Adorable obscure critters

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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Fri Sep 22, 2017 8:53 pm

So as I promised, I'm going to post some birds that the royal flycatcher reminded me. While not in the same family, it is related to the cotingas, a neat group of birds I haven't posted about. The most well-known cotingas are the cocks-of-the-rock, but there are a lot of neat birds in the group. I've narrowed the birds I want to post down to two posts. The first will be the fairly typically bird-shaped cotingas, which are neat because of how brightly-colored they are. The second will be the cotingas with feathers in weird patterns. Note that with one exception, which I'll post in the next post, these are the males of the species. Most cotingas have extreme sexual dimorphism.

I'm going to start with the orange-breasted fruit-eater...
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...move on to the scaled fruit-eater, in a different genus...
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And then post four cotingas with varying degrees of purple-adjacent colors. Y'all know how much I love purple. Enough that even similar colors are good.

Here's the rose-collared piha. It's also rose-vented.
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Spangled cotinga:
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Banded cotinga, the only one with a good, proper purple (in the same genus as the spangled):
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Finally (for this post) the pompadour continga sounds like it should have a crest, but as far as I can tell it doesn't.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Sat Sep 23, 2017 5:03 pm

Part two: cotingas with weird feather arrangements.

I start with the purple-throated fruitcrow, clearly named by a color-blind person. But check out the ruff that comes from its throat when displaying.

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Next comes the chestnut-crested cotinga:
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Two of the four Neotropical bellbirds. Three-wattled:
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I'm spoilering the bearded bellbird because it's kind of ugly-cute
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Bonus, the white bellbird
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The capuchinbird, which is the only cotinga I know of which isn't sexually dimorphic:
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Bonus bonus, the Andean cock-of-the-rock
Usually pictures of cocks-of-the-rock the Guiana cock-of-the-rock, which is saffron all over. The Andean cock-of-the-rock is smaller, redder, and has a grayish back.
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And finally, the weirdest of all the cotingas, the umbrellabirds, the only birds I know of with feathered wattles. Pictured here is the long-wattled umbrellabird, which has the most impressive ... umbrella?
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Mon Sep 25, 2017 3:54 am

I know that this is going to be a bit of a come down after the last post, but I still think these are neat. The honeycreepers (not to be confused with the Hawai'ian honeycreepers, of which I still need to post the living species, or the honeyeaters) are a group (well, two groups but I assume they're closely-related) of birds in the tanager family. Tanagers make up the second-largest family of birds and an eighth of all bird species in Latin America, and come in many striking colors. I need to post more of them, but today I feel like posting pictures of honeycreepers.

Honeycreepers are analogous to sunbirds, honeyeaters, sun-bird asities, and Hawai'ian honeycreepers, but unlike all these other birds they overlap ranges with hummingbirds. Like all of the aforementioned they're more generalist than hummingbirds, not being as agile fliers and eating insects, and it's not entirely clear to me why they seem to overlap them in parts of Latin America, but they do.

Any rate, I'll start with the green honeycreeper, which is widely distributed in the rainforests of mainland Latin America, but doesn't seem to live outside of them. Together with the golden-collared honeycreeper, it makes up one of the two groups of honeycreepers (like I said, they're in the same clade and I assume closely related). This is the male, as with many tropical birds the males are much more brightly colored than the females.
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And here's the male of the golden-collared honeycreeper:
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The typical honeycreepers all look fairly similar, with the red-legged honeycreeper having red legs, the short-billed honeycreeper a relatively short bill, and the purple honeycreeper being well, indigo to violet, not actually purple, but it's better than the purple-throated fruitcrow:
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The dacnises are closely related to the typical honeycreepers though at least some species rarely eat nectar, so it's possible that nectivory did evolve twice in these two closely-related groups. I thought about doing two posts because there's some variation in the dacnises, but ultimately decided to just post two (I'm subjecting y'all to enough brightly-colored birds as it is). First, the male blue dacnis:

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And here's the female
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And here's the scarlet-breasted dacnis, which I picked because it's pretty. The yellow-tufted dacnis is as distinct and the yellow-breasted moreso, but I'm not a big fan of yellow.
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Finally, the swallow tanager, in its own genus:
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby Paradox » Sun Nov 19, 2017 8:22 pm

Sellers will probably enjoy whatever this is.

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IMG_5430.JPG (92.38 KiB) Viewed 10967 times
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Sun Nov 19, 2017 8:50 pm

It's a kingfisher, and my first thought was "that looks like an Oriental dwarf kingfisher" (which I posted here long ago).

My second thought was "wait, that looks like a picture Toy took, do they have kingfishers like that in Brazil?"

