Based on a colored engraving by Jacques Barraband from F. Levaillant’s Histoire Naturelle des Perroquets. Vol 2, Paris, 1801-5. Wikipedia says: The Mascarene Islands (or Mascarenhas Archipelago) is a group of islands in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar comprising Mauritius, Réunion, Rodrigues, Agaléga, Cargados Carajos shoals, plus the former islands of the Saya de Malha, Nazareth and Soudan banks.…
Tag: drawing
Delalande’s Coucal
He was from Madagascar. He was also known as a Snail-eating Coucal. He liked eating land snails, as his name implies. It only was known to science as a living bird for a very short time in the 19th century. Life got difficult quickly: its habitat was destroyed by deforestation, it had to compete for food with non-native invasive black rats, and it was…
Heath Hen
The Heath Hen is one of the American birds on the list of extinct birds that helped build awareness about the existence of the phenomenon of extinction. It was a distinct subspecies of the Greater Prairie Chicken native to the East Coast, from New Hampshire down to Virginia. As a member of the grouse family, it was extremely common in…
Cuban Red Macaw
Will you look at how lovely this guy is? This was a species of parrot native to Cuba and the Isla de la Juventud, an island off the Cuban coast. It was one of the smaller types of the macaws, only 18-20 inches long, and the last native Carribean macaw to go extinct. As befits a flashy bird like this…
What Does It Sound Like
I started working on a field guide because I think that paper field guides, like travel guides and encyclopedias, will be gone soon. One reason is that the kinds of things that guides describe for each bird in order to differentiate them are often the things about birds that are difficult to document in print. Like birdsong: Quiet whistled peeping…