H.J. Ruiz – Avian101

Set # 33

Greater Yellowlegs

Greater Yellowlegs

Large sandpipers were once popular game for bird hunters. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many a fashionable restaurant featured gourmet meals with willet or curlew. Now shorebirds are protected, but only after many species were brought to the edge of extinction. The common names of large pipers often derive from the hunting era. Yellowlegs, for instance, are also called tattlers because these high-strung birds would be the first to raise a noisy alarm when shooters were spotted.

Shiny Cowbird

Shiny Cowbird

Like most other cowbirds, it is an obligate brood parasite, laying its eggs in the nests of many other bird species such as the rufous-collared sparrow. Different host species show different responses to their nests being parasitised, with behaviours ranging from accepting and caring for the cowbird eggs, to rejecting the eggs from the nest.

© HJ Ruiz – Avian101