article thumbnail

Restless New Zealand Fantails

10,000 Birds

I finally managed to get some photos as I found a pair of fantails in the Marlborough sounds that were very interested in me as a source of bugs (they will often follow trampers in the forest to collect flying insects) and being out in the open there was a limited supply of perches and plenty of good light. Fantails don’t do necks.

article thumbnail

The complete guide to Dodo relatives, living and dead

10,000 Birds

Not, as Linneaus thought, an ostrich, nor even, as later scientists concluded, a distant cousin of pigeons deserving of family rank, it was an honest-to-goodness pigeon, deeply embedded within the family Columbidae. Specimens were collected in 1904, and the bird has not been recorded with certainty since.