So I’m watching a Sir David Attenborough (Natural Curiousities on Netflix), to cope withe the crushing lonliness of solo housesitting, and he’s on about Really Weird animals and talks about the origins of the pheonix- a bird that people travelling though Africa only rarely saw shrouded in the streamy mists of volcanic soda lakes (which are literally boiling hot and also extremely caustic).
And all they’d see is the occasional bit of bright red plumage and see these things bobbing in and out of the horrible death clouds coming off the lake, and naturally came up with the myth of a firebird what the fuck ELSE would be living IN A GODDAMN VOLCANO??
The Central Africans told this to the Egyptians who told the Greeks* about this mysterious animal, and they ran hog-wild with it to create the now-famous Pheonix, but-
The bird they were seeing in those volcanic lakes?
*There is significant academic debate about who told who what when (esp as the firebird myth has cropped up multiple times and been culturally exchanged many, MANY times) but the Flamingo>Egyptian Bennu>Greek Pheonix>European Pheonix chain is fairly well agreed upon.
Some of my favorite tags so far:
@asleepinawell “Natural Curiousities” is on netflix and I think the PBS streaming app. BBC streaming keeps crashing on me but probably there too. It’s very much like his usual work, but with 500% more “Look at these funky specimens and the frantic scribbles of early scientific illustrators confronted with a fucking kangaroo” and “I’m Sir David Fucking Attenborough And I’m Going To Snuggle This Cheetah”
@heedra You are correct! According to Wikipedia: “The name “flamingo” comes from Portuguese or Spanish flamengo, “flame-colored”, in turn coming from Provençal flamenc from flama “flame” and Germanic-like suffix -ing, with a possible influence of words like “Fleming” THEY WERE TRYING TO TELL US ALL ALONG!
@melifair You’re in good company- I used to call them “Pimentos” until I was three and finally got the hang of the Letter “F”
Also, Apologies about the spelling. I have a reading disorder and it causes me to mis-read and by turn misspell certain words, especially ones with two nonidentical vowels in the middle of the word like Their and Becuase. Good thing we all know what I’m talking about anyway!
But how could you not tell us WHAT THE FLAMINGOS ARE DOING IN A VOLCANO?????
So Flamingoes are pretty badass.
They’re hyperspecialized filter-feeders, not unlike krill-feeding whales, and thier heads are shaped Like That, so they can dangle thier heads in the water, suck up water full of algae and brine shrimp and other goodies, and filter them out with thier Spiny Tongues.
(Image Source Apparently, according to the Ancient Romans, Flamingo Tounge has a “Superb” flavor. You Wacky Roman Bastards)
But the lakes with the tastiest and most dense algae and arthropods are not Normal lakes. African Lesser Flamingoes (lesser becuase they have a smaller range, but probably our phoenix given how people were travelling at the time) like to hang out in extremely Alkaline Lakes where thier favorite algae grow, and those lakes are mostly in the volcanic Great Rift Valley. Where the lava and occasional venting of hot toxic gasses happen.
In addition to the wierd diet, and caustic water, Flamingoes can also cope with some pretty intense climate. The Alkaline Lakes Lesser Flamigoes like are also VERY HIGH in the mountains, where they cope with low oxygen, Intense UV radiation, and rapid and extreme temperature fluctuations- below freezing at night and heatstroke hot in the day.
You can tell how well a Flamigo is Flamingoing by it’s color! The lovely red-pink color comes from the algae and arthopods they eat: the better-fed and healthier a flamingo is, the more intense thier colors will be! Zoo famingoes can thrive on a wide variety of diets, but thier colors will fade, and it will cause everyone to lose romantic interest, so they have to be fed a special color-intensive diet to keep breeding programs going.
So while Flamingoes probably weren’t the bird you were picturing when you thought of a Phoenix , they’re Pretty Badass and worthy of the mythic lore.
