We have a few more batches in the queue now, but it’s never enough.

And today we’re featuring lovely bird photos from Ephraim Heller. I had no idea this gorgeous creature existed! Ephraim’s ID and captions are indented, and, as usual, you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

I never had a favorite bird. Oh, sure, I’ve seen plenty of bewitching bee-eaters, mesmerizing manakins and motmots and macaws, plummy pigeons, parrots and pheasants, and tangy toucans and tanagers, but they never held my attention.

In Trinidad I first met a tufted coquette (Lophornis ornatus):

My coquette is 6.6 centimeters (2.6 in) long and weighs just 2.3 grams (0.081 oz) – much smaller than my thumb! My coquette doesn’t eat at hummingbird feeders with the big boys – its bill is too short:

Its food is nectar, taken from a variety of flowers, and some small invertebrates. Across hummingbirds, specialization often involves bill length and curvature for particular flowers; my coquette is relatively unspecialized in bill morphology. My coquette often must sneak nectar from the territories of other hummingbirds. With its small size and steady flight, my coquette resembles a large bee as it moves from flower to flower:

Many hummingbird genera have territorial males, but the combination of extreme ornamentation, very small body size, and intense aggression is a hallmark of Lophornis.

There are 11 species in the genus Lophornis, all as beautiful as my coquette. The name Lophornis combines Greek for “crest” (lophos) and “bird” (ornis), calling out a shared trait of all the birds in this genus:

Per the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a coquette is “a woman who endeavors without sincere affection to gain the attention and admiration of men.” But I forgive my coquette. The females are more subdued than the males, but still marvelous:

In French my coquette is called “Coquette huppe-col,” which literally translates to “tufted collar coquette.” That sounds lovely in French. In German it is called “Schmuckelfe,” which combines the literal terms “jewelry or ornament” and “elf or fairy.” To my ear, “jeweled fairy” sounds more pleasant and less insulting than “schmuckelfe”:

This is the last full batch of photos I have. 🙁

But today we have a glorious selection of water birds (starring DUCKS) from New Zealand, where reader David Riddell lives. His commentary and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Be sure to read the notes; you’ll see that several of these species are endangered.

Knowing how much our host likes ducks, I thought I’d put together a few images of water birds from around New Zealand.  Most of these are from the North Island, where I live, but there are a couple of South Islanders in here as well.

The blue duck (Hymenolaimus malacorhynchos) is one of only two duck species in the world that are mountain stream specialists, the other being the torrent duck (Merganetta armata) of South America. Males have a breathy whistle, which gives them their Maori name, whio, while the female call is a harsh, growling croak.  Like many New Zealand birds they’ve been badly impacted by introduced mammalian predators, but with management they’re holding their own and even expanding in some areas, such as the Volcanic Plateau in the central North Island.  For Tolkien fans, this pair was just below Tawhai Falls in Tongariro National Park, which doubled as the Forbidden Pool where Gollum was captured by Faramir’s men in The Two Towers:

Brown teal (Anas chlorotis) used to be the most abundant waterfowl in the country, but again have declined markedly, although numbers have increased in recent years in a few places. They occupied a wide range of habitats, not all of them aquatic.  This pair (male on the right) is part of a population introduced to Tawharanui Regional Park north of Auckland, which has a predator-proof fence across the base of a peninsula, protecting a 588 ha park from rats, cats, possums, mustelids and other exotic predators:

New Zealand scaup (Aythya novaeseelandiae) is a diving duck with a cute, “rubber duckie” profile. They mostly live in deep, clear waters where they feed on submerged water weeds, though this one was on a eutrophic (nutrient-enriched) lake in the small town of Cambridge:

Pacific black duck (Anas superciliosa) can cope quite well with introduced mammalian predators, but is perhaps now the country’s most endangered duck, as it is being genetically swamped by mallards (Anas platyrhynchos), with which it readily hybridises. This one, on the shore of a remote lake on the Volcanic Plateau, has the typically stripy face, and the green speculum with no white band on its upper margin, but the slight smudging of the facial stripes and orange tinge to the legs suggests that even this one has some mallard ancestry.  Fortunately they are still widespread elsewhere in the Pacific:

Mallards have also been in the news here lately as a few individuals on a high country lake in the South Island recently started preying on the chicks of Australasian crested grebes (Podiceps cristatus australis) and had to be “euthanised” as the local media euphemistically put it. The concern was that, being such adaptable creatures, other ducks would learn the habit and it would spread.  The grebes (a subspecies of the great crested grebe, from which it differs mainly by not having a distinct non-breeding plumage) are considered threatened, although their numbers have increased from a couple of hundred in the 1980s to perhaps a thousand today, with more in Australia.  Once almost entirely confined to the high country they are now well established on many lowland lakes, though they have not yet repopulated the North Island, from which they disappeared in the 19th century.  In 2023 the bird’s international profile was lifted dramatically when it was crowned New Zealand’s Bird of the Century after being championed by comedian John Oliver. “After all, this is what democracy is all about,” he said on his show, “America interfering in foreign elections.”  This one was photographed from the footbridge over the outlet of Lake Tekapo – the lake is fed by glacial meltwater, hence the pale blue colour:

