According to eBird this species is "not seen from the mainland." The birds breed on tropical islands and then spend the rest of their time at sea. It's easy to see why they named them after their feet - they are spectacular - but that bill is also quite something! I decided to write about booby species in general rather than the Red-footed specifically.
A Crowned Parrot isn't a single species; when I searched on eBird I found several different crowned parrots and crowned Amazons. I picked the White-crowned Parrot to write about because it's just so beautiful and brightly-colored. You can see lots of the colors in the video, but also check out the photos here on eBird. This bird lives in Central America; the video was taken in Guatemala. The scientific name is Pionus senilis. The second part refers to the white head, connected with old age and senility.
I have three nuthatch species on my life list: White-breasted, Brown-headed, and Red-breasted. Not the Pygmy, though. It's found in the western half of North America, usually in coniferous forests. According to All About Birds, "Pygmy Nuthatches cache seeds year-round by hammering them into crevices
or under flakes of bark on the tree, saving them for later. . . . Sometimes more than 150 individuals sleep in a single tree, stacked up
in squares, triangles, diamonds, oblongs, or tiers of birds."
I love this video because it is such a specific sighting, not a collection of various photos from who knows where. We can see the effects of the wind on this bird as it sits on a branch. We can hear the wind. And at the end the videographer pulls back to show us the larger context.
I have seen this bird; it's on eight of my checklists, all from Paraguay. When I think of this bird, I recall standing on a particular bridge with my brother as he identified it for me. I can feel the heft of my binoculars around my neck and the heat of the Asunción evening. There are no generic birds and no generic sightings.
Book #82of 2025 was Maine Characters, by Hannah Orenstein. Summary: nobody in this book had a life that turned out the way they wanted, but in the end they worked it out.
Book #83 was a book club pick, The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau, by Kristin Harmel. This one was the third Harmel title we've read together. Colette Marceau is a jewel thief, which gave a new wrinkle to the Holocaust themes Harmel has explored before.
Book #84 was my first Tana French book, the fifth book in a series. I chose The Secret Place because it was available from the library app without waiting, and as soon as I had read it, I checked out the first in the series, In the Woods, which became book #86 of the year.
Book #85 was The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore. I loved some parts of this book, but I thought it was a bit uneven. I found some revelations to be quite unbelievable.
I've written quite a bit about hummingbirds in the past; here's one post from Birdtober in 2022. I've never seen this one and I sure would love to. Look at that bright purple iridescent throat! This species lives in the desert in the western United States. I looked into who Costa was, and it turns out that this hummingbird was named after a French nobleman by an ornithologist friend of his. Kind of a nice gift, I guess. With the eponymous bird names due to be changed soon, I spent some time wondering about what kind of name could be chosen for Costa's. Amethyst is already taken -- there are several hummingbirds with that purple gem as part of their names. I thought of royalty being related to purple, but there's already at least one hummingbird species with royal in its name, in addition to an empress. I didn't find any kings or queens, so those are some possibilities. Several descriptions compare the Costa's purple throat to a mustache, so how about the Violet Mustache as its new name? And Louis Marie Pantaléon Costa, Marquis de Beauregard himself, the source of the Costa name, had a pretty impressive mustache. Some sources that have been suggested for the new names are the bird's behavior (and there's a lot of overlap in behavior among different species) and the indigenous names. The bird's habitat could also be a source, and this one is described in a couple of places as the only true desert hummingbird. So how about Desert Gem? The name Costa won't be lost, no matter what new name is chosen, because it's part of the bird's scientific name, Calypte costae. (Take a look at this list of hummingbird names to give you an idea of how much variety there is, and here's an article about some of the issues involved in bird names.)
What shall we name you, little bird? Do you prefer being named after a French nobleman, a precious stone, your physical appearance (stunning, if I may say so)? Would you like us to describe your behavior or your surroundings?
I’m guessing, little bird, that you don’t care at all what we call you. You’re too busy living your best hummingbird life.
I've written a lot about herons in the past; here's one post and it contains a link to others. Herons are so beautiful to watch, and the Gray Heron (Grey is the British spelling) is one of the most common ones we get here in Uganda. The scientific name of this heron is Ardea cinerea, meaning ash-colo(u)red heron.
My husband and I went camping by Lake Victoria on Saturday night and I took this picture on Sunday morning. You can see the mixture of mist with the smoke from our campfire. As I thought about the ash and the Gray/Grey Heron, this poem came to be:
Smoke rises from the campfire, Mist rises from the lake, Grey Heron rises, the S of her neck writing serenity across Sunday morning
I'm enjoying doing Birdtober for the fifth time. Andrea Holmes puts out these prompts every year for visual artists, but I use them to learn about birds and write poems every day of October. I always find that my busy days are more fun when I'm doing some tiny little creative thing like this.
Today's bird, the Kalij Pheasant, is found in the Himalayas and has also been introduced to Hawaii. And apparently, it lives in constant fear. (See the video.)
(Summary of the video in case you don't have four minutes for it: the first minute shows Paras getting up in the morning, getting his coffee, and sitting down at his desk. Then he explains that he'll be talking about the Kalij Pheasant, the "Big Boss," who is an "escape artist." He gives more information about the habitat and behavior of this bird. And then he shows details of the kind of danger they face from humans and why they'd feel the need to escape as fast as possible.)