Nope, you have five species of kingfisher, none of which resemble that. So I'm pretty sure my first guess was right, and if you took that picture it's probably somebody's escaped pet.

Anyways, such floof!

If you took that picture, you should capture it and name it "Martin" and feed it anchovies.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby Paradox » Mon Nov 20, 2017 2:27 pm

No, I found the picture on Reddit.

I was looking for ideas to draw!
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby CarrieVS » Mon Nov 20, 2017 10:31 pm

It appears (unless search is malfunctioning) that no-one has yet posted an aardwolf in this thread, or anywhere on the forum.

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They're related to hyaenas but eat termites and are about the size of a fox. That's a baby, of course, which might be cheating. So here are some fully grown aardwolves:

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So fluffy...

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Look at that 'do,

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and those ears!
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Tue Nov 28, 2017 4:35 am

Has the aardwolf become a meme, suddenly? Shortly after you posted that Tess posted it on Discord.

Any rate, I recently read Where Song Began by Australian biologist Tim Low, and I made note of some interesting species I need to share.

I'm going to start with miners, named after mynahs but respelled by Australians. Two of them are extremely aggressive, to the point that they drive other birds away. I wouldn't like them if I had to deal with them, but they're interesting and, from pictures, adorable. The first is the green, sad-eyed bell-miner. It eats the sugary excretions of insects which infest eucalyptus trees. It chases all birds away from the canopies of the trees it inhabits, and since these birds eat the insects, the trees eventually die. But in the mean time, the bell miner has a bonanza. This makes it akin to humans, overharvesting for short-term gain.
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The noisy miners inhabit a dystopian society, where male chicks kill off most of their sisters, leaving a ratio in adult birds of 4:1 males to females. As a result, adults live in a promiscuous society where females exchange sex for food and protection for their chicks, and many males dote on the chicks of a single female in their attempt to become her primary lay. Oh, and they chase off all birds from the trees, even ground-feeders except those who are too large.
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Both of these are honeyeaters, which I've mentioned before. They drive off the endangered regent honeyeater, which at the time of European settlement was one of Australia's most common birds. Regent honeyeaters are also aggressive, but smaller than the miners. They're quite pretty.
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The gibberbird is also a honeyeater, but is weird because it's evolved to fill the niche filled by larks in the Northern Hemisphere. I hadn't even realized larks had a particularly distinctive niche, but apparently they do.
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Two more honeyeaters about what I don't have much to say other than that they were only recently determined to be honeyeaters: the orange chat and crimson chat.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby CarrieVS » Tue Nov 28, 2017 10:34 am

cmsellers wrote:Has the aardwolf become a meme, suddenly? Shortly after you posted that Tess posted it on Discord.


I believe Tess linked the same article that prompted me to make this post - something about "the cutest animal you've never heard of." Though I had heard of it: not sure why I never posted it here before. So I guess that article's doing the rounds.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Tue Nov 28, 2017 11:23 pm

I've also heard of aardwolves. They're my second-favorite hyenas. They're more evolutionary interesting than any of the other hyenas (or nearly any member of the order Carnivora), but since spotted hyenas are smarter I like them slightly better.

Any rate, the lyrebirds are the most basal group of songbirds and also considered the best mimics (far better than parrots or mynahs), though only the males sing. I've been assuming they're not obscure because A. I had instructions on how to make one in an origami book and B. they were in David Attenborough's Life of Birds, but I realized that this may again be me assuming that since I've heard of it y'all have. I cannot find good pictures of the male Albert's lyrebird, but here's the male superb lyrebird.

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Scrubbirds are the sister taxa to the lyrebirds (the classification might concievably suffer from long-branch attraction, but there's no morphological evidence for this). There are only two species: the noisy scrubbird of Western Australia and the rufous scrubbird of eastern Australia. Pictured below is the rufous scrubbird. I love how they floof, which is apparently a thing they do.
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And here's the Attenborough clip.


The Australian treecreepers are put on a branch with the bowerbirds by genetic studies, but based on on morphological evidence bowerbirds are probably more closely related to other songbirds than to treecreepers, putting them on a branch of their own. Here's a picture of a red-browed treecreeper feeding on lerp, a cotton-candy-like substance some plant parasites in Australia create to protect themselves.
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Speaking of bowerbirds, documentaries usually pick the drabbest ones to say "hey, this bird may not look like much but look what it can do!" However the bowerbirds have several species with varying degrees of yellow and orange. I could do a whole post on them but won't, mostly because most of those bowerbirds it's hard to find good pictures of. All the decent shots are either tiny, watermarked, or of dead animals. Any rate, this is the male flame bowerbird. Another subspecies has a black mask which I like better (it's called the masked bowerbird, which I bet you'd never have guessed), but I couldn't find a good picture of that subspecies.
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The great bowerbird is a bit drab, but then he can open his head feathers to make it look like he's got a flower on his head.
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There are two genera of the bowerbird family which are called catbirds (and which I assume don't build bowers). My favorite is the green catbird, since it's a beautiful spotted green all over.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Thu Nov 30, 2017 10:37 pm

