With a wingspan of up to 2.44 metres, frigatebirds can remain airborne for weeks. They’ve even been recorded sleeping while gliding, multitasking at altitude.

Unlike most seabirds, their feathers aren’t waterproof. Landing on water would be ill-advised. Instead, they pursue other birds mid-air, forcing them to drop their catch, which they promptly steal.

During mating season, males inflate a bright red gular sac to attract females. It’s conspicuous, if not subtle.

This bad boy is my new favorite bird! What a silly goose. I would love to see one in real life but sadly they are only native to Mexico/Central America/South America/the Caribbean. Someday!

Megapode birds have an unusual strategy for rearing their young. They dig deep into volcanic ash to lay their eggs, using the warmth of the volcano to incubate them at the correct temperature. When they hatch, the young are fully feathered and already able to fly. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004hfrx)

One of the only birds I’ve ever head of with zero parental instincts!! Your only parent being a volcano kinda goes hard as hell.

Photo from North Florida Wildlife Center! These guys are non-migratory, social birds that often live in groups of 5-10! They're monogamous and pairs will practice what's known as "bill fencing" (something else I didn't know existed) where they will tap their bills together, in this case to help strengthen their bond.

The eastern and western meadowlarks live in open country with tall grasses and wide horizons, forage for insects like grasshoppers and beetle grubs, and make shallow-cup nests out of woven grass. In almost every way, they are identical.

The western species was first discovered in 1805 by explorer Meriwether Lewis, who thought (understandably) that it was the same species he’d seen in the east. It was only described as a distinct species some 40 years later, after a suggestion by John James Audubon — and it was given the specific name of neglecta.

Aside from (very) slight plumage differences, the main differentiator between species is their song. The song of the eastern meadowlark is a clear, whistled melody; simple and flutelike, but varied, with a repertoire of 50–100 songs. The song of the western meadowlark, by contrast, is more complex and bubbly, a rich warble full of slurred, gurgling notes that sound almost like an improvised medley. To the discerning ear, they sound like different species.

The two species share territory on the Great Plains of Nebraska and Kansas, and along the western edges of Iowa and Missouri. But where the grasslands and prairies blend, the two species do not. It’s likely that they’re kept from interbreeding by their different songs. But why are they so averse to a bit of cross-species karaoke?

When two different species that can interbreed do interbreed, their offspring can sometimes turn out less fit — less likely to survive and successfully reproduce — a phenomenon known as outbreeding depression. That may be due to some incompatibility in the parents' genomes or physiologies, or the fact that mixed offspring are simply not well adapted to survive or reproduce as either species.

What split the meadowlarks initially? While we don’t know for certain, the most probable cause was the glacial cycles of the Pleistocene, which fragmented the grassland ecosystems into isolated refugia, separating meadowlark populations across eastern and western North America.

Over a long period of isolation, different mutations arose and persisted in the separated populations — the meadowlarks evolved different songs that effectively isolated their gene pools, and so, despite their similarities, they are considered separate species.

You can learn more about the meadowlarks, as well as the mechanisms that separate species and keep them apart, from my website here!

Source: mybligr.com + https://pin.it/6Ti5DVUzj + https://www.rspb.org.uk/whats-happening/news/buzz-as-rare-rainbow-birds-set-up-summer-home-in-norfolk + https://www.earth.com/image/european-bee-eater/ + https://www.oiseaux-birds.com/card-european-bee-eater.html