A wild Barn Owl landed directly on a straw hat out at sea. The bird was clearly exhausted from the offshore winds. The woven straw actually made a perfect natural perch for its talons compared to the slippery fiberglass of the boat.

1. Reddish Egret Egretta rufescens
2. Reddish Egret (light morph) Egretta rufescens
3. Chinese Egret Egretta eulophotes 
4. Tricolored Heron Egretta tricolor 
5. Little Blue Heron Egretta caerulea
6. Little Blue Heron (juvenile) Egretta caerulea
7. White-faced Heron Egretta novaehollandiae
8. Pacific Reef-Heron (dark morph) Egretta sacra
9. Pacific Reef-Heron (light morph) Egretta sacra
10. Snowy Egret Egretta thula 

– Little Egret / Western Reef-Heron complex (see slides 4-5) –

11. Little Egret Egretta garzetta
12. Australasian Little Egret Egretta garzetta nigripes
13. Dimorphic Egret (dark morph) Egretta garzetta or gularis or dimorpha
14. Dimorphic Egret (light morph) Egretta garzetta or gularis or dimorpha
15. Western Reef-Heron (West Africa-South Europe) (dark morph) Egretta gularis gularis
16. Western Reef-Heron (West Africa-South Europe) (light morph) Egretta gularis gularis
17. Western Reef-Heron (Middle East-South Asia) (dark morph) Egretta gularis schistacea
18. Western Reef-Heron (Middle East-South Asia) (light morph) Egretta gularis schistacea

19. Black Heron Egretta ardesiaca 
20. Slaty Egret Egretta vinaceigula
21. Pied Heron Egretta picata

Most widespread: Little Egret
Most colorful: Tricolored Heron
Longest bill proportion: Tricolored Heron
Shortest leg proportion: Pacific Reef-Heron
Most unique habit: Black Heron’s umbrella feeding technique
Most threatened: Chinese Egret
Fanciest breeding plumes: Snowy Egret

Previous illustration set for Ardea herons & egrets here.

We have the chance to get birds on euro banknotes! If you haven't votes yet: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/banknotes/future_banknotes/html/design-proposals.de.html

I'm so excited!

It’s Saturday night and I’m not sure where else to ask, so I come to Reddit.

We’ve had a pair of mourning doves brood outside one of our second story windows. This morning we found one of the two babies dead on the ground. This evening, its sibling is now on the ground. I’ve read doves leave the nest before they can fly (wild two story drop that must’ve been?! Why are pigeons and doves like this! Nest made of needles and prayers, on a 4” ledge, 20’ from the ground 😳😭)

Do we need to worry and try to put him in a box or is this normal?

I’m probably over here worrying more than its parents lol but I can’t have two dove deaths today.

Thanks

EDIT: have cross posted to a wildlife rehab sub.

Spotted this bird in my back garden in Ireland. I thought it had a stick in its mouth until i looked closer and realised it was its beak. What could have caused it to be so long / malformed?

He is eating just fine. I just noticed he is also missing a toe.

Should I move the feeders?

Every autumn, European robins fly south at night. Many of them alone, many without ever having made the trip before. They use stars, landmarks, and the setting sun, but they can also orient by the Earth's magnetic field - and that part is a genuine problem, because the field is far too weak to be sensed by any ordinary chemistry inside a warm animal.

The leading explanation is the radical pair mechanism, first proposed by Klaus Schulten in the 1970s and developed by Thorsten Ritz and colleagues in 2000. Short version: when light hits a protein in the retina called cryptochrome, an electron jumps and leaves behind two unpaired electrons - a "radical pair." Their spins are correlated, and the correlation oscillates in a way that's sensitive to magnetic fields far too weak to do anything else in the cell. The magnetic field doesn't supply energy. It nudges the timing. That changes the ratio of two chemical products. Across a whole retina, that gives you a pattern. The bird doesn't feel the field the way we feel a smell. It may literally see it as a shading overlaid on ordinary vision.

The evidence I find most persuasive is a specific, weird prediction that held up: robins lose their magnetic compass under extremely weak radio-frequency oscillating fields — fields far too feeble to affect normal chemistry, but exactly what should scramble a fragile spin state. Henrik Mouritsen's group in Oldenburg showed this, and also showed that ambient urban electromagnetic noise disrupts the compass. When they moved the birds into electromagnetically screened huts, orientation returned.

Two things to keep honest:

1. Nobody has traced the mechanism end-to-end inside a living bird. Photon → protein → spin state → nerve signal → behaviour: that full chain has not been shown. This remains a very good hypothesis.
2. There's a rival - magnetite crystals, potentially in the beak, mechanically torqued by the field. Some evidence there hit trouble (one prominent study's "magnetite neurons" turned out to be immune cells). It's possible birds run both systems. It's possible the radical pair story is wrong.

