And both gotta crap. I caught this little Anna’s Hummingbird in the act the other day as it approached one of our backyard feeders.
What I find interesting in this shot is not just the rarity of catching this little bird in the act of elimination, but the nature of what’s being excreted. It looks clear, like urine (click for a better view), but, as I’ve described in a previous post, birds don’t urinate per se. Like all non-mammal vertebrates, they release combined liquid and solid waste though a single orifice—the cloaca. Could be that the little bird has been on an all-liquid diet—sugar water from our feeders plus flower nectar—and therefore has no solid waste to eliminate. (I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether I’ve got an unhealthy fixation on cloacas.)
*This is of course the opening line of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Can’t Help Loving That Man of Mine from the 1927 musical Showboat. Gotta love a love song that begins with the word “fish.”
onebreathkohala 