One thing I just can’t get enough of is close-up photos of bird heads. Some of them are so outlandishly weird (especially the beaks) that I’d never believe they existed if I only saw a drawing. And some of them are so different in exterior shape to the bone that one would never restore them correctly from the bone alone.
Yes, this is another venture into the realm of All Yesterdays.
Now, go to the google image search and look for “peacock skull”. Have a good look at the external nares. Then check out the nostrils on the living animal below.
WTF???? Would you come up with this based on the bone? I sure wouldn’t.
OK, while we are talking birds I’ll post a few more of the photos I took during the Tierpark Berlin visit with Dave Hone. In the Krokodilhalle (I guess no translation is necessary)there is one part that has the crocs, and another that has loads of turtles and birds. That part is a greenhouse aviary with a raised path going through it, so you look down on the turtles and up, level and down on the birds. Obviously, the entire hall is well heated, and Dave’s camera and lenses didn’t really un-mist themselves for the whole time we were in there. Mine did so rather quickly, for some weird reason. As a consequence I kept taunting Dave by photographing a male Andean Cock-of-the-rock (Rupicola peruvianus) and a female Ruby-topaz Hummingbird (Chrysolampis mosquitus) with my 300 mm zoom lens, while he was busy trying to get his stuff to work again.
More of them in future posts, along with lots more feathered and scaled stuff from the Krokodilhalle.
dinosaurpalaeo 
That orange-headed bird is beautiful. These pictures are really nice.
Bulging nares are everywhere… sic varanids. Very cool photos!
indeed, many structures do the oddest things 🙂
On our recent visit to London zoo, Marc’s camera turned out to be ‘jungle-proof’ in a similar way whenever we went into the tropical areas like the rainforest biome or the Blackburn pavilion, whilst mine resolutely remained misted up.
And yay, more peafowl!
I wonder if it has anything to do with the age of the lenses: are today’s models less prone to misty up internally?
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