So I was told that Human Planet had a segment about pigeons in the Cities episode that I might be interested in and I was honestly so underwhelmed. I haven’t finished the episode so maybe there’s more pigeon stuff but I feel like all I saw was more Birds Of Prey Are The Only Cool And Acceptable Birds and pigeons are Trespassers In Our Urban World Who Shit On Everything And Are Useless On Top Of It. Which isn’t true and I’m so tired of this being framed as some horrible burden that humanity must face. Pigeons are the victims here, not us.
Hate of pigeons didn’t start until the 20th Century. Before that was about 9,900 years of loving them. The rock pigeon was domesticated 10,000 years ago and not only that, we took them freaking everywhere. Pigeons were the first domesticated bird and they were an all-around animal even though they were later bred into more specialised varieties. They were small but had a high feed conversion rate, in other words it didn’t cost a whole lot of money or space to keep and they provided a steady and reliable source of protein as eggs or meat. They home, so you could take them with you and then release them from wherever you were and they’d pretty reliably make their way back. Pigeons are actually among the fastest flyers and they can home over some incredible distances (what fantastic navigators!). They were an incredibly important line of communication for multiple civilisations in human history. You know the first ever Olympics? Pigeons were delivering that news around the Known World at the time. Also, their ability to breed any time of year regardless of temperature or photoperiod? That was us, we did that to them, back when people who couldn’t afford fancier animals could keep a pair or two for meat/eggs.
Rooftop pigeon keeping isn’t new, it’s been around for centuries and is/was important to a whole variety of cultures. Pigeons live with us in cities because we put them there, we made them into city birds. I get that there are problems with bird droppings and there’s implications for too-large flocks. By all means those are things we should look to control, but you don’t need to hate pigeons with every fibre of your being. You don’t need to despise them or brush them off as stupid (they have been intelligence tested extensively as laboratory animals because guess what other setting they’re pretty well-adapted to? LABORATORIES!) because they aren’t stupid. They’re soft intelligent creatures and I don’t have time to list everything I love about pigeons again. You don’t need to aggressively fight them or have a deep desire to kill them at all. It’s so unnecessary, especially if you realise that the majority of reasons pigeons are so ubiquitous is a direct result of human interference.
We haven’t always hated pigeons though, Darwin’s pigeon chapter in The Origin of Species took so much of the spotlight that publishers at the time wanted him to make the book ONLY about pigeons and to hell with the rest because Victorian’s were obsessed with pigeons (as much as I would enjoy a book solely on pigeons, it’s probably best that he didn’t listen).
My point is, for millenia, we loved pigeons. We loved them so much we took them everywhere with us and shaped them into a bird very well adapted for living alongside us.
It’s only been very recently that we decided we hated them, that we decided to blame them for ruining our cities. The language we use to describe pigeons is pretty awful. But it wasn’t always, and I wish we remembered that. I wish we would stop blaming them for being what we made them, what they are, and spent more time actually tackling the problems our cities face.
I just have a lot of feelings about how complex and multidimensional hating pigeons actually is
ALL OF THIS
And also pigeon poop was a very valuable fertilizer before we had other options, people would hire guards to stop thieves from stealing their flock’s poop.
#LovePigeonsAgain2016
Late night, reblogging, so bear with me here…
Thank you for posting much of my thoughts over the past year and a half! I am known by many as “that guy who keeps the raptors”. Yes this is true, I do keep and handle raptors for educational purposes, but what many fail to realize is, I am fascinated with pigeons. My interest with birds began with the obvious, the raptors, corvids, and parrots. Then I discovered pigeons. These wonderful little birds with big attitudes and the incredible ability to thrive among people.
The organization I work with got its first pigeon a little over a year ago. She was a rescue with nowhere else to go. I was quickly drawn to her character and attitude about life.
We rarely handled her, but we did spend time with her.
She grew attached to our volunteers very quickly because their were no other birds she could socialize with in our facility.
We never intended to train her for educational programs. It was a job reserved for our raptors. It was our pigeon who decided she would be a part of what we were doing. One day, when we entered her enclosure to change water and food, she decided to fly to my hand and perch like our raptors do.
No training, no treats, just the reward of being with us.
