This just a quick note to subscribers of Onithology.com blog posts. I will be out of the country for a few weeks and won’t be able to publish my blog until early October. If you miss reading my blog, I have written about 400 of them so you can read the ones you missed or …
Fall is migration time in the Northern Hemisphere when birds leave their summer homes to winter at locations to the south; in the spring the migration is reversed, the birds moving from their summer homes to breeding locations in the north. But have you ever thought about the birds living in the Southern Hemisphere? Where …
The Secretarybird –Sagittarius serpentarius. The common name comes from the feathers of the head crest which resemble quill pens. Sagittarius, from the Latin, means “arrow or archer” and refers to the way an archer walked while stalking prey; serpentarius means “serpent handler” from the bird’s supposed affinity for snakes. They are endemic to Africa where …
One of the most notable characteristics of birds is their lightweight skeletal systems. Even though most bird bones are thin-walled and hollow relative to mammal bones, the wall of the bone itself is quite dense and the internal struts deter breaking. Some recent research tells us something that we had not known before: bigger birds …
