Colombian police say they have captured a carrier pigeon that was being used to smuggle drugs into a prison.
The bird was trying to fly into a jail in the north-eastern city of Bucaramanga with marijuana and cocaine paste strapped to its back, but did not make it.
Police believe the 45g (1.6oz) drug package was too heavy for it.
Police, who believe the bird was trained by inmates, say they've caught other pigeons attempting to carry phone cards into the jail.
Source
The bird was trying to fly into a jail in the north-eastern city of Bucaramanga with marijuana and cocaine paste strapped to its back, but did not make it.
Police believe the 45g (1.6oz) drug package was too heavy for it.
Police, who believe the bird was trained by inmates, say they've caught other pigeons attempting to carry phone cards into the jail.
Source
Think penguin movies peaked about five years ago when March of the Penguins and Happy Feet were playing?Hollywood believes audiences will come waddling back on Aug. 12, when 20th Century Fox releases the big-screen adaptation of the 1930s children's book Mr. Popper's Penguins, starring Jim Carrey, Angela Lansbury and a half-dozen real-life, flightless water fowl.
Audiences will be watching the real penguins for roughly half the movie. In some scenes, CGI animals were used.Source
At a zoo in western Germany, a baby African Penguin decided to go on a little stroll through a lion's den. As reported by Der Spiegel, the tiny bird escaped its habitat and started waddling through the lion enclosure. Fortunately, the lions were asleep. Zookeepers guided the penguin to safety using a trail of herrings. The zoo doesn't usually name its penguins, but apparently bonded with this one, since they started calling it Leona.Source
Photo: Allwetterzoo Münster
Feathers can be colorful and spectacular in their own right, but how much more stunning might they be when used as canvases for artists, eager to demonstrate their talent for the unusual?
Alaskan-born and -bred artist Julie Thompson is an astounding exponent of this incredible art form. Julie, a self-taught wildlife artist for nearly 20 years, strives to make every feather painting as unique as the feathers themselves are, and believes that every feather has a kind of personality relating to the painting it bears.
Source
via Presurfer
Alaskan-born and -bred artist Julie Thompson is an astounding exponent of this incredible art form. Julie, a self-taught wildlife artist for nearly 20 years, strives to make every feather painting as unique as the feathers themselves are, and believes that every feather has a kind of personality relating to the painting it bears.Source
via Presurfer
Sotheby's: Audubon sells for record £7.3m
LONDON 7 DECEMBER 2010 --- This evening, one of the most magnificent printed books ever produced, John James Audubon’s Birds of America, sold at Sotheby’s London for £7,321,250/ US$11,542,683, establishing a new world record for any printed book ever sold at auction. A fiery enthusiasm among four collectors bidding on the phones and in the room drove the price rapidly beyond pre-sale expectations (£4-6 million/ US$6.3-9.5 million). The book was bought by London dealer Michael Tollemache, who was bidding in the room and who described the work after the sale as “priceless”.
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LONDON -- Sotheby's is auctioning a rare copy of John James Audubon's "Birds of America," billed as the world's most expensive book - a treasure that could sell for 6 million pounds ($9.5 million).One of only 100 or so remaining copies of "Birds of America," the tome will be on the block Tuesday in London alongside a first edition of Shakespeare's plays expected to fetch at least 1 million pounds ($1.6 million).
The books come from the estate of the 2nd Baron Hesketh, an aristocratic book collector who died in 1955. Another complete copy of "Birds of America" was sold by Christie's for $8.8 million in 2000, a record for a printed book at auction.
The collection of 435 hand-colored prints is made from engravings of Audubon's illustrations.
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Five month-old Tungo was found on a beach in Rio de Janeiro with a shattered bill that had been damaged by a boat propeller.Discovering that he was unable to eat, vets at Rio de Janeiro zoo built him a brand-new acrylic beak, shaped from a broken piece of the original.
This is the first operation of its type on a penguin in Latin America.
Source
via Neatorama
Awwwwwww . . .
This delightful apple bird feeder will be the place to hang out for all your neighborhood's cool birds. Eco-friendly design made from Bamboo.$25.00 at Satinbox
If you want to stand out on your wedding day, this dress made up of 2009 peacock feathers could be just the ticket.The $1.5million creation was made at a wedding dress factory and took eight workers 40 days to sew together.
An average male peacock sheds around 200 feathers during his annual moult – meaning the makers would have had to have harvested the feathers from more than ten birds over the course of a year.
Source
Chinese conservationists are in a fix over endangered condors eating large numbers of a protected species of deer in a reserve in the north of the country.