I haven't seen this bird, which eBird describes as "cartoon-like," but I do live in its range, so the possibility exists! How fun would that be? I typed into Google, "Where can I see the White-crested Helmetshrike in Uganda?" and the AI responded that there have been no sightings in Uganda, but that is not true. Here's a better response from an actual human being.
There’s one thing I would really like: To see White-crested Helmetshrike To look in their startling yellow eyes To say, “It’s nice to meet you guys. I’m glad our acquaintance is now official in spite of intelligence that’s artificial.”
I would love to see these in the wild (they live in Australia), but they can also be seen in cages, like a couple of the birds we've already met this Birdtober. I read that they fly in long lines, with their bright red rumps very visible.
Row of burning coals, of bright, glittering diamonds, little birds in flight
The Common Loon is the ABA Bird of the Year for 2025, and I wrote about it here, along with a poem by Miller Oberman. I've never seen a Common Loon but I very much want to.
Chessboard of a bird, Haberdashery model of stripes and polka dots, Red eyes: Diving 200 feet down in the lake, Flying at 75 miles an hour, Wailing through the winter night.
I wrote about the African Green-Pigeon last year during Birdtober, so this year I decided to learn more about the larger family of Green Pigeons. There are thirty species of them across Africa and Asia. I enjoyed looking at many photos of different varieties. The video below shows one of them. They are green because of carotenoids in their fruit diet. I wondered whether humans could turn green from eating carotenoids but found that occasionally people turn orange when they overconsume. But don't stop eating them, because carotenoids are antioxidants, great for your eyes, your heart, and even cancer prevention.
The genus Treron, to which Green Pigeons belong (some species have a hyphen and some don't), was first introduced by French ornithologist Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot, who lived in Haiti during the 1770s and 1780s. He worked in his brother's spice business and fled to the US during the Haitian revolution. He lost one of his daughters to Yellow Fever. I read the novel Fever 1793 with one of my middle school classes during Covid, and we were interested to learn that the Yellow Fever epidemic in Philadelphia was blamed on the refugees from Haiti. It was easy to draw parallels with anti-Asian sentiment during Covid. All subjects do eventually lead back to Haiti with me, as you may have noticed.
You are what you eat, Green Pigeon Carotenoids and all But don’t hold back a smidgeon: Fruit makes you beautiful.
When I first started Birdtober this year, I'd never even heard of the Javan Green Magpie, but within moments of beginning to research for my poem, I learned that there may be only about 50 of them left in the wild. So no sooner did I learn that they exist than I had to mourn that they are almost gone. Because of their dramatic appearance, they are popular as caged birds, so they have been captured into near-extinction. Some people think they may already be extinct in the wild. eBird doesn't even have a photo.
Then I discovered that Chester Zoo, in England, is part of a program working on breeding them with a goal of returning them to the wild. Watch the video below for more details!
Once their romances played out in tea gardens in Java, but now their privacy is over as zookeepers try to encourage them to mate. Bright green feathers and orange bills in an enclosure in Chester, and then a squirming, naked baby bird.
If you're as interested as I am, watch this video from Chester Zoo! I've seen several of the birds in this video in the wild, which makes me feel extremely privileged. While in a sense these birds are in captivity just as much as the ones kept in cages in people's homes, at least they are in habitats with lots of room and they are cared for by experts. And let's hope some day they can all be plentiful in the wild again.
I love that today's prompt is a chicken. The first prompt for 2022 was a rooster, and I waxed eloquent about how ubiquitous and beautiful these domestic birds are, even though we can't list them on eBird (wild birds only, please).
I wondered how I could combine the Birdtober prompt, the Venezuelan Troupial, with the Spiritual Journey Thursday prompt, Compassion. Read on to see how I did it.
Photo Source: eBird.com
The Venezuelan Troupial
As I read about the Venezuelan crisis - collapsed economy hunger millions in exile - I’m overwhelmed with the sadness and loss
As I read about the Venezuelan Troupial, though, the national bird, and look at its cheerful orange feathers and the blue teardrops around its eyes - I’m overwhelmed with its beauty.
When refugees leave behind everything they might not think of the birds in their country, their biodiverse home, until, far away, they listen to the sound of the Venezuelan Troupial on YouTube and read on eBird that its conservation status is “Of Least Concern.”
And they might be glad that there’s one thing they don’t have to worry about.
There are four living species of Banded Penguins, and one of them is the African Penguin. Someday I want to go to Capetown to see them, and since they are critically endangered, I hope it will be soon. I wrote a found haiku using words from the eBird description here.
I've been privileged to live in three of the world's great cities (Nairobi, Port-au-Prince and Asunción, Paraguay) as well as spending time in many others (including nine weeks in Paris as a college student). I just moved to a new city: Kampala, Uganda. I've also lived in smaller towns in three countries. In all of those places there have been difficult days, but I've never found a city or town yet where God is not, and I don't anticipate finding one in the future, either. The name of my blog comes from the song "Love is Always There," by Carolyn Arends.