What we hadn’t noticed for the couple months prior was her watching us. This brilliant little bird had been watching us every day as we trained and worked with our raptors. Finally she decided she didn’t want to be left out any longer. She made her place on our hands.
This occurred several times before we finally put her on a glove and brought her into the public. Needless to say, she was right at home. She fluffed up and preened the entire evening while people gawked and asked us why we had a pigeon on one glove and a hawk on another.
Since then, we’ve added 5 more rescued pigeons to our growing flock. And our pigeon (Tybalt) has become a mainstay ambassador for our programs. Each of our pigeons are incredibly fun to watch and interact with. Pigeons simply don’t get enough love. They are marvelous creatures incredibly suited to life alongside people both physically and mentally.
Raptors my have been my introduction into birds, but pigeons opened my eyes to a new appreciation for them and the fascinating world of bird cognition.
NOT ONLY are pigeons very amazing, worth our respect, and INTERESTING (did you read any of that stuff above?), but they are beautiful too!
Not chickens, but I feel compelled to spread this gospel.
hmmm. this is making me rethink my new york pigeon hate
and, AND, haven’t you ever wondered why city pigeons come in a magnificent rainbow of unusual colors?
Most wild animals all look alike within a species, with TINY, RARE individual variations in terms of rare color morphs, unusually big or small animals, different facial markings and other subtleties. But there is no evolutionary benefit to having species where everyone looks slightly different, and in fact, it’s beneficial for species to be similar and consistent, with a distinctive aesthetic. Especially if you’re trying to blend into the environment – a black wolf is all very well, but it looks positively silly in the summer tundra, where its grey/brown/brindley cousins blend in. A white deer has a great aesthetic – and a very short lifespan in the forest. Distinctive Protagonist looks are rare in the wild, simply because natural selection usually comes down heavily on them.
To humans, most wild animals are visually indistinguishable from each other.
As a result, most wild animals are like
“Oh it’s obvious – you can tell the twins apart because Kara has a big nose.”
Wild animals usually have a pretty consistent aesthetic within their species. It’s important to them!
SO WHAT IS GOING ON WITH PIGEONS?
Look, in one small picture you’ve got a red color morph in the center, several melanistic dark morphs, a few solid black birds, a few variations on the wildtype wing pattern, a PIEBALD, a piebald copper color morph…
Like, there are LAYERS UPON LAYERS of pigeon diversity in most flocks you see. Pure white ones with black wingtips. Solid brown ones with pink iridescent patches. Pale pinkish pigeons.
WHY IS THAT? When other wild animals consider “being slightly fluffier than my brother” to be dangerously distinctive in most circumstances?
BECAUSE CITY PIGEONS AREN’T TRULY WILD.
MANY OF THEM (POSSIBLY MOST OR ALL) ARE FERAL MIXES.
THEY WERE ONCE BELOVED PETS, SPECIAL MESSENGERS, EXQUISITE SHOW-WINNERS, AND PRIZED LIVESTOCK.
THEIR PRETTY COLORS WERE DELIBERATELY INTRODUCED BY HUMANS.
AND NOW THEIR HUMANS DON’T LOVE THEM ANY MORE.
See, pigeon fanciers bred (and still breed!) a huge array of pigeons. And the resulting swarms of released/discarded/escaped/phased out “fancy” pigeons stayed around humans. What else were they going to do? They interbred with wildtype pigeons.
Lots of the pigeons you see in public are feral. They’re not wild animals. They’re citizen animals. They’re genetically engineered. And now that’s what “city” pigeons are.
These “wild” horses are all different colors because they’re actually feral. Mustangs in the American West are the descendants of imported European horses – they’re an invasive domestic species that colonized an ecological niche, but they are domestic animals. Their distinctive patterns were deliberately bred by humans. A few generations of running around on the prairie isn’t going to erase that and turn them back into wildtypes. If you catch an adult mustang and train it for a short period, you can ride it and have it do tricks and make it love you. It’s a domestic animal. You can’t really do that with an adult zebra.
