Bush thick-knee curlews are medium to large birds with strong black or yellow black bills, large yellow eyes and gray/stone-colored plumage. They are largely nocturnal, particularly when singing their loud wailing songs. Thick-knee refers to the prominent joints in the long yellow or greenish legs which have a ‘backwards’ knee joint.
We have a variety of lorikeets in our park, easily identified by their bright plumage! Approximately 70% of their day is spent feeding, and lorikeets will travel more than 30 miles a day to find food. Some lorikeets can feed on as many as 650 flowers each day.
The rock dove makes its home along seaside cliffs in Europe, Asia and Northern Africa. One of the oldest domesticated birds, rock doves have been redistributed across the world by humans and can now be found on every continent except Antarctica.
Guira cuckoos can be found in South America in Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina. They prefer drier trees, scrub savanna, scrub woodlands, and coastal dunes. These birds usually dine on insects, grasshoppers, cicadas, flying termites, frogs, eggs, and nestlings of small birds.
Turacos are the only birds to possess true red and green color. When you look at most birds, the color you are seeing is a reflection produced by the feather structure. The turaco's red pigment (turacin) and green pigment (turacoverdin) both contain copper. In fact, if you stirred a glass of water with a red turaco feather, the water would turn pink!
Tawny frogmouths have enormous, wide, frog-like mouths to capture insects. Their bill is large, horny, triangular, and sharply hooked. Their legs are very short and their feet small and weak. Because they don't use their feet to hunt, they are not technically classified as birds of prey. They are slow and deliberate in their movements, and are the weakest fliers in the order. Often mistaken for owls, these unique birds are part of the nightjar, nighthawks, and whippoorwill family.
