It was three years ago (:eek: *) I first mentioned the pair of hoopoe birds that have taken up residence near our house, evidently loving my wife’s garden. They keep making nests in the same rain gutter at the corner of our house. (We’ve still never seen a young one – unless the hoopoes with us now are the children of the first pair), but we hear sounds like the new fledgling is getting ready to fly off and seek his fortune.
We have a large mirror-like glass door. Recently a hoopoe bird began knocking on that door repeatedly with its long beak. (It came in when the door was opened and then had trouble finding its way back out.) The two loving birds are often seen together and I got worried when I didn’t see the other one – Was the bird rapping at our chamber door looking for its mate?
I assumed it could see its reflection and figured it thought it saw another hoopoe bird. But then it started rapping on several other, non-reflective, windows. Eventually we were relieved to see two hoopoe birds together. (Maybe the bird was relieved too: After a few days the window rapping stopped.)
I’ve never been a bird watcher, but these hoopoes are amazingly beautiful. I’m very pleased with the wonders of my wife’s garden.
I’m thinking of starting an IMHO thread, Septimus’ Political Manifesto, but the only progress I’ve made on the OP is
[QUOTE=septimus]
If things get bad, I ask the Mods to move this thread to BBQ Pit. Or, depending on how it plays out, rename it “Ask the idiot savant living isolated in an Asian jungle.”
[/QUOTE]
Maybe this post is a compromise.
(* - Time flies? You can’t; they fly too quickly.)
Oh gloat you gloater! We all have hoopoes! Oh look at us!
Watch a squirrel and a bluejay fight over a peanut. And they all scramble when the feral cats end up in the backyard.
i’ve learned the noises. I end up yelling at cats at five am.
They have one of my favorite scientific names among birds: Upupa epops (from the names in Latin and Greek). All the names are based on their hooting calls.
I have a silk painting of three Hoopoes I got in India in the middle of my living room wall.
Me, I live in Toronto. What I get rapping on my windows, are raccoons. Those little bastards have hands, and can open your windows if you aren’t careful - they certainly can get in your garbage.
They have cute faces, though.
As for their rapping - one scared the living shit outta me once doing that. I was reading late at night, and had a peanut butter sandwich on a plate in front of me, when I heard a rap-rap-rapping on the window beside me - I looked over, and saw what looked like a withered, black human child’s hand with long nails fumbling and pawing to open the window.:eek:
My scream startled the creature, who was of course a raccoon. It was attracted by the sandwich, but hadn’t seen me.
There are a few species of birds that have a propensity for attacking their reflections. In North America, red Cardinals do it, as do their western cousins the Pyrrhuloxias.
You are very lucky, in my opinion the Hoopoe may be the most beautiful bird in the world. The first one I saw was in Assam, India. Vivie memories of about a dozen of them cavorting acrobatically on the lawn of my hotel in Dubai.
A more proper name for the bird, e.g. as shown at the Thai Wikipedia page has an extra word set in the middle: นกกะรางหัวขวาน. If I plug that extra underlined word into Google translate by itself it shows ‘hoopoe’, but if I search for กะราง with Google I get hits on other birds, e.g. White-crested Laughingthrush.
Delightful creatures, for sure – I’ve seen them in the Balkans.
If I’m right, the hoopoe is biblically specified as on the Jewish forbidden-foods list. I believe that in said reference in the King James Bible, it’s erroneously called the “lapwing” – name of a British bird, the green plover (Vanellus vanellus). I reckon the King James’s makers can be forgiven – hoopoes are rarely seen in Britain.
My wife just saw the baby hoopoe! He was peeking out, but ducked back when he saw my wife looking at him.
The parent birds have a procedure for feeding their baby; one (the male?) goes and gets a grasshopper(?) and brings it to the nest where mama hoopoe stands guard. She takes the food out of papa’s mouth and feeds it to baby. What’s the reason for this division of labor? Is to reorient or inspect the food, or does mama just want all the baby-feeding peasure herself?
(BTW, the nest is actually hidden under a half-broken roof tile adjacent to the rain gutter. The hoopoes have cleverly found a special spot relatively safe from weather and predators.)
My in-laws had hoopoes nesting in a hole in a tree on their property, lovely birds. The ones I’ve seen in Saudi and Europe don’t seem as bright orange as the ones here and in the rest of Africa.
I bump to celebrate the mundane and pointless fact that hoopoe birds, after at least five years, are still our constant companions, still rapping on our windows, and using the same old nest to breed youngsters. (We’ve cut down trees that might have been used by predators to reach that nest.) I supposed our current hoopoes might be the children or grandchildren of the original homesteaders, but Google shows ten years as the lifespan of hoopoes in the wild.
In my daydreams I’m [del]Jeff Bezos[/del] Walter Mitty, sailing the seven seas surrounded by [del]$5000-per-trick callgirls[/del] intellects and musicians. But in my real life I get a slight frisson of joy just spotting our hoopoes, or hearing them say Hello at our windows.