No matter how many generations these dogs stay on the street and interbreed with one another, they won’t turn back into wolves. They can’t. They’re deliberately genetically engineered. If you catch one (even after generations of rough living, even as an adult) you can make it stare at your face, care about your body language, and love you.
City pigeons? Well, you don’t have to like them, but they’re in the same boat. They’re tamed animals, bred on purpose, living in a human community. Their very bodies are marked with their former ownership and allegiance; they cannot really return to what they once were; if you caught one, you could make it love you (in a limited pigeon-y way.) They have gone to “the wild,” but not very far from us, and they’d be happy to come back.
So next time you see a flock of city pigeons, spare a moment to note their diversity. The wing patterns. The pied, mottled and brindled. The color types.
All of it was once meant to please you.
I am now on Team Pigeon. Thank you.
Aww, the pigeon discourse has come home to my dash again! Like a homing pigeon.
It’s not uncommon for chickens, especially roosters, to have iridescent green* feathers of varying intensity and hue, but those feathers are typically located on the body or tail, and are really more like black feathers with a green sheen. Some ckickens will have these feathers up in the head/neck area like
A) This Nice Australorp Rooster
B) This Buckwild Mutuant, which looks an awful lot like some of the feral chickens I saw roaming Hawai’i, though the photographer does not say where this specimen was found. His green feathers go right up to his throat! I’ve seen specimens there with some outright teal necks and heads, though they didn’t seem to be as popular with the ladies as thier more fair-headed cousins.
*Fun fact: almost no birds have green-pigmented feathers. The green color comes from light reflected from microscopic structures on the bird’s feathers. the only bird with Actual Green Pigment is the Turaco, which has Turacoverdin! This is probably only a fun fact if you are a biology nerd, but it’s one of the EXTREMELY FEW green pigments that occurs in vertebrete animals and comes from the Tucraco’s copper-rich diet, which is another Fun Fact only if you are major NERD. here’s a picture of one becuase they’re cute, and becuase it’s a really strange green for a bird to have:
So while Turacos come in the nice limey green color like in my Icon, Chickens Do not.
Yet.
I see in the replies section a lot of people are confused how there are other birds that are green– all of the birds that do not have green pigmented feathers, but look green?! The OP mentions this but for clarity: That is because bird feathers are colored in two ways: Pigments and structural color! Green (and blue) pigment is pretty rare in bird feathers. Turacos, as mentioned above, being an exception!
Most birds that sport bright blues, greens, purples, and iridescent feathers have feathers that use structural color. The feather uses light refraction between microscopic physical structures in the feather barbs to create a color. Iridescent feathers are the greatest example of this (it’s how they color ‘shift’ depending on the angle of the light and your viewing angle!), but non-iridescent feathers can use structures to make color too, by using air pockets in the feather barbs to refract light and bounce only certain spectra back to the viewer (most of the non-iridescent blues, greens, violets, and UV colors of feathers are formed this way; e.g. jays, parrots, fruit doves, etc). People who have seen green/blue parrots bathe know that if the feathers get soaked, they look brownish… because they are no longer refracting the light in a way that allows you to see the green/blue (at least until they dry out!).
Some birds have both structural and pigmented feather colors! IF YOU DON’T THINK THIS IS SOME OF THE RADDEST STUFF I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT TO TELL YOU, COME ON
Can someone please tell me this was a pair that was trying to do the death spiral that mating birds of prey do, and somehow in the process they ended up stuck on a road sign.
Because if it is, this is definitely one of the funniest “Okay, maybe we WERE a little bit over our head when we started this…” moments.
I doubt it. One of these birds is a juvenile (the top) while the other is an adult (bottom). The juvenile would have no interest in mating.
Honestly when I see hawks doing stupid stuff 9/10 times its a harris hawk—this seriously just looks like one of those stupid hawks time. They are one of the only social raptors, so this leads to some funny things, like
Stacking
The harris hawk argument for stacking is “your back is less Pokey than a cactus so imma use it”
Not even falconers are safe…
They even hold hands
Please, what are you doing harris hawks, learn how to hawk
