CUE A LOAD OF SHAG JOKES

Maxy was out birdwatching yesterday, and he got three snaps of this peculiar looking cormorant.


Now we know that cormorants do flaunt white head feathers in the breeding season. One authority (the URL at the bottom of this page) writes:


"Both subspecies acquire white heads prior to breeding, with some evidence that older birds have whiter heads. As an illustration, in a colony in coastal France comprised entirely of P.c.carbo, 92% of early breeders had white head feathers, while none of the later breeders showed this feature. The white head fades from egg-laying onwards, so while P.c.sinensis may average more white filoplumes at its peak than P.c.carbo, this is not a reliable character since it is dependent on the stage of breeding.

Perhaps one reason why it has been tempting to record white-headed birds at inland sites as P.c.sinensis is because only a proportion of birds in any breeding colony show the characteristic".

Now we had always thought that cormorants were cormorants, (unless they were shags) but it seems that there are two distinct subspecies jostling for our attention.

http://www.paxton-pits.org.uk/id.htm

Has lots more information, but does not get us any further in identifying this bird, whose fine white head plumage and what appears to be a yellow chin, seems far more marked than any other images that we have been able to find. Over to you guys...

Maxy had a particularly good day birdwatching (I could make twitching jokes but I won't), seeing two sorts of egret as well as some other goodies. Expect a full report on his blog in the next few days, although with his A-Levels looming it is not unsurprising that his postings are a little erratic at the moment.

ALBINO BIRDS FROM THE KENDAL MUSEUM

Yesterday Richard Muirhead asked a rhetorical question. "What HAPPENS to all these preserved Fortean specimens?!" he asked angrily.

Well they don't all disappear forever. Some regional museums, for example, still have remarkable collections of exhibits of fortean interest. However many of these collections are just not in tune with current tastes, so they are kept off show, like these gloriously bizarre albino birds from Kendal Museum...

BORED OF THE FLIES?

These three pictures turned up in my e-mail inbox last night.

I have to say that I have never seen anything quite like this before, although Max tells me that he once saw an albino bluebottle.

So what is it? Is it:
a. An albino housefly
b. An albino of some other species of fly
c. A perfectly normal specimen of a species of fly that I have never seen before, and furthermore a species which has a milky
complexion
d. A species unknown to science
e. A genetically engineered super-fly which has escaped from a secret research laboratory and is going to spread an equally genetically engineered plague amongst the world of men
f. An abomination from the Icy Plateau of Leng
g. A fly which happens to be white and is of no possible interest to people who are more interested in bigfoot, ufos and Government conspiracies


or



h. None of the above.


Answers in an e-mail please

Seriously, I am extremely interested in this little insect. I have seen nothing quite like it, and I would be very interested to find out what it is.

If anyonbe out there in bloggoland comes across other unusual looking creatures, or anything else that they feel would be grist to the CFZ's increasingly complicated mill, please do not hesitate to email me on jon@eclipse.co.uk

OK - what causes this?

Whilst rootling around in the CFZ Picture library yesterday for the pictures of what I have dubbed the `real` jackalope, I found more pictures that I had completely fogotten that I had, and I think that I shall post them, one a day, for a while...

Cop a load of this... What do you think it is? It is a white tailed deer, and it is from the same boozer-cum-museum as the `real` jackalope, but what the heck can cause such weirdly aberrant antlers?


This is not a competition because I don't know the answer, but I hope that someone out in bloggo land does...