King Vulture Pictures

One species of cariama is called the crested; the other is called Burmeister’s. The crested cariama lives on the grasslands of western Brazil and northern Argentina. It spends most of its time walking on the ground and runs rapidly, instead of flying to escape from its enemies. At night it roosts in low trees. It generally travels with one other cariama or with a small flock. It eats fruit, berries, insects, lizards and snakes. Sometimes farmers capture young cariamas and put them with their chickens in order to keep their farmyards free of snakes.

Cariamas begin mating in the spring and the males strut, giving strange dog-like yelping calls in an effort to impress the females. The crested cariarnas nest on the ground. The females lay two brown-spotted eggs. The parents take turns incubating the eggs which hatch in about three and a half weeks. The young are covered with down when they emerge from the egg.

Like the crested cariama, the Burmeister’s cariama has long legs and grayish- brown feathers but it is slightly smaller. It lives in brushland areas instead of open grasslands, and builds its nest in low trees. Cariamas are said to have the odd habit of giving loud calls if they sense danger from afar only to become perfectly silent when danger is near. At the last minute they put their heads down and swiftly run away. They can fly, but not as well as most birds.

Cariamas are classified as belonging to the order Gruiformes, which includes the cranes, rails, and bustards. Some ornithologists think that this very old order of birds, which now contains only twelve families, is on its way out. Many species in it have recently become extinct or are, like the whooping crane of North America, on the verge of extinction.

The cariamas resemble the bustards of Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia more closely than they do any other bird in the order. The bustards, like the cariamas, live on grassy plains and in brushland, and have brownish-grey feathers. The great bustard of Europe is about three and a half feet tall; the cariama stands about two feet tall.

Cariamas Pictures

Pelicans are large birds. The average white pelican of North America weighs from ten to seventeen pounds when it is full grown. It is from four to five feet long and has a wingspan of eight or nine feet. Brown pelicans are smaller, usually weighing about eight pounds, and having a wingspan of seven and a half feet.
These birds are found almost everywhere in warm and temperate regions. The brown and the white pelicans are the only species in the Americas. In Europe, Africa, southern Asia, and Australia there are six species. Pelicans have existed in the world for a very long time. Fossil remains date back to between thirty or forty million years ago.

All pelicans have a throat, or gular, pouch which can be extended when they are feeding. The gular pouch of the American white pelican can hold as much as three gallons. This pelican fishes from the surface of the water; the brown pelican dives into the water for its food.

The white pelicans sometimes have a community fishing arrangement. They gather in a semi-circle on the surface of shallow water and with noisy splashings drive the fish in towards shore. Then, almost in unison, they gather the fish into their voluminous pouches. Pelicans for the most part eat “trash fish,” that is, fish which are not valuable to the commercial fisherman.

In March and April the white pelicans of North America begin their long migration from the Gulf Coast to their inland breeding areas. Over mountains and deserts they fly, to islands in fresh water lakes in Utah, Wyoming, and western Canada. A few nest in coastal areas, but most of the seven major breeding areas of white pelicans in North America are in fresh water.

They nest in colonies of from a few birds to several hundred pairs, depending on the local food supply. They may lay their chalky white eggs on the ground or in mounds of earth from eight to twelve inches high.
Baby pelicans are naked when they come out of the eggs, but within a week they are covered with white down. Their first feathers are grey.

When the young are about four weeks old they leave their nest and gather into groups with other young pelicans. From the time of hatching until the young are ready to feed on their own, the parents have bad to supply each one with about one hundred and fifty pounds of fish. In order to do this the parent birds may have bad to fly as far as one hundred miles a day to get food.

In September and October the white pelicans fly south to winter along the Gulf Coast. The brown pelicans follow much the same breeding pattern, but they are coastal birds and are seldom seen inland.

Pelican Pictures

The white storks appear to like the company of men. Originally they nested in tall trees but have given this up in favour of nesting on rooftops of churches and houses. And, because they are supposed to bring good luck, people in Central Europe have welcomed them, going so far as to put up wheels and platforms so the storks can easily find a place to build their heavy, bulky nests.

