Birds are weird
Birds in general are weird, but our friendly neighbourhood reiger (heron? crane? stork? whatever) is especially so. What in the name of all that’s feathered is he doing on the roof of the houseboat next door, spreading his wings, wobbling his throat and stepping around in circles?
A couple more pics below the fold.
Between our balconey and the boat he’s standing on there’s about two metres clearance. So I’m standing no more than five metres away with the camera pointed at him, shuffling about and muttering to myself, and he’s … preening. Don’t play poker with this guy.
Funnily enough, earlier that very same day I was ranting about how bizarre the body-plan of a bird is when you look carefully. (You can see it in the baby meerkoeten: they’ve grown a lot but they’ve still got baby feathers, so the actual shape of the body shows through more clearly.)
I rest my case.
Comments
Fair enough. That was my first guess, but I also don't know what distinguishes a heron from the others, so I'm happy to play it safe.
It's a heron; at least I found that out when I looked up heron some time ago, so the problem is inversible just as the translation. You tell me what that means.