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Venezuelan Troupial (Icterus icterus) by Lucas Limonta on Flickr About the photo: Many thanks for your invitation to feature my image at your homepage. I'm truly honored. The bird in the image is a Venezuelan Troupial. Its an introduced bird in Puerto Rico since the 18 century. It's Venezuela's national bird and since its a bird from the family Icteridae, it is related to the orioles and blackbirds such as the Baltimore Oriole.
The species is more abundant in the southwest corner of the island where a dryer forest habitat exists that the bird prefers. Surprisingly a pair of these beautiful birds showed up on the northeast part of the island were I live. I had traveled many times just to try and catch a photo of this species, but since the bird was so wary of any movement, it made it impossible just to get near the bird.
This time, I used another approach. I set my car in a place where I knew they could land and eat. Since I've already seen them foraging in this bush before, I knew this could be it. Without getting out of the car, a first bird landed in the place where the bush was and then after making a loud call, the pair came too. They stayed for a few seconds, ate some of these berries (which I think, are the fruit or seed of a eucalyptus tree) and moved on. Other thing that worked on my advantage, was that for the first shots, I did not had to use the flash nor the flash extender, since I knew this could scare them away. Kind regards, Lucas Limonta
San Juan, Puerto Rico About the bird: The Venezuelan Troupial or Troupial (Turpial in Spanish), also known as Icterus icterus is the national bird of Venezuela. Venezuelan Troupials inhabit dry areas like woodlands, gallery forest, dry scrub, llanos and open savannah where they forage for insects, a wide variety of fruit, small birds and eggs. Generally they can be found in central South America with some of the subspecies to the northern and eastern extremes of the continent. Venezuelan Troupials breed from March to September. They do not construct their own nests, but are instead obligate nest pirates. This means that they make no nest of their own, but instead must either find a vacant nest, or must drive the adults away from an active nest. Venezuelan Troupials are capable of violent attacks against established nesters. Source: Wikipedia
» 2 Comments
1Comment
at Thursday, 19 August 2010 12:02
wow a stunning bird and super shot, Lucas!! Thank you so much for sharing this beautiful shot and bird with us!
and thank you Mich for sourcing this week's FBOTW ;-)
2Comment
at Saturday, 21 August 2010 10:19
Pleasure Jay..this really is a beautiful bird...and a fantastic shot thereof !!!
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