Earlier in October, I attended the monthly meeting of the Nicola Naturalist Society at NVIT. Those meetings always begin with a slideshow of members’ pictures of nature and wildlife sightings in and around the area.
That evening’s slideshow included some impressive shots of the recent blood moon and animals of all shapes and sizes in and around the Nicola Valley.
One member-submitted picture was particularly striking. It featured a hawk taking a starling as its prey. There the hawk stood in an amazing candid shot, wings spread, talons firmly clamped on the bird at its feet, eyes staring wide at the camera.
A snapshot of a bird of prey in action like that is really something, and it got me thinking about birds in all their quirky and impressive glory.
The Nicola Valley is home to over 200 species of birds, including different varieties of hawks and songbirds, hummingbirds, cranes and eagles. It’s also on the migratory path of pelicans and loads of other bird species.
In Canada, we might think of the Canada goose as a symbol of our nation, but really, each province and territory has an official bird. In B.C., the official bird is the Stellar’s jay, the black-headed, prominently crested, blue-bodied relative of the blue jay.
The national bird of Australia is the ever-comical emu.
The aviary representative of the Bahamas is the Caribbean flamingo, while Belize lays claim to the vibrant keel-billed toucan.
Peru’s national bird is the Andean cock-of-the-rock, a mid-size perching bird species whose male members have dark bodies and strikingly bright orange heads.
Besides the stunning and colourful plumage birds can wear, one of the things I find most interesting about some species is their ability to mimic others.
Parrots and parakeets are well known for this ability, and it’s believed it helps them identify as part of a flock.
However, a man in Mexico might want to consider getting a non-mimicking bird as part of his flock the next time he’s in the market for a pet after his parakeet squawked on him to police.
In January, the man was pulled into an alcohol checkpoint in Mexico City when his bird chirped, “He’s drunk, he’s drunk.”
Sure enough, police gave him a breathalyzer and he failed, spending the night in jail with his feathered fink.
A British man living in California recently got the surprise reunion of a lifetime when his grey African parrot, Nigel, came home — four years after he flew the coop.
Nigel was discovered by a Spanish-speaking person in another part of California and returned to his owner largely unchanged, except for one noticeable difference.Gone was his British accent. Instead, he chattered away in Spanish.
Pet birds can be lifelong companions, especially parrots: African grey parrots can live as long as 60 years, so Nigel’s world travels were just a flash in the pan for that adventurous parrot.
Humans aren’t just drawn to birds for their pretty plumage or their sassy companionship; people have even found uses for bird by-products.
Bird droppings are specifically what led to the U.S. staking claim to a network of islands in the remote Pacific in the mid-19th century.
The Guano Islands are so named for the guano — bird-created fertilizer — that hordes of sea birds leave on them.
The sun exposure on the islands was thought to create ideal conditions for drying out the droppings and making good quality fertilizer.
Prior to the invention of synthetic fertilizers, guano was a potent and valuable fertilizer for farmers’ fields.
Each island can host hundreds of thousands of seabirds who nest there, and others migrate there for winter. That’s a lot of guano.
(Guano has also been used as a facial treatment, but I digress).
The U.S. fought with Britain, Venezuela and Peru over the Guano Islands, and eventually staked out five areas as its own. As it turns out, those areas weren’t great for producing the fertilizer after all.
One island received too much rain, so the guano never dried; one was too low-lying, so guano could wash away in the sea.
Seeing that attempt to secure guano as a bust, the U.S. government abandoned that idea, but kept the islands under its watch. In 2009, it declared the string of islands and the waters around them a national monument.
Recently, the U.S. expanded the area covered by that national monument to 490,000 square miles — six times its previous size.
Claiming those unproductive islands was perhaps a bird-brained scheme, but their current designation as a national monument helps protect those seabirds and the waters around their islands, preserving the fish species the birds depend on.
