they are buried loose in mud without a shell, any predator coming along can just scoop them up. And they are pure rump steak, a terrific meat supply for any predator."

The researchers think that the creatures would initially have used large bivalve shells as their haven, but later swapped to coconuts after our insatiable appetite for them meant their discarded shells became a regular feature on the sea bed." -- read whole article

If you want to read more about octopuses, the Wikipedia page has lots of cool stuff.

Singapore's bird conference

The BBC has this wonderful story about a regular gathering of caged birds in Singapore:

"I asked how much the birds were selling for, to be told that this was less a marketplace and more... he thought about the words... a conference of birds.

Every Sunday morning, the birds were brought down from their tower-block eyries so that they could talk to one another.

I had never really thought of birds in that way, but looking again at the rows of cages with birds chatting animatedly, I realised they were doing just the same as their owners, relishing a respite from a solitary life."

read the whole story here.

Cat among the hens

Flying hordes

These amazing radar images show the night-time skies over the US are thick with migrating birds. Thanks to Mekayla for the link.

Monstrous cuteness!

Tom pointed me to this giant rabbit. No, it's not a stuffed toy!
Read all about it here.






If that doesn't provide sufficient cuteness, try Nora the piano-playing cat:




You can read more about Nora here.

Cow Portraits

I've only ever taken one portrait of cattle, and this is it:



This was taken near Ahaura, on the West Coast. They obviously don't get a lot of visitors.

English painter Sue Moffitt has forged an entire career out of portraits of cows, and they are just amazing! Look at this. Or this. Who would have thought you could get so much personality into a picture of a cow? You can check out Sue Moffitt's whole portfolio here.

Image copyright Grace Dalley. All rights reserved.

Basking bird

When I was in the Botanic Gardens the other day trying to photograph the waterlilies (with only limited success!) I suddenly noticed this sparrow only about a metre away on a gunnera leaf, lying unmoving with his beak open. I thought he might be dead, or dying...

...but of course once he realised I had seen him, he stared paying attention to me...
...and within a few seconds he flew off.

Images copyright 2009 Grace Dalley, all rights reserved.

The Life of Birds

Life Of Birds

This 10-episode series by David Attenborough is spellbinding. Find out all about birds' evolution from winged dinosaurs; flight; the many uses and adaptations of feathers; the huge diversity of appearance, anatomy and behavior in the bird world.

And needless to say it's crammed with amazing footage (you haven't lived until you've seen the sea-eagles duelling in mid-air, or the black heron wrapping its wings around its head so it can see better, or the crested grebes doing their walk-on-water courtship dance).

One of my favourite examples of bird ingenuity was the New Caledonian crow, which shapes a broken-off twig to fish for grubs inside tree-bark. The grubs can't do much to defend themselves except bite, and the crow uses this behavior to its advantage: the crow pokes the grub with the twig until it bites the twig, then the crow withdraws the twig with the grub still attached, and eats it.

Another amazing behavior is that of Japanese crows which drop very hard nuts on the road so that they are crushed by passing traffic, and they retrieve the crushed nuts by waiting to cross the road with pedestrians.

There's so much more amazing stuff, some of which is described on the Life of Birds website.

It has this on the making of the programme:

""The Life of Birds" took three years to make at a cost of $15 million. Sir David Attenborough travelled 256,000 miles during filming - 10 times round the Earth. The production employed 48 cameramen and camerawomen, many of them battle-hardened veterans of overseas wildlife filming, working in 42 countries on five continents. They used up 200 miles of film on 300 bird subjects. "

You can read the whole article here.

And you can buy the entire Life of Birds series on DVD at Fishpond, here.

And today the BBC has some amazing footage of a flock of 20,000 starlings formation-flying in Gloucestershire. This has to be seen to be believed, go take a look!

Giant eagle at Macraes

The extinct Haast eagle was the largest eagle ever known, so big that it preyed on giant moa. In the bird-dominated New Zealand ecosystem, the Haast eagles filled the niche of the big cats, or of bears - the largest land-based predators. When the giant moa were hunted to extinction by humans, the giant eagles also became extinct.

At the Macraes gold mine site in Central Otago, soon to be the site of Macraes Heritage and Art Park, a giant eagle sculpture made of stainless steel has been erected. The eagle was made by Queenstown sculptor Mark Hill in his studio in Arrowtown. It is 8m tall and has a wingspan of 12m, roughly four times the scale of the extinct bird, so it will be a landmark in the area. And how did it get from Arrowtown to Macraes? It flew, of course!
The ODT has more information about the sculpture here and there are details of the installation, plus a picture of the eagle arriving by helicopter, here.

You can read more about the Haast eagle on the excellent New Zealand Birds site here.
And because I couldn't resist it, here is a video dramatisation of a Haast eagle attacking a person. Please bear in mind there's no hard evidence that the eagles did attack humans, although there is evidence that humans hunted the eagles. Anyway, the video gives you an idea of the size of the birds!

Another highlight of the Macraes Heritage and Art Park is a vast installation of speargrass and snow tussock by Auckland artist John Reynolds. You can read about it in this Art New Zealand feature .

Simon's cat

This is just so funny I have to post it.

More chances to see

When Douglas Adams and Mark Cawardine wrote their brilliant conservation book Last Chance to See.... in 1991, they visited kakapo on New Zealand's Codfish Island, along with a host of other critically endangered animals around the world. Adams himself died tragically in 2001, but zoologist Mark Cawardine is teaming up with the delightful Stephen Fry to revisit the animals described in the book and check on their progress. Fortunately, most of the animals featured have increased in number, the kakapo among them.

Stuff has an item on Cawardine's and Fry's visit to NZ, and says they will be visiting not only kakapo on Codfish Island, but also black robin on the Chathams, kiwi in Waipoua Forest and tuatara and giant weta in Karori Wildlife Sanctuary.

There will eventually be a BBC television series, but in the meantime Fry promises to post detailed updates on his redesigned website. And if you haven't already read the book, go to it!, it's hugely entertaining as well as informative and insightful.

Gecko glue

This fascinating story tells about a new dry adhesive that mimics the way geckoes hold themselves on walls and ceilings.

Dance dialects

Bees dance to tell each other where to find nectar. The dance is a coded representation of distance and direction, but not all bees do it in the same way: geographically separated populations of bees have slightly different dances.

Reasearchers in China have found that with practice, bees can learn to interpret the dances of foreign bees. Read the full story here.

I want a puggle!

What is a baby platypus called? A puggle! I kid you not! There's a picture of one here. And there's a neat article on platypuses here in the NYT. (access is free but registration is required)

Baby echidnas are also called puggles, and there's one here.