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The shoebill (Balaeniceps rex), also known as the whale-headed stork, and shoe-billed stork, is a large long-legged wading bird. It derives its name from its enormous shoe-shaped bill . It has a somewhat stork -like overall form and has previously been classified with the storks in the order Ciconiiformes based on this morphology.
Shoebill storks look like something out of a dark fantasy novel. With their towering height, piercing eyes, and enormous bills, you might even wonder if these birds have escaped from Jurassic Park.
A small, freely-moving projection on the anterior edge of the wing of modern birds (and a few non-avian dinosaurs)—a bird's "thumb"—the word is Latin and means 'winglet'; it is the diminutive of ala, meaning 'wing'. Alula typically bear three to five small flight feathers, with the exact number depending on the species.
Reviewing genetic evidence to date, Cracraft and colleagues surmised that pelicans were sister to the shoebill with the hamerkop as the next earlier offshoot. [7] Ericson and colleagues sampled five nuclear genes in a 2006 study spanning the breadth of bird lineages, and came up with pelicans, shoebill and hamerkop in a clade. [8]
The marabou stork is a frequent scavenger, and the naked head and long neck are adaptations to this livelihood, as it is with the vultures with which the stork often feeds. In both cases, a feathered head would become rapidly clotted with blood and other substances when the bird's head was inside a large corpse, and the bare head is easier to ...
Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda. The hamerkop (Scopus umbretta) is a medium-sized bird.It is the only living species in the genus Scopus and the family Scopidae. The species and family was long thought to sit with the Ciconiiformes but is now placed with the Pelecaniformes, and its closest relatives are thought to be the pelicans and the shoebill.
A white stork in Tsavo East National Park, Kenya.The lower parts of its legs are covered with whitish droppings. Urohidrosis (sometimes misspelled "urohydrosis" [1]) is the habit in some birds of defecating onto the scaly portions of the legs as a cooling mechanism, using evaporative cooling of the fluids.
A tile design by William de Morgan, 1872 (Victoria & Albert Museum). The majority of literary allusions to the fable have contrasted the passivity of King Log with the energetic policy of King Stork, but it was pressed into the service of political commentary in the title "King Stork and King Log: at the dawn of a new reign", a study of Russia written in 1895 by the political assassin Sergey ...