“I think you’ll be amused by its impertinence”.
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Category: Western Australia
Australia has six black cockatoo species.
All are intelligent, sociable, spectacularly agile, and have very powerful beaks.
The world’s only two white-tailed black cockatoo species – both endangered – are endemic to southwest Western Australia.
My beloved and I are lucky enough to see and hear one of them – Carnaby’s Black Cockatoo – on hundreds of occasions, every year.
The featured image shows behaviour which is very familiar to us.
The other photos show something “new”, at least to us.
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Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all…
So begins a justly celebrated poem by Emily Dickinson.
In this post “hope” is viewed through photographic, musical and poetic “lenses”.
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(Sequel to immediately-preceding post. If you are new to Pelican Yoga, please see/read that post before you explore this one)
This post’s cockatoos were not playing “Banksia rugby”, but they were members of the same flock, and also part of our “late arvo Carnabys Encounter” on 15 September 2021, just outside Cape Arid National Park’s northwestern edge.
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Imagine a spectacularly athletic, aerial form of rugby, played by members of an endangered cockatoo species…
This post will also lead you to a superb, long-awaited book by an Australian whose bird photography is in an entirely different league to yours truly’s.
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The wing’s shape is such that it can push effectively against the air, and also generate lift as it moves forwards, but that is no use without a very powerful downstroke to capture the air in the first place, and this is where muscular strength comes in.
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The wrist and ‘hand’ of a bird contain far fewer bones than those of mammals and reptiles.
Through the evolutionary process that transformed a foreleg into a wing, some of the original bones have been lost, and others fused together.
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The lives of most flying birds are fast-paced and make tremendous physical demands upon them.
A robust framework is essential, but the bird skeleton also needs flexibility and to be light enough for flight.
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Birds are all that remain today of the dinosaurs.
The history of their emergence from the mighty theropod dinosaur lineage is told through millennia of fossils, and evidence of this ancestry is apparent in their living bodies today.
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Waterbirds approaching (or departing from) their liquid runways offer much more rewarding viewing than does any airport.
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