Toledo Zoo Birds

After Breakfast With the Hippos, the missing gardener and I visited other parts of the zoo, including, of course, the aviary.

black-naped fruit dove (f)

black-naped fruit dove (m)

sunbittern

The back of a Siamese fireback. I have several nice pictures of the whole bird when it's farther back in the enclosure, meaning the mesh doesn't show. Every shot of the feathers that give the bird its name looks like this, with the mesh intruding.

red-whiskered bulbul

diamond firetail chicks

diamond firetail

This emerald starling kept trying to swallow a berry. The out-of-focus video below shows the action.

Long Legs

For tagging pictures, I classify birds sometimes by science and sometimes by something I make up. Cardinals and other songbirds are passerines, which is common shorthand for the order Passeriformes. Pigeons and doves are in the order Columbiformes. I call birds "waders" if they wade in water or look like or are related to birds that wade, even if they stick to land. The great majority of birds in this category that I have photographed have long legs. There are many small shorebirds, but I don't have pictures of them, so I haven't separated them from long-legged birds.

I didn't plan my tags much beyond bird / insect / mammal / reptile. As I have accumulated thousands of photos I've added categories and subcategories so that I can find, for example, long-legged birds.

saddle-billed stork (Cincinnati Zoo)

white-faced ibis (Columbus Zoo)

white-faced ibis (Columbus zoo)

Caribbean flamingo (Columbus Zoo)

hamerkop (Columbus Zoo)

sunbittern (Cincinnati Zoo)

killdeer (Columbus Zoo)

sacred ibis (Columbus Zoo)

If there's an itch...

What do you do when you have an itch?

Nubian goat

Bali myna

Angora goat

markhor

The picture of the buffalo weaver is pretty horrible because a shutter at 1/15s is not fast enough to stop motion. That means there's a lot of motion blur, which makes the bird appear out of focus. Motion blur can be good, though, and I think the curve of the leg's motion is pretty cool. The blue is the tag on the leg, captured a couple of times.

white-headed buffalo weaver

Tyler, a Reeves's muntjac

Mustard, a Tasmanian devil

western cattle egret

sunbittern

All photos are from the Columbus Zoo except the sunbittern's, which is from the Cincinnati Zoo.