The Ruffed Grouse is a hardy bird and can adapt to many climates, including cold ones. If you are wanting to experience the beauty of this wild yet exotic game bird to breed or enjoy in your aviary, this is the species for you! Description: This species is gray and brown mottled with spots of two shades. The male has a large brown ruffed neck and a large crest on his head. The female has a smaller crest on her head. The male Ruffed Grouse makes a beautiful drumming sound used to attract his mates.
The drumming is created by beating his wings against the wind. This causes a vacuum and creates this unusual yet amazing sound. The tail spreads out during the male display. The female will not drum but does have a strutting behavior.
The two can be visually differentiated by their tail as adults. The male has what is called a broken tail band. The female does not have this. Range: This species of grouse is a popular one and has a wide range throughout North America.
Their range is from Alaska to the western United States, all the way to Minnesota and the midwest. There are some Ruffed grouse found in the Appalachians to northern Georgia. This is a growing species and a highly sought-after one. Habitat: Ruffed grouse can be found in the woodlands, coastal rainforests, and deciduous forests.
The drumming sound is created by the bird compressing air between his body and his rapidly beating wings. It is a haunting sound. Male Red Ruffed Grouse will also raise his crest, neck ruff, and fan out his tail as part of his whirring display.
Drumming deters other males and attracts females. Courtship is brief, and females nest alone, laying eggs. Incubation is days in a small nest made as a depression next to a log, boulder, or stump for protection. Once hatched, the chicks are quick to become independent. They are considered precocial, meaning that they are all set to start feeding themselves as soon as they have fully dried from hatching. They begin to fly at five days old. The young birds are ready to go their separate ways and set up their territories in about 84 days.
Lifespan: Ruffed Grouse can live up to 8 years old if kept safe and in proper conditions. In the wild, they are unfortunately quite short-lived. Size: Mature Red Ruffed Grouse weigh between 1 and 1. They are about 17 inches long with wingspans of inches.
They do spook easily though and should be kept in pens without any dog pressure or exposure to loud noises and predators. Like many game bird species, they tend to fly straight up when startled and can injure their heads or even break their necks if the top of the enclosure is too hard.
A soft netting top works best. Also, Ruffed Grouse will need to be kept in separate enclosures for much of the year, as they can get aggressive with one another. Roosts should be raised as they prefer to sleep as high up as possible. Link to post Share on other sites. Replies 31 Created 4 yr Last Reply 4 yr. Top Posters In This Topic 4 3 3 2. Popular Posts RuffChaser February 27, Craig Doherty February 27, Tom Avent February 27, Greg Hartman Posted February 26, Interesting, Dave.
At that price, they must be virtually impossible to breed in captivity. I wonder if you'd need some sort of special license in Pa to keep ruffed grouse? Posted February 27, I wonder how big on an aviary they would require? RuffChaser Posted February 27, Tom Avent Posted February 27, Cooter Brown Posted February 27, Brad Eden Posted February 27, Factor in strict state regulation on pen raised gamebirds as an additional cost.
Its name in French is more straightforward; baleine noire, the black whale. The American Eel Anguilla rostrata is a fascinating migratory fish with a very complex life cycle. Like salmon, it lives both in freshwater and saltwater.
It is born in saltwater and migrating to freshwater to grow and mature before returning to saltwater to spawn and die. The American Eel can live as long as 50 years. It is a long, slender fish that can grow longer than one metre in length and 7. Males tend to be smaller than females, reaching a size of about 0. With its small pectoral fins right behind its gills, absence of pelvic fins, long dorsal and ventral fins and the thin coat of mucus on its tiny scales, the adult eel slightly resembles a slimy snake but are in fact true fish.
Adult eels vary in coloration, from olive green and brown to greenish-yellow, with a light gray or white belly. Females are lighter in colour than males. Large females turn dark grey or silver when they mature. The American Eel is the only representative of its genus or group of related species in North America, but it does have a close relative which shares the same spawning area: the European Eel.
Both have similar lifecycles but different distributions in freshwater systems except in Iceland, where both and hybrids of both species can be found. The American Lobster Homarus americanus is a marine invertebrate which inhabits our Atlantic coastal waters. As an invertebrate, it lacks bones, but it does have an external shell, or exoskeleton, making it an arthropod like spiders and insects. Its body is divided in two parts: the cephalothorax its head and body and its abdomen, or tail.
On its head, the lobster has eyes that are very sensitive to movement and light, which help it to spot predators and prey, but are unable to see colours and clear images.
It also has three pairs of antennae, a large one and two smaller ones, which are its main sensory organs and act a bit like our nose and fingers. Around its mouth are small appendages called maxillipeds and mandibles which help direct food to the mouth and chew. Lobsters have ten legs, making them decapod ten-legged crustaceans, a group to which shrimp and crabs also belong other arthropods have a different number of legs, like spiders, which have eight, and insects, which have six.
Four pairs of these legs are used mainly to walk and are called pereiopods. The remaining pair, at the front of the cephalothorax, are called chelipeds and each of those limbs ends with a claw. These claws help the lobster defend itself, but also capture and consume its prey. Each claw serves a different purpose: the bigger, blunter one is used for crushing, and the smaller one with sharper edges, for cutting.