Even in the United States, where the white storks exist only in zoos, the big birds are often pictured as a symbol of maternity, probably a carry-over from some obscure European tradition. Early in the spring the white storks which winter in Africa begin flocking in large groups. They circle high in the sky soaring on updrafts of warm air. Then, still in large groups, they take off for their ancestral nesting grounds in Europe, arriving in.April or May. Some flocks go through Spain; some go through the Near East and the Balkans, and a few go across the Mediterranean and through Italy.

The males usually arrive at the nesting sites first, followed soon after by the females. Storks are thought to mate for life, but, if a partner fails to show up within a reasonable time, the stork that arrived first will take a new mate. They often use the same nest for several years, adding new material to it each year. The male hunts for sticks; the female fits them into the nest. Adult white storks, like all other storks, are voiceless, so their courtship displays consist of circular flights and bill clacking. They also have a peculiar display in which they throw their heads backward onto their backs, which makes them look as if they had broken necks. This particular display continues throughout their nesting period.
Eventually the female lays three to five white eggs which both parents take turns incubating for a month. When the babies finally hatch they are fed with insects, frogs, mice, and other small animals which the parents have picked up in lakes, marshes and fields near the nesting site.

The young storks remain in the nest for about two months. Then they are able to fly and can join their mother and father in hunting for food. In the fall when the flocks begin to migrate south, the parents usually leave before the young. The young birds apparently know instinctively where and by what route to fly south for the winter. They return to a place near where they were hatched when they are ready to nest.

White storks are large handsome white birds with black wing tips. They may stand as high as four feet. They have red feet and long straight red bills. At one time they were found in Asia as far east as China and Japan, but their numbers are decreasing. Only in Central Europe are they still a relatively common bird.

White Storks Pictures

The most colourful flamingos are those of the New World, especially the American flamingo which lives in the Caribbean and parts of South America. The adult American flamingos have pinkish-red feathers instead of the pinkish-white feathers of the birds living in the Old World.

Flamingos have a five-foot wingspread and stand about five feet tall. They have very long legs and necks, and fly with them outstretched. They are usually seen feeding or flying in fairly large groups. On their colonial breeding grounds the flock may number as many as twenty thousand birds.

The beak of a flamingo is very different from that of any other bird. The top part of it is bent down and almost looks as if it had been broken. When the flamingo feeds, it lowers its head so its bill is upside down on the shallow bottom of the salty mud flat. Then it scoops up mud, algae, and small shrimp. The bird has special filters on its beak and bristles in its mouth so it can get rid of any shells or other inedible objects.
Flamingos live on salt flats in almost desert-like regions where few other creatures can live. Those that nest inland do so on shallow salt-water lakes like those in Kenya in Africa. One advantage of such areas is that there are almost no predators, and since these birds nest on the ground their eggs and young are therefore safe from other animals. However, nesting areas may be flooded or become too dry. Then a whole season may pass without any young flamingos being raised. Flamingos may also be frightened from their nesting areas by low- flying aircraft, and desert their nest for that season.

The American flamingos usually arrive at their nesting places in the Caribbean in February. They often come by night in small flocks until there are several thousand of them on one small island. They soon begin their displays. Long lines of females weave back and forth across the salt flats. The males stand about in small groups occasionally flicking their wings and pecking at one another. The air is filled with the sound of constant gabbling. Finally pairs are formed and cone-like nests of mud are built.

The female lays a single white egg in the nest. Both the parents take turns sitting on it for about a month. They usually exchange places in the morning and in the evening, giving each other a chance to feed.
When the young bird hatches, it is covered with white down which is later replaced by grey down. It stays in the nest for several days and then joins a flock of other young flamingos its own age. The young bird then may be fed by any adult bird, and not just by its own parents. When they first hatch the babies’ beaks are not curved, but by the time they are six weeks old they have the same type of curved beaks as their parents.

