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Volcano Junco
The volcano junco (''Junco vulcani'') is a New World sparrow endemic to the Talamancan montane forests of Costa Rica and western Panama. This junco breeds above the timberline, typically at altitudes above 3,000 m, but there is an isolated population at 2,100 m on the Caribbean slope of Costa Rica and forest clearance on Cerro de la Muerte has allowed this species to descend to 2,600 m. The habitat is open grassy or brushy areas with some stunted scrubs. The nest is a neat, lined cup constructed on the ground under a log, bush or rock, or in a cavity on a vegetated bank. The female lays two brown-spotted pale blue eggs. The volcano junco is on average 16 cm long and weighs 28 g. The adult has brown upperparts with dark streaking especially on the back. The wings and tail feathers are dark fringed. The underparts are grey. The sides of the head are grey with a black mask through the eye, a yellow iris, and a pink bill and legs. Young birds are brighter br ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adolphe Boucard
Adolphe Boucard (1839 – 15 March 1905) was a French ornithologist and trader in specimens who collected extensively in Mexico and Central America. He lived in San Francisco between 1851 and 1852, at the height of the California Gold Rush. He concentrated on collecting hummingbirds, sold scientific bird skins to natural history museums, and supplied the plume trade. He collected birds on expeditions to southern Mexico between 1854 and 1867, and many specimens were sold to P.L. Sclater. By 1865 he had become a foreign corresponding member of the Zoological Society of London. In 1891 he moved to London and set up a taxidermist company, ''Boucard, Pottier & Co.'' He published a periodical ''The Hummingbird'' (1891–95), which was stopped shortly after he moved to the Isle of Wight in 1894, the same year in which he published ''Travels of a Naturalist''. He died at his son's home in Hampstead in 1905. Taxa named in honor of Boucard Seven species of birds are named after Boucard, in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New World Sparrow
New World sparrows are a group of mainly New World passerine birds, forming the family Passerellidae. They are seed-eating birds with conical bills, brown or gray in color, and many species have distinctive head patterns. Although they share the name sparrow, New World sparrows are more closely related to Old World buntings than they are to the Old World sparrows (family Passeridae). New World sparrows are also similar in both appearance and habit to finches, with which they sometimes used to be classified. Taxonomy The genera now assigned to the family Passerellidae were previously included with the buntings in the family Emberizidae. A phylogenetic analysis of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA sequences published in 2015 found that the Passerellidae formed a monophyletic group that had an uncertain relationship to the Emberizidae. Emberizidae was therefore split and the family Passerellidae resurrected. It had originally been introduced, as the subfamily Passerellinae, by the Ger ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Talamancan Montane Forests
The Talamancan montane forests ecoregion, in the tropical moist broadleaf forest biome, are in montane Costa Rica and western Panama in Central America. Setting The Talamancan montane forests cover a discontinuous area of in Cordilleran mountains, including the Cordillera de Guanacaste, Cordillera de Tilarán, Cordillera Central, and Cordillera de Talamanca, from northwestern Costa Rica to western Panama, with outliers on Cerro Hoya on Panama's Azuero Peninsula. The montane forests lie above 750 to 1500 meters elevation, up to approximately 3000 meters elevation, where they transition to the grasslands and shrublands of the Costa Rican páramo on the highest peaks. The montane forests are surrounded at lower elevations by lowland forests, including the Isthmian-Atlantic moist forests on the Atlantic (Caribbean) slope, the Isthmian-Pacific moist forests to the south on the Pacific slope, and the Costa Rican seasonal moist forests to the northwest. Flora The forests are made u ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Costa Rica
Costa Rica (, ; ; literally "Rich Coast"), officially the Republic of Costa Rica ( es, República de Costa Rica), is a country in the Central American region of North America, bordered by Nicaragua to the north, the Caribbean Sea to the northeast, Panama to the southeast, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, and Maritime boundary, maritime border with Ecuador to the south of Cocos Island. It has a population of around five million in a land area of . An estimated 333,980 people live in the capital and largest city, San José, Costa Rica, San José, with around two million people in the surrounding metropolitan area. The sovereign state is a Unitary state, unitary Presidential system, presidential Constitution of Costa Rica, constitutional republic. It has a long-standing and stable democracy and a highly educated workforce. The country spends roughly 6.9% of its budget (2016) on education, compared to a global average of 4.4%. Its economy, once heavily dependent on agricultu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Panama
Panama ( , ; es, link=no, Panamá ), officially the Republic of Panama ( es, República de Panamá), is a transcontinental country spanning the southern part of North America and the northern part of South America. It is bordered by Costa Rica to the west, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean Sea to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the south. Its capital and largest city is Panama City, whose metropolitan area is home to nearly half the country's million people. Panama was inhabited by indigenous tribes before Spanish colonists arrived in the 16th century. It broke away from Spain in 1821 and joined the Republic of Gran Colombia, a union of Nueva Granada, Ecuador, and Venezuela. After Gran Colombia dissolved in 1831, Panama and Nueva Granada eventually became the Republic of Colombia. With the backing of the United States, Panama seceded from Colombia in 1903, allowing the construction of the Panama Canal to be completed by the United States Army Corps of En ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Junco