More than 100 young spotted deer have been eaten by the condors so far this spring at the Luanhe River National Nature Reserve in Hebei province, near Beijing,becoming an "unanticipated" part of the food chain.
Nationally, the condor is considered far more endangered than the deer.
"The raptors are growing in number and threatening to catch larger animals, like elk, in the reserve," it quoted wildlife official Zhou Changhong as saying.
The reserve only has 600 or so deer and just 10 elk, the report added.
"An adult condor has a wingspan of more than two metres, and not even wardens can frighten it," Zhou said.
Source
More than 100 young spotted deer have been eaten by the condors so far this spring at the Luanhe River National Nature Reserve in Hebei province, near Beijing,becoming an "unanticipated" part of the food chain.
Nationally, the condor is considered far more endangered than the deer.
"The raptors are growing in number and threatening to catch larger animals, like elk, in the reserve," it quoted wildlife official Zhou Changhong as saying.
The reserve only has 600 or so deer and just 10 elk, the report added.
"An adult condor has a wingspan of more than two metres, and not even wardens can frighten it," Zhou said.
Source
Inmates have devised an innovative way to smuggle in cell phones into a prison farm in Brazil: carrier pigeons. Guards at the Danilio Pinheiro prison near the southeastern city of Sorocaba noticed a pigeon resting on an electric wire with a small cloth bag tied to one of its legs last week. "The guards nabbed the bird after luring it down with some food and discovered components of a small cell phone inside the bag," police investigator Celso Soramiglio said Tuesday.One day later, another pigeon was spotted dragging a similar bag inside the prison's exercise yard. Inside the bag was the cell phone's charger, Soramiglio said.
The birds were apparently bred and raised inside the prison, smuggled out, outfitted with the cell phone parts and then released to fly back.
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Just as they were when Rachel Carson published 'Silent Spring' nearly 50 years ago, birds today are a bellwether of the health of land, water and ecosystems.From shorebirds in New England to warblers in Michigan to songbirds in Hawaii, we are seeing disturbing downward population trends that should set off environmental alarm bells.
The declines can be traced to a variety of factors, depending on a bird's particular habitat. But the causes most frequently cited in the report are agriculture, climate change, development and energy, and invasive species.
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A man poses with the alleged largest egg in the world in central London. The egg was laid in the early 17th century by the now-extinct Great Elephant Bird of Madagascarto. It is priced at $7,340 and will be sold at The Chelsea Antiques Fair.Photo Credit: Shaun Curry-AFP/Getty Images
Today, Monk (or Quaker) parakeets comprise the largest group of the nine species of parrots known to live in the wild in the United States. But their success in establishing an ecological niche for themselves didn't come easily.The birds, Myiopsitta Monachus, originate from South America. A government-sponsored program in Argentina managed to kill more than 400,000 of them in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But in the mid 1960's, someone had a bright idea: instead of killing them, why not ship them to the U.S.A. and make a few extra dollars? More than 60,000 wild parrots were shipped from South America to the U.S.A. during the 1960s and early 1970s.
Brooklyn has a large population of these wild parrots and many theories as to how the birds first were released into the wild. In 1973, the Federal Government became aware of the parrots' existence in the New York area, and sent out SWAT-style eradication teams which captured many birds and shot those unwilling to surrender. One of the last remaining parrot strongholds, a nest complex on Rikers Island, Queens, managed to survive the eradication teams and are the probable ancestors of the parrots alive today all over Brooklyn.
These intelligent, non-aggressive birds, which no self-respecting scientist has ever claimed have caused any significant crop damage in the U.S., are regarded with extreme hostility in many states. In New Jersey and Connecticut, they are classified as a "potentially dangerous species." In Pennsylvania, they are reportedly euthanized on the spot whenever power companies find them nesting on transmission lines. In Florida, both the state Department of Transportation and the Florida Power & Light utility company do the same thing. Florida Power & Light has for years maintained secret gas chambers where captured parrots are killed en masse.
Stephen Carl Baldwin, at Brooklyn Parrots, writes, "The fact that North America has a new parrot on its shores is in my view a blessing, especially because our countrymen wiped out our only native parrot - the Carolina Parakeet - nearly a hundred years ago. Nature has given us the rarest of gifts: a second chance."
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Yes - we do have Monk parakeets in Illinois!
There are monk parakeet colonies in nearly 20 Chicago suburbs.
I took the following photo in Alsip, Illinois, on December 6, 2006.
It was 8:30 am, temperature was 36 degrees. There were about a dozen of these gorgeous, vivid green birds at 116th and Springfield.