While the crested grebe retreated to the South Island, another grebe, the New Zealand dabchick (Poliocephalus rufopectus) went the other way, becoming restricted to the North Island from the 1940s. More recently it’s been expanding again, and recolonised the South Island in 2012.  This is a pair engaging in a courtship dance:

And another dabchick:

Another small grebe, the Australasian grebe (Tachybaptus novaehollandiae) has been colonising New Zealand since the 1970s, though numbers nationwide are still low. Adults have a prominent yellow spot at the base of the bill that looks almost like a second eye, though the colour hasn’t fully developed on this juvenile:

Pied shags (Phalacrocorax varius) are one of 13 currently recognised New Zealand species of shags and cormorants (all usually called shags in New Zealand), making the country a centre of diversity for the family. The same species in Australia is generally a freshwater bird, although in this country they’re most commonly found on the coast.  This one however was nesting alongside the Karamea River in the north-west of the South Island:

Here are two other shag species, at a small lake near my home in the Waikato region of the North Island. On the left is a black shag (Phalacrocorax carbo novaehollandiae), the local subspecies of the widespread great cormorant, while on the right is a little pied cormorant (Microcarbo melanoleucos).  This is a highly variable species; juveniles are entirely black, while adults can range from a white-throated form through to completely pied.  This individual has a rather unusual motley appearance – I suspect it’s an older juvenile moulting into adult plumage:

American readers may be wondering why I’ve put in a picture of such a common species as a laughing gull (Leucophaeus atricilla) – and one in scruffy non-breeding plumage at that. But this was the first individual of the species ever seen in New Zealand, which my wife, daughter and I found two days before Christmas in 2016, when we stopped for a picnic lunch at a beachside reserve near the small east coast town of Opotiki.  It created huge interest among the local birding community, hanging around for several weeks and allowing many people to see it, eventually moulting into its much more handsome breeding colours, with black head and white-ringed eye.  It eventually moved southwards down the coast as far as Cape Kidnappers in Hawkes Bay, and was reported intermittently until October 2018:

Here’s another shot of it, next to a red-billed gull (Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae scopulinus), which is the species you would expect to see in such a place:

Black-billed gulls (Chroicocephalus bulleri) are our only endemic gull (the southern black-backed or kelp gull, Larus dominicanus, also occurs here). Until recently they were classified as critically endangered due to rapid declines at some of their main breeding colonies on South Island river beds, but they’re holding their own elsewhere, and establishing new colonies in the North Island.  These ones are roosting on an old wharf at the southern end of Lake Taupo, the large lake in the centre of the North Island:

Thanks to kind and diligent readers, I have a few batches left.

Today’s photos come from Ephraim Heller, who sends us today the birds of Little Tobago. Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on the.

Jerry’s pathetic plea for photos activated my guilt neuron, so I composed the following story. It is all true, apart from the moral judgments and anthropomorphism.

About 100 miles off the coast of Venezuela lies the island of Tobago, and just off its coast lies the wildlife sanctuary island of Little Tobago. Once upon a time, there lived on the island peaceful colonies of brown boobies (Sula leucogaster) and red-billed tropicbirds (Phaethon aethereus).

The boobies happily sat on their nests:

The tropicbirds, too, spent their days in domestic bliss on their nests:

Just for the joy of it, the tropicbirds would sail through the air, riding the thermals and admiring their splendid tail feathers:

Whenever they were hungry, the boobies and tropicbirds would roam the seas for many miles around Little Tobago, scooping up small fish. When their eggs hatched, they would fill their crops with fish to carry back to their nests and regurgitate for their chicks.

But one day evil entered Little Tobago’s Eden in the form of the Magnificent Frigatebirds (Fregata magnificens):

Frigatebirds live in the air, feeding and sleeping while aloft. The word frigatebird derives from the French mariners’ name for the bird: La Frégate– a frigate or fast warship. These mean, nasty frigatebirds were indeed warlike, as they were the worst class of birds: kleptoparasites. Because they were named magnificent frigatebirds, they felt themselves entitled to everyone else’s food. In fact, they were so mean that they would even steal food from each other:

While frigatebirds could scoop up their own food or eat carrion, the frigatebirds of Little Tobago attacked the boobies and tropicbirds when they were most vulnerable, as they returned to the island with their crops full of food for their babies. The frigatebirds grabbed the boobies and tropicbirds and shook them and pecked at them until they regurgitated their food in midair. The frigatebirds then swooped down and caught the regurgitated food before it hit the ocean surface.

These Frigatebirds had one weakness: their feathers are not waterproof, so they could not float on the ocean surface because if their feathers became waterlogged they drowned. The boobies often evaded the frigatebirds by diving into the ocean water, where the frigatebirds could not follow.

Sadly, the poor little tropicbirds had no such defense. To add insult to injury, the frigatebirds shook the tropicbirds so hard that many of them lost their beautiful tail feathers, which hurt their feelings as they were rather vain avians:

Will the cute tropicbird chicks go hungry?

Won’t you help us?