A junco , genus ''Junco'', is a small North American bird in the New World sparrow family Passerellidae. Junco systematics are still confusing after decades of research, with various authors accepting between three and twelve species. Despite having a name that appears to derive from the Spanish term for the plant genus ''Juncus'' (rushes), these birds are seldom found among rush plants, which prefer wet ground, while juncos prefer dry soil. Their breeding habitat is coniferous or mixed forest areas throughout North America, ranging from subarctic taiga to high-altitude mountain forests in Mexico and Central America south to Panama. Northern birds usually migrate farther south; southern populations are permanent residents or altitudinal migrants, moving only a short distance downslope to avoid severe winter weather in the mountains. These birds forage on the ground. In winter, they often forage in flocks. They eat mainly insects and seeds. They usually nest in a well-hidde ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cerro De La Muerte
Cerro de la Muerte is a mountain peak of a massif in Costa Rica, it is located within the Tapantí — Cerro de la Muerte Massif National Park, and is the highest point on the Pan-American Highway. Toponymy Its name means "Mountain of Death", "Hill of Death" or "Summit of Death," since in the past crossing the mountains from the Valle Central meant a three- or four-day journey, on foot or on horseback, and many ill-prepared travelers succumbed to the cold and rain. However, the peak is now easily accessible since the Route 2 runs close by. Description A drivable track from the highway (Kilometer 89) leads to a peak, with its cluster of telecommunications aerials. A short hike is also available from the highway to another peak marked with a barrel. A sign marks the high point of the highway (Route 2) at , from where the vehicle track and hiking trail begin. At this altitude, overnight temperatures can dip below freezing, but the sun soon raises the temperatures in the morning, wi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cup Nest
A bird nest is the spot in which a bird lays and incubates its eggs and raises its young. Although the term popularly refers to a specific structure made by the bird itself—such as the grassy cup nest of the American robin or Eurasian blackbird, or the elaborately woven hanging nest of the Montezuma oropendola or the village weaver—that is too restrictive a definition. For some species, a nest is simply a shallow depression made in sand; for others, it is the knot-hole left by a broken branch, a burrow dug into the ground, a chamber drilled into a tree, an enormous rotting pile of vegetation and earth, a shelf made of dried saliva or a mud dome with an entrance tunnel. The smallest bird nests are those of some hummingbirds, tiny cups which can be a mere across and high. At the other extreme, some nest mounds built by the dusky scrubfowl measure more than in diameter and stand nearly tall. The study of birds' nests is known as ''caliology''. Not all bird species bu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Seed Predation
Seed predation, often referred to as granivory, is a type of plant-animal interaction in which granivores (seed predators) feed on the seeds of plants as a main or exclusive food source,Hulme, P.E. and Benkman, C.W. (2002) "Granivory", pp. 132–154 in ''Plant animal Interactions: An Evolutionary Approach'', ed. C.M. Herrera and O. Pellmyr. Oxford: Blackwell. . in many cases leaving the seeds damaged and not viable. Granivores are found across many families of vertebrates (especially mammals and birds) as well as invertebrates (mainly insects); thus, seed predation occurs in virtually all terrestrial ecosystems. Seed predation is commonly divided into two distinctive temporal categories, pre-dispersal and post-dispersal predation, which affect the fitness of the parental plant and the dispersed offspring (the seed), respectively. Mitigating pre- and post-dispersal predation may involve different strategies. To counter seed predation, plants have evolved both physical defenses ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Insect
Insects (from Latin ') are pancrustacean hexapod invertebrates of the class Insecta. They are the largest group within the arthropod phylum. Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body ( head, thorax and abdomen), three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes and one pair of antennae. Their blood is not totally contained in vessels; some circulates in an open cavity known as the haemocoel. Insects are the most diverse group of animals; they include more than a million described species and represent more than half of all known living organisms. The total number of extant species is estimated at between six and ten million; In: potentially over 90% of the animal life forms on Earth are insects. Insects may be found in nearly all environments, although only a small number of species reside in the oceans, which are dominated by another arthropod group, crustaceans, which recent research has indicated insects are nested within. Nearly all insects hatch from eggs. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spider
Spiders ( order Araneae) are air-breathing arthropods that have eight legs, chelicerae with fangs generally able to inject venom, and spinnerets that extrude silk. They are the largest order of arachnids and rank seventh in total species diversity among all orders of organisms. Spiders are found worldwide on every continent except for Antarctica, and have become established in nearly every land habitat. , 50,356 spider species in 132 families have been recorded by taxonomists. However, there has been debate among scientists about how families should be classified, with over 20 different classifications proposed since 1900. Anatomically, spiders (as with all arachnids) differ from other arthropods in that the usual body segments are fused into two tagmata, the cephalothorax or prosoma, and the opisthosoma, or abdomen, and joined by a small, cylindrical pedicel, however, as there is currently neither paleontological nor embryological evidence that spiders ever had ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Junco
A junco , genus ''Junco'', is a small North American bird in the New World sparrow family Passerellidae. Junco systematics are still confusing after decades of research, with various authors accepting between three and twelve species. Despite having a name that appears to derive from the Spanish term for the plant genus ''Juncus'' (rushes), these birds are seldom found among rush plants, which prefer wet ground, while juncos prefer dry soil. Their breeding habitat is coniferous or mixed forest areas throughout North America, ranging from subarctic taiga to high-altitude mountain forests in Mexico and Central America south to Panama. Northern birds usually migrate farther south; southern populations are permanent residents or altitudinal migrants, moving only a short distance downslope to avoid severe winter weather in the mountains. These birds forage on the ground. In winter, they often forage in flocks. They eat mainly insects and seeds. They usually nest in a well-hidde ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
