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Selayar Whistler
The Selayar whistler (''Pachycephala teysmanni'') is a species of songbird in the family Pachycephalidae. Described by the Swiss zoologist Johann Büttikofer in 1878, it is endemic to the Indonesian island of Selayar, off the southwestern coast of Sulawesi. After its initial description, it was long considered a subspecies of the golden whistler and later the rusty-breasted whistler, before being raised to species status again in 2016. Selayar whistlers are around in length. Adult males have grey heads, white throats, olive-green upperparts, pinkish underparts, and brownish-olive tail and wing feathers. Adult females are largely similar to males, but have dark ochre lores and rufous ear-coverts. The similar appearances of the sexes in this species helps differentiate it from the rusty-breasted whistler; in that species, males have black-and-yellow plumage, contrasting with the female's olive-brown colouration. The Selayar whistler prefers forested habitats, but also occurs i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Johann Büttikofer
Johann Büttikofer (9 August 1850 – 24 June 1927) was a Swiss zoologist who worked at the Blijdorp Zoological Garden in Rotterdam. After his retirement he settled in Bern, Switzerland. For his extensive contributions to the knowledge of Liberian fauna based on two zoological expeditions to the Republic of Liberia (1879 to 1882 and 1886 to 1887) he is regarded as the 'Father of Liberian Natural History'. Early life Büttikofer was born in Ranflüh (part of Rüderswil, Canton of Bern) in the Emmental where his father Jakob was a school teacher. He attended village school until the age of 16 and then studied French for one year, after which he attended a teacher training college in Hofwil until the age of 20. He taught school in Graswil, Switzerland for six years, hunted, began to learn taxidermy, read travel accounts, and longed to visit the tropics. He left teaching to become a preparator at the Natural History Museum of Bern where he attended lectures by Prof. Theophil Stud ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Biodiversity Heritage Library
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open-access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to address this challenge by digitizing the natural history literature held in their collections and making it freely available for open access as part of a global "biodiversity community". The BHL consortium works with the international taxonomic community, publishers, bioinformaticians, and information technology professionals to develop tools and services to facilitate greater access, interoperability, and reuse of content and data. BHL provides a range of services, data exports, and APIs to allow users to download content, harvest source data files, and reuse materials for research purposes. Through taxonomic intelligence tools developed by Global Names Architecture, BHL indexes the taxonomic names throughout the collection, al ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pachycephala
''Pachycephala'' is a genus of birds native to Oceania and Southeast Asia. They are commonly known as typical whistlers. Older guidebooks may refer to them as thickheads, a literal translation of the generic name, which is derived from the Ancient Greek terms ''pachys'' "thick" + ''kephale'' "head". This lineage originated in Australo-Papua and later colonized the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos to the west and the Pacific archipelagos to the east. Taxonomy The genus ''Pachycephala'' was introduced in 1825 by the Irish zoologist Nicholas Vigors with the Australian golden whistler as the type species. The name is derived from the Ancient Greek ''pakhus'' meaning "large" or "thick" and ''kephalē'' meaning "head". The genus contains 53 species: * Olive whistler, ''Pachycephala olivacea'' * Red-lored whistler, ''Pachycephala rufogularis'' * Gilbert's whistler, ''Pachycephala inornata'' * Mangrove whistler, ''Pachycephala cinerea'' * Green-backed whistler, ''Pachycephal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
EBird
eBird is an online database of bird observations providing scientists, researchers and amateur naturalists with real-time data about bird distribution and abundance. Originally restricted to sightings from the Western Hemisphere, the project expanded to include New Zealand in 2008, and again expanded to cover the whole world in June 2010. eBird has been described as an ambitious example of enlisting amateurs to gather data on biodiversity for use in science. eBird is an example of crowdsourcing, and has been hailed as an example of democratizing science, treating citizens as scientists, allowing the public to access and use their own data and the collective data generated by others. History and purpose Launched in 2002 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University and the National Audubon Society, eBird gathers basic data on bird abundance and distribution at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. It was mainly inspired by the , created by Jacques Larivée ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Macaulay Library
The Macaulay Library is the world's largest archive of animal media. It includes more than 71 million photographs, 2.6 million audio recordings, and over three hundred thousand videos covering 96 percent of the world's bird species. There are an ever-increasing numbers of insect, fish, frog, and mammal recordings. The Library is part of Cornell Lab of Ornithology of Cornell University. History Arthur Augustus Allen and Peter Paul Kellogg made the first recordings of bird sound on May 18, 1929, in an Ithaca park. They used motion-picture film with synchronized sound to record a song sparrow, a house wren, and a rose-breasted grosbeak. This was the Beginning of Cornell Library of Natural Sounds. Graduate student Albert R. Brand and Cornell undergraduate M. Peter Keane developed recording equipment for use in the open field. In the next two years they had successfully recorded more than 40 species of birds. In 1931, Peter Keane and True McLean (a Cornell professor in electrical ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wildlife Trade
Wildlife trade refers to the exchange of products derived from non-domesticated animals or plants usually extracted from their natural environment or raised under controlled conditions. It can involve the trade of living or dead individuals, tissues such as skins, bones or meat, or other products. Legal wildlife trade is regulated by the United Nations' Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which currently has 184 member countries called ''Parties''. Illegal wildlife trade is widespread and constitutes one of the major illegal economic activities, comparable to the traffic of drugs and weapons. Wildlife trade is a serious conservation problem, has a negative effect on the viability of many wildlife populations and is one of the major threats to the survival of vertebrate species. The illegal wildlife trade has been linked to the emergence and spread of new infectious diseases in humans, including emergent viruses. Global init ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gleaning (birds)