By the time they are two and a half ; months old the young flamingos have developed their first brownish-white feathers and are able to fly. Flocks begin leaving the nesting grounds for the wintering grounds on other Caribbean islands and in South America. Not until they are four years old do the young birds acquire adult plumage and return to their ancestral nesting grounds to breed.

There are three other species of flamingos found in South America—the Chilean, the Andean, and the James’s. They differ in color of feathers, bills and legs. The An- dean and James’s flamingos breed on salt water lakes high in the Andes. For a long time it was thought that the James’s flamingo was extinct, but in 1957 ornithologists discovered some of these birds in a mountain lake in Bolivia. Two other ornithological expeditions were made to lakes in this region, and nesting flocks of James’s flamingos were found. A few of these rare birds were captured and taken to the Bronx Zoo in New York City in 1960.

The flamingos found in Europe, Asia and Africa are white with light pink wings. Their nesting colonies are in Spain and France as well as in the Near East, India and Africa. The birds which nest in Europe spend the winters in Africa, Flamingos have been in existence in the world for a long time. Fossil remains date back about forty million years. Some five thousand years ago a Neolithic artist painted the picture of one on the wall of a cave in Spain. This painting can still be seen today.

Flamingos Pictures

Except for the breeding and nesting seasons, penguins spend most of their lives at sea, swimming about with just their heads showing. They eat squids and fish in the water and drink the salty water of the sea. Even the penguins’ eyes are adapted for seeing in the water; on land the birds act as if they were near-sighted.
Penguins are found only in the southern hemisphere. Two of seventeen species nest in the Antarctic. The other fifteen species nest on coastal islands of South America, New Zealand, Australia, and southern Africa.
Colour variations among the species are generally found in head feathers, eyes, bills and feet. Except for these areas, most penguins are black and white, although the patterns vary among the species.

The emperor penguin is the largest of all species. The adults stand almost four feet tall and weigh about seventy-five pounds. In March, autumn below the equator, the emperor penguins begin arriving at their ancestral nesting grounds in the Antarctic. They come in groups, fat and sleek from months of feeding at sea. Often they make five-foot-high leaps out of the water on to the ice, landing on their feet. Then they begin their waddling walk inland to the nesting area. Their legs are placed so far back on their bodies, that, out of water, the upright birds trudge along at a slow pace. Sometimes, especially if they are pursued, they toboggan over the snow and ice on their bellies. Then they can make rapid progress.

Penguins often mate for long periods, if not for life, When they arrive at the nesting grounds, only those breeding for the first time or those finding themselves without mates have to find new mates. The single white egg is laid by the female in May. Then a long ordeal begins for the male emperor penguin because he alone is responsible for hatching it. The female heads back to sea to feed. No place in the world is colder than the Antarctic in winter. Not only are there terrible winds, but the temperature drops far below zero Fahrenheit.

The male penguin has to balance the egg on his feet, covering it with a flap of skin and feathers on his lower abdomen; if it touches the ground or is exposed to the air for even a short time it freezes. Not all members of the penguin colony have eggs, but all would like to have one to hatch. If an egg is dropped by a parent, it may be broken by other penguins attempting to get it for themselves. During storms the males that are incubating gather in groups for greater warmth, hopping about carefully, each with an egg balanced on its feet.

The eggs hatch in about two months and within a few days the mother penguins arrive to take charge of the babies. The fathers then go off to sea to break their long fast. They have not eaten since they came to the nesting grounds in March, and have lost at least one-third of their weight. They return within the month to help take care of the young.

Young emperor penguins are covered with greyish down. They spend the first days of their lives on the feet of their parents; they feed by sticking their heads into their parents’ gullets to get regurgitated food. If any young birds are accidentally left on the ground by their parents, there are many non-breeding birds ready to take care of them.

Within Four or five months from the time the young hatch, they have lost their down and acquired their feathers. In the meantime the colony has begun to break up and move back to the sea. The first birds to go are those which do not have young. The emperors move off from Antarctica in small orderly groups, usually on ice flows, as the ice breaks up in the summer. The young, in brown plumage, are among the last to leave. About two years later they will have adult breeding plumage and will return to the Antarctic continent. There they will breed near the place where they were hatched.

