{"id":8561,"date":"2014-04-23T03:44:41","date_gmt":"2014-04-23T10:44:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=8561"},"modified":"2014-04-22T14:46:25","modified_gmt":"2014-04-22T21:46:25","slug":"ibis-ascendant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2014\/04\/23\/ibis-ascendant\/","title":{"rendered":"Ibis Ascendant"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Glossy<\/a><\/p>\n

Famously, the\u00a0Glossy Ibis\u00a0<\/strong>(here represented by the photo of a bird on Tobago last fall) is spreading like wildfire in Mediterranean France; our counts these past few days have fallen, conservatively, between 60 and 100 each day, a far cry from the times — not that long ago — when a single individual would make the list of an excursion’s “good birds.”\u00a0By 2012, the breeding population of the Camargue<\/a> exceeded 350 pairs, and the bird, dramatic and beautiful, no longer strikes anyone as especially noteworthy here in southern Provence.<\/p>\n

Though this species was a rarity through much of the twentieth century, Crespon, a hundred seventy-five years ago, knew it as a regular spring migrant in the Camargue:<\/p>\n

This charming bird only migrates through those of our marshy landscapes that are closest to the Mediterranean; in the early days of May, it arrives in more or less large flocks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s tempting to think of those nineteenth-century passage birds as would-be pioneers, and equally tempting to find a hint at the reasons for their failure in Crespon’s words:<\/p>\n

Their flesh is hard and leathery, and tastes extremely bad; it has an odor of sardines.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nobody’s eating them today, and these exotic beauties are free now to continue their conquest of the world, one marsh and one rice paddy at a time.<\/p>\n

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Famously, the\u00a0Glossy Ibis\u00a0(here represented by the photo of a bird on Tobago last fall) is spreading like wildfire in Mediterranean France; our counts these past few days have fallen, conservatively, between 60 and 100 each day, a far cry from the times — not that long ago — when a single individual would make the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Ibis Ascendant”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8561"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8561"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8564,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8561\/revisions\/8564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}