Gleaning is a feeding strategy by birds and bats in which they catch invertebrate prey, mainly arthropods, by plucking them from foliage or the ground, from crevices such as rock faces and under the eaves of houses, or even, as in the case of ticks and lice, from living animals. This behavior is contrasted with Hawking (birds), hawking insects from the air or chasing after moving insects such as ants. Gleaning, in birds, does not refer to foraging for seeds or fruit. Gleaning is a common feeding strategy for some groups of birds, including nuthatches, Tit (bird), tits (including chickadees), wrens, Ovenbird (family), woodcreepers, treecreepers, Old World flycatchers, Tyrant flycatchers, Old World babbler, babblers, Old World warblers, New World warblers, Vireos and some hummingbirds and cuckoos. Many birds make use of multiple feeding strategies, depending on the availability of different sources of food and opportunities of the moment. Techniques and adaptations Foliage glea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Invertebrate
Invertebrates are animals that neither develop nor retain a vertebral column (commonly known as a ''spine'' or ''backbone''), which evolved from the notochord. It is a paraphyletic grouping including all animals excluding the chordata, chordate subphylum Vertebrata, i.e. vertebrates. Well-known Phylum, phyla of invertebrates include arthropods, molluscs, annelids, echinoderms, flatworms, cnidarians, and sponges. The majority of animal species are invertebrates; one estimate puts the figure at 97%. Many invertebrate taxon, taxa have a greater number and diversity of species than the entire subphylum of Vertebrata. Invertebrates vary widely in size, from 10 Micrometre, μm (0.0004 in) myxozoans to the 9–10 m (30–33 ft) colossal squid. Some so-called invertebrates, such as the Tunicata and Cephalochordata, are actually sister chordate subphyla to Vertebrata, being more closely related to vertebrates than to other invertebrates. This makes the "invertebrates" para ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fledge
Fledging is the stage in a flying animal's life between egg, hatching or birth and becoming capable of flight. This term is most frequently applied to birds, but is also used for bats. For altricial birds, those that spend more time in vulnerable condition in the nest, the nestling and fledging stage can be the same. For precocial birds, those that develop and leave the nest quickly, a short nestling stage precedes a longer fledging stage. All birds are considered to have fledged when the feathers and wing muscles are sufficiently developed for flight. A young bird that has recently fledged but is still dependent upon parental care and feeding is called a fledgling. People often want to help fledglings, as they appear vulnerable, but it is best to leave them alone. The USA National Phenology Network defines the phenophase (or life cycle stage) of fledged young for birds as "One or more young are seen recently departed from the nest. This includes young incapable of sustained ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sexual Dimorphism
Sexual dimorphism is the condition where sexes of the same species exhibit different Morphology (biology), morphological characteristics, including characteristics not directly involved in reproduction. The condition occurs in most dioecy, dioecious species, which consist of most animals and some plants. Differences may include secondary sex characteristics, size, weight, color, markings, or behavioral or cognitive traits. Male-male reproductive competition has evolved a diverse array of sexually dimorphic traits. Aggressive utility traits such as "battle" teeth and blunt heads reinforced as battering rams are used as weapons in aggressive interactions between rivals. Passive displays such as ornamental feathering or song-calling have also evolved mainly through sexual selection. These differences may be subtle or exaggerated and may be subjected to sexual selection and natural selection. The opposite of dimorphism is ''monomorphism'', when both biological sexes are phenotype, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Australian Golden Whistler
The Australian golden whistler (''Pachycephala pectoralis'') or golden whistler, is a species of bird found in forest, woodland, mallee, mangrove and scrub in Australia (except the interior and most of the north). Most populations are resident, but some in south-eastern Australia migrate north during the winter. Its taxonomy is highly complex and remains a matter of dispute, with some authorities including as many as 59 subspecies of the golden whistler (one of the highest numbers of subspecies in any bird), while others treat several of these as separate species. This bird is also known as White-Throated Thickhead in older books. Taxonomy and systematics The Australian golden whistler was originally described in the genus ''Muscicapa'' by the English ornithologist John Latham in 1801. Subspecies The taxonomy of the golden whistler complex is difficult, and remains a matter of dispute. Some authorities include a wide range of – often strikingly different – taxa from Indones ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Monotypic Taxon
In biology, a monotypic taxon is a taxonomic group (taxon) that contains only one immediately subordinate taxon. A monotypic species is one that does not include subspecies or smaller, infraspecific taxa. In the case of Genus, genera, the term "unispecific" or "monospecific" is sometimes preferred. In botanical nomenclature, a monotypic genus is a genus in the special case where a genus and a single species are simultaneously described. Theoretical implications Monotypic taxa present several important theoretical challenges in biological classification. One key issue is known as "Gregg's Paradox": if a single species is the only member of multiple hierarchical levels (for example, being the only species in its genus, which is the only genus in its family), then each level needs a distinct definition to maintain logical structure. Otherwise, the different taxonomic ranks become effectively identical, which creates problems for organizing biological diversity in a hierarchical o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
