Beautiful Animals

Violet-backed starling:

Bump

Turning page

got a window feeder a while back, took the birds a bit to find it, but eventually they did

Feeding birds is good karma! What's that white stuff in the background??

Besties...

A meerkat puts his arm around another in Makgadikadi Salt Pan, Botswana. The adult meerkat seems to be saying "One day, son, all this will be yours" as the pair scann the horizon together. The moment was caught on camera by caterer Thomas Retterath, 48, from, Nurburg, Germany.
Picture: THOMAS RETTERATH / BARCROFT MEDIA

Love that teddy bear with the jacket!


Amateur photographer Octavianus Darmawan has spent years capturing mother birds feeding their hungry chicks near his car service station in Jakarta, Indonesia. He said: "I'm always impressed when I see the mother birds feeding their chicks because I can see how difficult it can be to find food and raise their kids. I became appreciative of my own parents after watching these birds and it made me thankful for the struggle they'd gone through to teach me and raise me well."
Picture: Octavianus Darmawan/solent

the daily B & O

How can people say animals don't really feel? Looking at this thread you can see so many emotions in their beautiful little faces. Beautiful birds, bunnies, and otters! Those besties are soooooooooooooooooooooooo cute!

dj, LOVE seeing da boids and your backyard. Don't see any snow structures or entities. Go out and play before it's all gone. The bunny today looks a bit daunting. The otter today is to-die-for cute. Sigh and thanks.

Irish, Love dem meerkats. I watched a show on Animal Planet called Meerkat Manor. These are amazing, small, smart animals with an incredible social structure. Mother birds (and sometimes both parents) work like crazy to raise their young. Some humans could learn a thing or two from them.

Arella Mae, I think that humans in our arrogance have greatly underestimated what animals feel and are capable of. Brace yourself. I'm about to bore you with a story about a former pet of mine.

She was a little parakeet named Billie. She was smarter than some people I know. She laid many eggs. None hatched. No male boid.

Once I was very sick. Billie stayed on my pillow and refused to leave. My mother put her in her cage. She got out and came back to me. When I started school and my mother started working part time, we came home and found Billie in my doll carriage. I guess she was finding companionship as best she could. That very small bird was a giant presence in our home. Sigh.

Billie's coloring:

PS: The boid in the picture is a male. Couldn't find a female with the right coloring.

Marine worms:

Lots of females out there, Boida..

Hiya Francis, The top one is the right color, but on my computer it looks like a baby or a male. The bottom bird is definitely a female, but she's the wrong color of blue. Thanks for trying. I miss that little bird--after all these years.

Was billie really a parakeet? - looks like a budgerigar to me - very much like the one Mrs Hinge and I rescued from a street in Florence - don't know what is was doing out on it's own but it was completely tame (ate chips from your hand) and had no traffic sense - it flew onto the road and Mrs Hinge and a lovely old Italian lady shepherded traffic around it while I picked it up. Had to help an expat aussie of course.

Oh, I just looked it up, parakeet is a generic term for any one of a large number of unrelated small to medium sized species of parrot, that generally have long tail feathers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parakeet . well that's my learning for today taken care of!

I think in the US we generally call parakeets what you Ozians and Brits call budgies (judging from my remembrance of old Monty Python skits).

From National Geographic via BoingBoing.net, the New Zealand kakapo, large and flightless and extremely endangered, only 124 left in the wild, due largely to predation by non-native human-introduced feral cats.

[ing] http://boingboing.net/img/rare-birds-photo-contest-kakapo_32641_600x450.jpg [/img]

Hey, hinge. I have been scolded several times for using the term parakeet (scolded by an Aussie). It's a term used in the US for the kind of bird in the picture. It may also apply to other small parrotlike birds, but not in my neck of the woods.

I've had six of these wonderful little birds. Loved them all.

Well, this didn't work the first time, but I think it will this time. With any luck, that's the

KAKAPO

ah, looking back I see that it didn't work the first time because I am apparently incapable of typing
"img" on my own.

That photograph doesn't do any justice to the size of the bird. Never heard of these birds before. I expected some kind of kiwi bird size bird.

They seem bigger then wild turkeys.

tsar, whoa, cool, I had no idea they were that big either, since that photo was my first exposure to them too--what I thought was neat about it was the kakapo's protective coloration, the way it blends into the moss and lichen and vegetation, looks like it's moss-covered itself.