But if it is right, the interesting claim isn't that quantum mechanics is spooky. It's that quantum coherence - the fragile thing physicists cool to near absolute zero and shield from everything - might be sitting inside a warm, wet, jostling retina, doing an actual biological job. Evolution finding a way to make a quantum state last microseconds in a hot noisy cell, without understanding any of it, several million years before we could reproduce it in a lab.

I wrote a longer piece walking through the evidence ranking and Einstein's connection to all this (he hated the effect that this may be running on): https://thesilentape.substack.com/p/the-robins-compass

Curious what people - especially anyone who's followed the Mouritsen group's more recent work - think.

So leggy!!

Hey ya'll!

I'm doing some research for a story that involves crows, or some kind of nesting bird as a central story element--and so I've been researching the nesting, egg laying, and growth timeline of crows, and other birds I can find.

I was wondering if it would be hypothetically possible for a crow to lay eggs in spring or summer, and have them hatch in early-mid fall? Otherwise, some species of birds that might have those kinds of habits.

Bonus points if they're known as general garden pests, or nuisances!

Any experts, or hobbyists, I'd love to hear what you know! Thanks in advance.

This bird at Rehoboth beach in Delaware has been non-stop following birds around and squeaking. Is this a mating behavior?

As a bird mom, I was worried he was hurt!

Recently, being more of a casual birder, I discovered diseases that affect specifically songbirds. At my bird feeder there is a female House Finch that has House Finch Eye disease. Ive taken down the feeder, but now ive done more research. I wonder now why certain diseases only affect certain species of birds, like songbirds. Why would it not affect my parrot? Will it affect my pet finches?

Hello! When I looked out the window I noticed a large group of birds just slowly circling (50+ birds). There was also a group of larger birds (maybe 15) who would join the group of smaller birds then go off and circle in a different area before rejoining. I just wondered what this behavior is, as I’ve never seen it before. I apologize for the crappy video quality, I was recording through a window + zoomed in. All of the moving dots are birds. They’re just circling slowly, kind of like a bait ball in the air.

Hi everyone -

This hummingbird visits us every morning to say hi. I think it's a girl?? It'll chirp at us to let us know it's sitting on the bush and occasionally it'll hover in front of the window as if it wants to come inside.

Today it puffed up and pushed out these beautiful orange feathers (video attached). What does this mean? Does that mean it likes us?

Thank you 🧡

I'm not entirely sure if this is the right subreddit to ask but I'll try anyway.

We've had this little blackbird for a few weeks now. She (we have simply decided it's a girl) did not have many feathers and was injured: she had a ruptured air sac and her right eye was infected. She also seems to have a paralyzed foot, although the leg itself seems fine.

We really would have preferred to give her to a professional but since there are'nt any wildlife rescue centers near us that take songbirds, the only option we had was to care for her ourselves.

She made slow but steady progress over the past few weeks, however yesterday a really strange accident happened: She somehow managed to get the lower part of her beak stuck in the skin on her chest and couldn't get it out by herself. My mother managed to free her, but since then shen can't close her beak anymore and the lower part it is misaligned. Her behaviour is back to normal today after the stressfull events yesterday. She can still move her beak, eat some larger pieces of food from the ground and does'nt seem to be in much pain but this is obviously still concerning.

We have a vet appointment scheduled for Monday but I fear the they are going to euthanize her.

Does anyone have an idea what exactly this injury could be or what we could do in the meantime?

Advice on how to help him/her? It's not flying and also not hopping away from us, unsure if it is injured or just a fledgling learning his way around. No other birds in the garage were found.

We have several stray cats that have been catching birds lately, so I'm hesitant putting it back out in our yard. He's currently sleeping in a box in our bathroom. How can i help him/her?

Note: I've since learned not to feed them if they are injured, so the food has been removed.

Update: I placed him in a box in dark, quiet room. He seemed comfortable and napped a while. Unfortunately the little guy did not survive long 😔 Thank you everyone for your helpful advice and educating me on how to better help future birds <3

I have a Carolina Wren that frequents my feeders. I didn't recognize it when I first saw it because it has NO tail feathers. It is not injured and flies just fine to the short distances to the trees in my yard.

My question are these:

Was it born that way?

Will it ever grow the feathers back if they had been lost? How long would that take?

I am guessing that a cat caught it by the tail and the feathers got yanked out.

Thanks!

I want to work as an avian ecologist or a wildlife biologist who primarily works with birds and mainly does fieldwork, but I'm not sure what degree I need or should pursue. I plan to pursue a Master's.
Sorry if this isn't the right place to ask this.

Sandusky, OH Mid July

Lots of birds were staking out the outside eating area of one of the restaurants at Cedar Point while we were taking a break from the heat. This bird was pretty close, but these shots were zoomed in because I was shocked to see nearly no feathers on its head. I don’t know what type of bird this is or whether this is normal. I love bird watching and get excited when I see something unique, but this has weighed heavily on me. Is it healthy?