About the time the first migrant emperors are leaving the Antarctic, the Adelie penguins are arriving in flocks for their nesting season. They are much smaller than the emperors, being only about one and a half feet tall.
The Adelies nest in windswept areas where there is little snow. Nests are built of pebbles, the only material available in this region. Part of their courtship ritual is the presentation of pebbles to a potential partner. Male and female penguins look alike and apparently even they cannot readily tell the difference between the sexes. An Adelie male goes courting with a pebble in his beak. If he presents it to an unresponsive female, or one already mated, she pays no attention to him. If he offers it to a male, he has a fight on his hands. But if he offers it to an unmated and willing female, she accepts it. From then on it is the male’s job to get pebbles, preferably round ones, to complete the nest. He spends much of his time trying to steal these from neighboring nests.

Eggs appear in the nests in November and hatch in about a month. The parents sometimes eat snow during this mating and incubation period, but otherwise they fast. Adelies nest in large colonies of from 100,000 to almost 500,000 birds. The king penguin looks very much like the emperor penguin but is smaller and has yellowish feathers on its breast. The king penguin stands about three feet tall and breeds in the Falklands and other sub-antarctic islands. Like the emperor, the king penguins hold the precious eggs on their feet.
The gentoo penguin nests in the Falklands and on small islands off the tip of South America. It is a shy bird, but fairly common, and was called Johnny Penguin by the seal hunters. It is the only penguin which has a white mark on its head.

The gentoo penguin spends the four or five winter months at sea. In spring it moves inland to nest.
Its chief enemies are those of most penguins, the leopard seal and the skuas. The leopard seals catch adult penguins in the water. Skuas, large birds of the southern hemisphere, eat the unattended eggs and young of the penguins.

Penguines Pictures

During most of the year emus travel about in small flocks in grassland regions of Australia. They eat plants, fruits, insects and small animals.When nesting time comes in February and March they pair off. Each pair builds a nest on the ground out of grasses and leaves and the female lays from seven to ten eggs. The eggs are big—each may be five and a half inches long and weigh as much as a pound and a half. Only the father sits on the eggs; he has to incubate them for about two months. When the young emus finally hatch, the father alone takes care of them.

Baby emus do not look like their parents; they have striped yellow and brown down at first. This probably helps protect them from predators, because it is very difficult to see them in their native habitat. It takes about two years before young emus become adult birds and raise families of their own.

Emus are rather gentle birds. They are curious about any strange creature which appears and will sometimes come up to men and stare with large, pale-brown eyes. The early settlers in Australia killed emus for food and also ate their eggs. Even now the farmers and ernus are not on good terms. The big birds eat the farmer’s crops and crash through the fences which have been built to keep them out of cultivated fields. At one time the men who were trying to raise wheat in western Australia asked the government for help against emus, and a small number of soldiers was sent out to shoot the birds. Emus can run very rapidly and can also swim well, and the soldiers were unable to kill very many of them on the birds’ home ground, so the “Emu War” was a failure. Since then a fence five hundred miles long, supposed to be secure against emus, has been put up in the interior region of the country and it is constantly checked to make sure that emus do not break through it.

Fortunately Australians, like Americans, are now beginning to value the original wildlife of their country. There are plans for setting up wildlife sanctuaries where emus as well as other rare Australian animals can live in peace. Emus do well in captivity—as a matter of fact they do so well in some zoos that the flocks have grown to greater numbers than the zoos have room for.

According to scientists who have studied fossil remains, other species of ernus lived in the Australia-Tasmania area as long ago as a hundred thousand years. Now there is only one species left.
The other big flightless bird of Australia is the cassowary. There are also other species of cassowaries found in New Guinea and on surrounding islands. The Australian cassowary lives in forests in the northeastern part of the continent.