The channel-billed cuckoo is the only member of the cuckoo family that primarily eats fruit, the largest living member of the family (larger even than the greater roadrunner), and the world's largest brood parasite, which is likely made possible by the size of its main hosts: the pied currawongs. It was at various times considered a hornbill and a toucan, even though it looks fairly obviously like a cuckoo to me, unlike some cuckoos I've posted before. None of the cuckoos I previously posted are brood parasites, which this bird is.

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I'm going to digress to talk about a couple other members of the cuckoo family I find interesting, which are once again not brood parasites. The groove-billed ani lives in southern Texas and the smooth-billed ani lives in Southern Florida (and both extend much further south), yet I've never managed to see one live, in the wild or a zoo. I'm reminded of it because the grooves are similar.
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I was pleasantly surprised to see that the San Antonio Zoo had a chestnut-breasted malkoha.
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And I think I'm just going to make this a cuckoo post (I still have enough interesting-looking cuckoos for another full post), and post the other stuff I was meaning to post in my next post.

This is the blue malkoha, which is in a different genus from true malkohas.
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This is the lesser ground cuckoo which is related to roadrunners.
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Finally, I'll end on another a brood-parasitic cuckoo, but oh how pretty! This is the African emerald cuckoo. Note that that among cuckoos, obligatory brood parasites make up one of six subfamilies (with occasional brood parasites constituting three species in one subfamily), but the brood-parasitic cuckoos make up almost half of all cuckoo species. As far as I can tell, sexual dimorphism in cuckoos is found only among the brood-parasitic subfamily.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Fri Dec 01, 2017 6:51 pm

Back to Australia, where I meant to stay with the channel-billed cuckoo. The pied currawong is the most common victim of the channel-billed cuckoo where their ranges overlap. This one is giving me a disapproving glare for posting the cuckoo before its victims.
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The pied currawong is related to the Australian magpie, which I haven't posted apparently, likely because it's quite well-known in Australia. However it's so poorly-known outside Australia that people assume I'm talking about a member of the crow family, when in fact the Australian magpie belongs to an entirely different group of birds, colloquially called the butcherbird family. Both crows and members of the butcherbird family are intelligent and engage in play, however Australian magpies are one of the the three birds known to engage in the widest variety of play, along with apostlebirds and keas. The image below links to a YouTube video of a pair of young magpies playing.
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Channel-billed cuckoos also prey on Australian magpies and butcherbirds, with the magpies being slightly larger than ideal and the butcherbirds slightly smaller. Here is gray butcherbird.
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The peltops are two small birds in the butcherbird family from New Guinea. Here is the mountain peltops.
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The woodswallows are in the butcherbird family, but constitute a separate subfamily with only one genus. Here are some white-breasted woodswallows huddled up adorably.
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And here's a similar huddle of black-faced woodswallows.
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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby cmsellers » Thu Dec 14, 2017 10:03 pm

More Australian species at some point, but I'm going to take a break to post some hawks and Old World Vultures, which are hawks in disguise.

First off, I'm going to to talk about chanting goshawks. I was first introduced to them by a nature documentary that described them as "goshawks" and I thought "that doesn't look remotely like a goshawk." As it turns out, they belong to a distinctive clade of one one genus with three species, though it's not clear what their relationship to other hawks is.
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The harrier-hawks are an even smaller group, with one species native to mainland Africa and one to Madagascar.
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Also, I'm not saying this is going to be my next avatar but this is going to be my next avatar
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Bataleurs are some rather interesting looking African snake eagles.
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I should note that the Old World vultures come in two groups. One is bald and ugly AF, the other includes three species in three genera which are cute or at least majestic.

First there's the lammergeier, which probably isn't all that obscure since it's famous for it's habits of dropping bones until they break open and it eats the marrow.
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The Egyptian vulture, which does look somewhat vulture-like.
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And finally the palm-nut vulture, which exclusively eats fruit and oh, just look at it!

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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby Anglerphobe » Sat Dec 16, 2017 11:53 am

South America's maned wolf -

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- and bush dog

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Re: Adorable obscure critters

Postby CarrieVS » Sat Dec 16, 2017 11:31 pm

If you average those two out you get one normal canid.
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