The red-breasted goose is a brightly marked species of goose in the genus Branta from Eurasia. It is currently classified as vulnerable by the IUCN.
The Canada goose, sometimes called Canadian goose, is a large wild goose with a black head and neck, white cheeks, white under its chin, and a brown body. It is native to the arctic and temperate regions of North America, and it is occasionally found during migration across the Atlantic in northern Europe. It has been introduced to the United Kingdom, Ireland, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand, Japan, Chile, Argentina, and the Falkland Islands. Like most geese, the Canada goose is primarily herbivorous and normally migratory; often found on or close to fresh water, the Canada goose is also common in brackish marshes, estuaries, and lagoons.
The herons are long-legged, long-necked, freshwater and coastal birds in the family Ardeidae, with 72 recognised species, some of which are referred to as egrets or bitterns rather than herons. Members of the genera Botaurus and Ixobrychus are referred to as bitterns, and, together with the zigzag heron, or zigzag bittern, in the monotypic genus Zebrilus, form a monophyletic group within the Ardeidae. Egrets do not form a biologically distinct group from herons, and tend to be named differently because they are mainly white or have decorative plumes in breeding plumage. Herons, by evolutionary adaptation, have long beaks.
The American coot, also known as a mud hen or pouldeau, is a bird of the family Rallidae. Though commonly mistaken for ducks, American coots are only distantly related to ducks, belonging to a separate order. Unlike the webbed feet of ducks, coots have broad, lobed scales on their lower legs and toes that fold back with each step which facilitates walking on dry land. Coots live near water, typically inhabiting wetlands and open water bodies in North America. Groups of coots are called covers or rafts. The oldest known coot lived to be 22 years old.
The black-billed cuckoo is a New World species in the Cuculidae (cuckoo) family. The scientific name is from Ancient Greek. The genus name, kokkuzo, means to call like a common cuckoo, and erythropthalmus is from eruthros, "red" and ophthalmos, "eye".
The Eurasian siskin is a small passerine bird in the finch family Fringillidae. It is also called the European siskin, common siskin or just siskin. Other (archaic) names include black-headed goldfinch, barley bird and aberdevine. It is very common throughout Europe and Eurosiberia. It is found in forested areas, both coniferous and mixed woodland where it feeds on seeds of all kinds, especially of alder and conifers.
The buff-bellied pipit or American pipit is a small songbird found on both sides of the northern Pacific. It was first described by Marmaduke Tunstall in his 1771 Ornithologia Britannica. It was formerly classified as a form of the water pipit. It is known as "American pipit" in North America and "buff-bellied pipit" in Eurasia.
The pheasant-tailed jacana is a jacana in the monotypic genus Hydrophasianus. Like all other jacanas, they have elongated toes and nails that enable them to walk on floating vegetation in shallow lakes, their preferred habitat. They may also swim or wade in water reaching their body while foraging mainly for invertebrate prey. They are found in tropical Asia from Yemen in the west to the Philippines in the east and move seasonally in parts of their range. They are the only jacanas that migrate long distances and have different non-breeding and breeding plumages. The pheasant-tailed jacana forages by swimming or by walking on aquatic vegetation. Females are larger than males and are polyandrous, laying several clutches that are raised by different males in their harem.
The Ross's goose is a white goose with black wingtips and a relatively short neck. It is the smallest of the three white geese that breed in North America. It is similar in appearance to a white-phase snow goose, but about 40% smaller. Other differences from the snow goose are that the bill is smaller in proportion to its body and lacks "black lips". The dark phase is extremely rare.
The black robin or Chatham Island robin is an endangered bird from the Chatham Islands off the east coast of New Zealand. It is closely related to the South Island robin. It was first described by Walter Buller in 1872. The binomial commemorates the New Zealand botanist Henry H. Travers (1844–1928). Unlike its mainland counterparts, its flight capacity is somewhat reduced. Evolution in the absence of mammalian predators made it vulnerable to introduced species, such as cats and rats, and it became extinct on the main island of the Chatham group before 1871, being restricted to Little Mangere Island thereafter.