Unlike the emus, adult cassowaries are not friendly. They strike out with their powerful clawed feet and are capable of killing a man. In zoos they often fight with each other, and even males and females have to be kept in separate pens. In spite of this bird’s aggressiveness, some of the primitive peoples of New Guinea keep captive cassowaries and use their feathers as money. Cassowaries have a strange bony covering, which looks like a helmet, on their heads. The exact purpose of this is not known, but scientists think it may protect the bird’s head as it travels through the thick underbrush of its forest home.

The skin of cassowaries’ heads and upper neck is featherless and is bright red and blue. Some species have long folds of skin, called wattles, which hang down from their necks. Other than serving as decoration, these strange wattles seem to have no particular function. The plumage of adult cassowaries is black and quite heavy. The birds stand about five feet tall; the female is somewhat larger than the male.

Shy birds seldom seen in their native forests, they can run at rapid speeds through the forest undercover and are also excellent swimmers. They eat fruits, insects and small animals. Their calls are a combination of grunts and bellows. At nesting time the pairs build large nests of leaves on the ground and each female lays from three to six dark-green eggs. Then she departs and the male takes over, sitting on the nest until the young birds hatch. At first the young are striped, but their later feathers are brown and eventually, when they are adults, they have black feathers. Other big flightless ground birds still found in the world today are the ostriches of Africa and the rheas of South America.

Emus and Cassowaries Pictures

The whistling swans of North America spend the summer nesting north of the Arctic Circle, where they arrive about the first of May. There the pairs raise from one to five young cygnets. They leave their breeding grounds in the fall and spend the winter in California and along the Chesapeake Bay in the eastern part of the United States. They have been protected by law since 1918 and it is illegal to hunt them. They are somewhat smaller than the mute swans, an adult measuring about three and a half feet in length, and have black bills and feet.

Trumpeter swans, the only other native North American species, are the largest swans, being almost five and a half feet long and weighing about twenty-five pounds. Like the whistling swans, they have black bills and feet. However, their nesting range extends farther south, down as far as Wyoming and Montana.  At one time there were large numbers of these big wild swans in western and middle- western parts of the United States, but their nesting grounds were replaced by farms. The swans were also hunted almost to the point of extinction. Now they are legally protected and there are small colonies in Yellowstone National Park and in Red Rocks Refuge as well as in sanctuaries in Canada and Alaska. The trumpeters tend to stay in these areas all year rather than migrate for the winter months. They have a loud,musical, trumpeting call.

The two swans which live in the southern hemisphere are unique because they have black feathers, The one which lives in South America is the black-necked swan. It lives all the way south from Brazil to the Falkland Islands. Only its neck is black; the rest of its body is covered with conventional white feathers like the northern species. It averages about three and a half feet in length. It is often seen in zoos, but in zoos in the northern hemisphere these swans have trouble trying to raise young. Since the seasons are opposite to those of their home, they lay their eggs at the beginning of winter.
The other southern hemisphere swan is the black swan of Australia. The Dutch sailors who first saw this swan when they were exploring the Australian coast in 1697 could hardly believe their eyes. They took black swans back with them to Batavia in the Dutch East Indies and later to Europe. However, these unusual swans did not become really popular in Europe until Josephine, the wife of Napoleon, acquired some for the royal parks.

In their native land the black swans spend the winter on salt water in coastal areas. In the spring they migrate to the southern part of the continent to nest on fresh water lakes. Like other swans, they build a bulky nest on islands or in shallow water. They lay from four to seven greenish- white eggs. The nesting period is from August to December—spring and summer in the southern hemisphere. If there is a drought they do not nest.

The young birds’ first plumage consists of grey feathers; only when they are adults do they have black feathers.
Adults have unusual curled feathers on their backs as well as white flight feathers, or primaries, in their wings. The white feathers show only when the birds fly. They have red beaks and red eyes.

The black swans were killed by the native Australians and by the early settlers. Now they are protected by law and their only enemies, especially during the nesting season, are the foxes, which the settlers introduced to the country, and water rats. Black swans are shown on the armorial standard of Western Australia and have been pictured on Australian stamps. The river at Perth, where the black swans were first seen by the Dutch, is named Swan River.

Swans Pictures