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Half a century ago, Belgian Zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans first codified cryptozoology in his book On the Track of Unknown Animals.

The Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) are still on the track, and have been since 1992. But as if chasing unknown animals wasn't enough, we are involved in education, conservation, and good old-fashioned natural history! We already have three journals, the largest cryptozoological publishing house in the world, CFZtv, and the largest cryptozoological conference in the English-speaking world, but in January 2009 someone suggested that we started a daily online magazine! The CFZ bloggo is a collaborative effort by a coalition of members, friends, and supporters of the CFZ, and covers all the subjects with which we deal, with a smattering of music, high strangeness and surreal humour to make up the mix.

It is edited by CFZ Director Jon Downes, and subbed by the lovely Lizzy Bitakara'mire (formerly Clancy), scourge of improper syntax. The daily newsblog is edited by Corinna Downes, head administratrix of the CFZ, and the indexing is done by Lee Canty and Kathy Imbriani. There is regular news from the CFZ Mystery Cat study group, and regular fortean bird news from 'The Watcher of the Skies'. Regular bloggers include Dr Karl Shuker, Dale Drinnon, Richard Muirhead and Richard Freeman.The CFZ bloggo is updated daily, and there's nothing quite like it anywhere else. Come and join us...

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Monday, July 20, 2009

BALD BLACKBIRD

JAN EDWARDS WRITES: Jon, a friend sent this to me today. Any ideas what caused it?


The original message read:

Jan, have you ever seen a bald blackbird . . . ? You have now. She looks perfectly healthy apart from the near perfect head shave. Any ideas? Obviously feeding a family so she's not sterile

1 comment:

BlueDreadlock said...

i don't know if this is the same or not, but when i was a kid, we had a chicken that went bald from robbing out of a bird feeder we'd left up for the song birds (it used to flap and flutter it's way onto the bird table like a graceless version of that carling advert with the squirrel), it got it's head scraped up by the little hole on the feeder to the point where it stopped growing feathers there...

the other possibility that springs to mind is that if it's a female bird, it could just have an over-amorous partner. (again, no idea about blackbirds, but it's quite common in spring for female ducks to have no feathers on the back of their neck or their head)

if it doesn't seem to be a problem for the bird it's probably not worth worrying about!