The New Zealand scaup, also known as the black teal or pāpango in Māori, is a diving duck species of the genus Aythya endemic to New Zealand. They weigh around 650 grams (23 oz) and measure around 40 centimetres (16 in), and have dark-coloured plumage. They are found throughout New Zealand in deep natural and man-made lakes and ponds.
The mountain plover is a medium-sized ground bird in the plover family (Charadriidae). It is misnamed, as it lives on level land. Unlike most plovers, it is usually not found near bodies of water or even on wet soil; it prefers dry habitat with short grass and bare ground.
The Cape sparrow, or mossie, is a bird of the sparrow family Passeridae found in southern Africa. A medium-sized sparrow at 14–16 centimetres (5.5–6.3 in), it has distinctive plumage, including large pale head stripes in both sexes. Its plumage is mostly grey, brown, and chestnut, and the male has some bold black and white markings on its head and neck. The species inhabits semi-arid savannah, cultivated areas, and towns, and ranges from the central coast of Angola to eastern South Africa and Eswatini. Three subspecies are distinguished in different parts of its range.
The white-fronted plover or white-fronted sandplover is a small shorebird of the family Charadriidae that inhabits sandy beaches, dunes, mudflats and the shores of rivers and lakes in sub-saharan Africa and Madagascar. It nests in small shallow scrapes in the ground and lays clutches of one to three eggs. The species is monogamous and long-lived, with a life expectancy of approximately 12 years. The vast majority of pairs that mate together stay together during the following years of breeding and retain the same territory. The white-fronted plover has a similar appearance to the Kentish plover, with a white fore crown and dark bands connecting the eyes to the bill.
Reginald Ernest Moreau,, was an English civil servant who worked as an accountant in Africa and later contributed to ornithology. He made studies of clutch size in nesting birds, compared the life-histories of birds in different latitudes and was a pioneer in the introduction of quantitative approaches to the study of birds. He was also a long time editor of the ornithological journal Ibis.
The white-rumped swallow is a species of bird in the family Hirundinidae. First described and given its binomial name by French ornithologist Louis Vieillot in 1817, it was for many years considered a subspecies of the Chilean swallow. The species is monotypic with no known population variations. It has a white supraloral streak, or streak above its lores, which can be used to differentiate it from the Chilean swallow. The lores, ear coverts, tail, and wings are black, with white tips on the inner secondaries, tertials, and greater coverts of the wings. The rest of the upperparts are a glossy blue. Its underparts and underwing-coverts are white, in addition to the rump, as the name suggests. The sexes are similar, and the juvenile is duller and browner with a dusky breast.
Bird eggs are laid by the females and range in quantity from one to up to seventeen. Clutch size may vary latitudinally within a species. Some birds lay eggs even when the eggs have not been fertilized; it is not uncommon for pet owners to find their lone bird nesting on a clutch of infertile eggs, which are sometimes called wind-eggs.
Egg tossing or egg destruction is a behavior observed in some species of birds where one individual removes an egg from the communal nest. This is related to infanticide, where parents kill their own or other's offspring. Egg tossing is observed in avian species, most commonly females, who are involved with cooperative breeding or brood parasitism. Among colonial non-co-nesting birds, egg-tossing is observed to be performed by an individual of the same species, and, in the case of brood parasites, this behavior is done by either the same or different species. The behavior of egg tossing offers its advantages and disadvantages to both the actor and recipient.
Clutch size refers to the number of eggs laid in a single brood by a nesting pair of birds. The numbers laid by a particular species in a given location are usually well defined by evolutionary trade-offs with many factors involved, including resource availability and energetic constraints. Several patterns of variation have been noted and the relationship between latitude and clutch size has been a topic of interest in avian reproduction and evolution. David Lack and R.E. Moreau were among the first to investigate the effect of latitude on the number of eggs per nest. Since Lack's first paper in the mid-1940s there has been extensive research on the pattern of increasing clutch size with increasing latitude. The proximate and ultimate causes for this pattern have been a subject of intense debate involving the development of ideas on group, individual, and gene-centric views of selection.
Fecundity selection, also known as fertility selection, is the fitness advantage resulting from selection on traits that increases the number of offspring. Charles Darwin formulated the theory of fecundity selection between 1871 and 1874 to explain the widespread evolution of female-biased sexual size dimorphism (SSD), where females were larger than males.
