Our Neighbors: Oriental Magpie-Robin
More kudos to Lip Kee for fine photography. This is one of the most elegantly marked birds we have at the NTU campus. The zippy stripe along the wing makes it look like a fast car.
More kudos to Lip Kee for fine photography. This is one of the most elegantly marked birds we have at the NTU campus. The zippy stripe along the wing makes it look like a fast car.
I didn’t take this picture: It’s by Lip Kee. But the bird is the same as the long-tailed parakeets I see in small flocks on my morning walks. Sometimes they’re roosting high up among some leafless branches, and the morning sun makes their little bellies glow pink and orange. But I never have the tripod […]
I spotted this guy near the entrance to our apartment building. His belly is bright intense yellow. He’s quick and very cheering to look at.
Look what’s outside our window these days! I’ve seen both male and female of this species. This is not my own picture: our local male has a darker yellow on his casque. The female has a smaller casque and her bill/casque ensemble is whiter. But both are LARGE birds; I only notice them when they […]
I saw this bird flying overhead on my walk this morning. It perched high in a tree, so I mostly saw a dark shape against the sky, of a medium-sized black bird with two long tail wires hanging down and black tear-shaped appendages at the end of the tail wires.
Another restless bird in the Southeast Asian aviary.
Cassowaries are native to Indonesia, I think. They have big feet, whose toes are dangerous because they can eviscerate you if you approach them the tactlessly. The casque on the top of the head grows during the bird’s life and indicates age. Portrait below:
There are about fifty of these in an enclosure at the Bird Park, very colorful. I think they’re African rather than Asian, but they look great nonetheless.
There are plenty of Nicobar pigeons, bleeding heart pigeons and others in the Southeast Asian aviary. What you can’t tell from this picture is that the shorter feathers on this guy’s back are irridescent. The pigeons wander around the central area at will, rather than being confined to cages – I guess nobody’s tempted to […]
This magpie is native to Borneo. Hard to photograph, although not particularly shy, because it moves around a lot. So catching it at a standstill was a minor triumph. So was photographing it before my camera steamed up from the ambient humidity in the Southeast Asian Aviary. This aviary features a pond and a daily […]