Yeecaw🤠

Springtime willow tree and Eurasian Jays, a view from my window.

rocky coast

had to pry this dude out of kippies beak. now she's at the door asking where her meal went

Two more weeks of gender!

American Crow - ML201955231, Daniel Jimenez

Hello! You take requests, right? Please ignore this if I'm mistaken. I'd love to see some good green heron faces, though. Ever since I saw this image ((c) Larry Jordan, The Birder's Report) I've been in love.

ohhh i do take requests and i love them !!

Green Heron (Butorides virescens)

© Gregg Petersen

© Richard Lachance

© John Diener

© Forest Jarvis

© Alejandra Pons

oh but don't worry...

i saved the best for last...

cause i know the angle you REALLY wanted is...

© Mikael Behrens

ardeidae buddies @unironic-memes

Let’s do a Wild Hunt larp where we kidnap Jeff Bezos and release him in the forest and then give all the larpers (who are amazon employees) weird masks and motorbikes painted to look like fucked up horses and wolves.

Best quality: her wiggles

In Green Company: Aurora over Norway : Raise your arms if you see an aurora. With those instructions, two nights went by with, well, clouds – mostly. On the third night of returning to same peaks, though, the sky not only cleared up but lit up with a spectacular auroral display. Arms went high in the air, patience and experience paid off, and the creative featured image was captured as a composite from three separate exposures. The setting is a summit of the Austnesfjorden fjord close to the town of Svolvear on the Lofoten islands in northern Norway. The time was early 2014. Although our Sun has just passed the solar minimum of its 11-year cycle, surface activity should pick up over the next few years with the promise of triggering more spectacular auroras on Earth. via NASA

My understanding of phylogenetics is definitely limited so maybe I'm the one who's been getting it wrong this entire time, but if you haven't done so already would you mind explaining the studies about falcons being part of the Australaves clade? I find a lot of people saying things like "falcons are closely related to parrots" which I feel is a bit misleading, but again I could be wrong. Thanks in advance!

Sure! Australaves is the name given to a clade containing the seriemas, falcons, parrots, and passeriform birds. This group was first discovered by genetic analyses in the mid-2000s. As one might expect, this was a very unexpected finding, because prior to this no one had considered that all of these birds might be closely related to each other. (For example, seriemas were traditionally thought to be more closely related to cranes, falcons were thought to be more closely related to hawks, passeriforms were thought to be more closely related to woodpeckers, and so on.)

However, many more genetic studies on birds have been done since then by different research teams sampling different types of genes, vastly greater amounts of genetic data, and larger numbers of bird species, and Australaves has been consistently supported by nearly all of these. We can be pretty confident at this point that Australaves is a real clade.

Within Australaves, parrots and passeriforms are each other’s closest living relatives, and falcons are most closely related to the clade uniting both of them (which has been given the long name of Psittacopasserae). So it would not be incorrect to say that falcons are closely related to parrots, because parrots are indeed among the closest living relatives that falcons have.

However, I’ve occasionally seen people claim that parrots alone are the closest living relatives of falcons, and that is not correct. Instead, parrots and passeriforms are together the closest living relatives of falcons, and falcons are equally closely related to both (much like how a pair of siblings is equally closely related to their first cousin, instead of the cousin being more closely related to one sibling than to the other). The group containing falcons, parrots, and passeriforms (but not seriemas) has another mouthful of a name, Eufalconimorphae!