Yes, dark creatures... dark gloomy creatures, waiting silently while....while... you take their photo and feature them in this week's Show Me A Photo Contest! 😁
So, Black Birds it is!
There is a huge number of species that have an almost entirely black plummage. Probably their colour has also been the reason why some of them are connoted as carriers of bad news, or given a bad reputation. But no, colour isn't an indication of evil-doing. In fact, some of these black #featheredfriends have a very important role in our ecossystems. Take vultures, for example:
Vultures, being a scavenger species and feeding mainly on carcasses, are extremely useful in helping keeping the environment clean!
These are one of the seven species of New World Vultures (i.e., in American continent).
They were photographed in the eastern side of Costa Rica, where they seemed to like the beach as much as us tourists!
Black birds exist all over the world, so if we hop to the other side of the world, more specifically Sri Lanka...
These ones were never associated with evil-doing, as far as I know. They just chill, eat fish, and stand in cool poses drying their feathers after the dives!
The reason why cormorants adopt these postures is because in order to be able to swim better, their feathers are not water-proof, so adopting these postures helps them dry their feathers faster.
Still in Asia, I've found in Malaysia a crow species I hadn't seen before!
This smal crow had one of the smoothest black colours I had ever seen, and they are a common finding in urban parks, where these photos were taken.
And now, back to Europe!
This next black bird was probably my favourite species to see during all my hiking in Hungary. It was a brief encounter, and the only up to date... but I was fortunate to have one!
The biggest woodpecker in Europe! It's considered a shy species, and this was the most I was able to get close (hurray for optical zooms!). Males can be distiguished from females by the amount of red on the head: females only have red in the back, while in the males it covers all the top.
Red is also the colour of the beak of these not so common crows:
I don't see them that often, and only found them in mountain regions. These ones were wondering in Picos de Europa, a National Park in Spain.
So there you go: black birds, big and small; the lack of colours doesn't lower their beauty for sure!
Happy birding everyone!
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