The Barn Swallow Hirundo rustica is a medium-sized songbird, about the size of a sparrow. It measures between 15 and 18 centimeters cm in length and 29 to 32 cm in wingspan, and weighs between 15 and 20 grams g. Its back and tail plumage is a distinctive steely, iridescent blue, with light brown or rust belly and a chestnut-coloured throat and forehead.
Their long forked tail and pointed wings also make them easily recognizable. Both sexes may look similar, but females are typically not as brightly coloured and have shorter tails than males. When perched, this swallow looks almost conical because of its flat, short head, very short neck and its long body. Although the average lifespan of a Barn Swallow is about four years, a North American individual older than eight years and a European individual older than 16 years have been observed.
Sights and sounds: Like all swallows, the Barn Swallow is diurnal —it is active during the day, from dusk to dawn. It is an agile flyer that creates very acrobatic patterns in flight. It can fly from very close to the ground or water to more than 30 m heights. When not in flight, the Barn Swallow can be observed perched on fences, wires, TV antennas or dead branches.
Both male and female Barn Swallows sing both individually and in groups in a wide variety of twitters, warbles, whirrs and chirps. They give a loud call when threatened, to which other swallows will react, leaving their nests to defend the area. Freshwater turtles are reptiles, like snakes, crocodilians and lizards. They also have a scaly skin, enabling them, as opposed to most amphibians, to live outside of water.
Also like many reptile species, turtles lay eggs they are oviparous. But what makes them different to other reptiles is that turtles have a shell. This shell, composed of a carapace in the back and a plastron on the belly, is made of bony plates. These bones are covered by horny scutes made of keratin like human fingernails or leathery skin, depending on the species. All Canadian freshwater turtles can retreat in their shells and hide their entire body except the Common Snapping Turtle Chelydra serpentina.
This shell is considered perhaps the most efficient form of armour in the animal kingdom, as adult turtles are very likely to survive from one year to the next. Indeed, turtles have an impressively long life for such small animals. Most other species can live for more than 20 years. There are about species of turtles throughout the world, inhabiting a great variety of terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems on every continent except Antarctica and its waters.
In Canada, eight native species of freshwater turtles and four species of marine turtles can be observed. Another species, the Pacific Pond Turtle Clemmys marmorata , is now Extirpated, having disappeared from its Canadian range. Also, the Eastern Box Turtle Terrapene carolina has either such a small population that it is nearly Extirpated, or the few individuals found in Canada are actually pets released in the wild.
More research is needed to know if these turtles are still native individuals. Finally, the Red-eared Slider Trachemys scripta elegans , has been introduced to Canada as released pets and, thus, is not a native species. Females tend to be slightly larger than males but are otherwise identical. As its name implies, it is pale tan to reddish or dark brown with a slightly paler belly, and ears and wings that are dark brown to black.
Contrary to popular belief, Little Brown Bats, like all other bats, are not blind. Still, since they are nocturnal and must navigate in the darkness, they are one of the few terrestrial mammals that use echolocation to gather information on their surroundings and where prey are situated. The echolocation calls they make, similar to clicking noises, bounce off objects and this echo is processed by the bat to get the information they need.
These noises are at a very high frequency, and so cannot be heard by humans. Narwhals Monodon monoceros are considered medium-sized odontocetes, or toothed whales the largest being the sperm whale, and the smallest, the harbour porpoise , being of a similar size to the beluga, its close relative. Males can grow up to 6. Females tend to be smaller, with an average size of 4 m and a maximum size of 5. A newborn calf is about 1. Like belugas, they have a small head, a stocky body and short, round flippers.
Narwhals lack a dorsal fin on their backs, but they do have a dorsal ridge about 5 cm high that covers about half their backs.
This ridge can be used by researchers to differentiate one narwhal from another. It is thought that the absence of dorsal fin actually helps the narwhal navigate among sea ice. Unlike other cetaceans —the order which comprises all whales—, narwhals have convex tail flukes, or tail fins. These whales have a mottled black and white, grey or brownish back, but the rest of the body mainly its underside is white. Newborn narwhal calves are pale grey to light brownish, developing the adult darker colouring at about 4 years old.
As they grow older, they will progressively become paler again. Some may live up to years, but most probably live to be 60 years of age. Although the second, smaller incisor tooth often remains embedded in the skull, it rarely but on occasion develops into a second tusk. Tusks typically grow only on males, but a few females have also been observed with short tusks. The function of the tusk remains a mystery, but several hypotheses have been proposed. Many experts believe that it is a secondary sexual character, similar to deer antlers.
Thus, the length of the tusk may indicate social rank through dominance hierarchies and assist in competition for access to females. Indeed, there are indications that the tusks are used by male narwhals for fighting each other or perhaps other species, like the beluga or killer whale.
A high quantity of tubules and nerve endings in the pulp —the soft tissue inside teeth — of the tusk have at least one scientist thinking that it could be a highly sensitive sensory organ, able to detect subtle changes in temperature, salinity or pressure. Narwhals have not been observed using their tusk to break sea ice, despite popular belief.
Narwhals do occasionally break the tip of their tusk though which can never be repaired. This is more often seen in old animals and gives more evidence that the tusk might be used for sexual competition. Adult coho salmon have silvery sides and metallic blue backs with irregular black spots. Spawning males have bright red sides, and bright green backs and heads, with darker colouration on their bellies. The fish have hooked jaws and sharp teeth.
Young coho salmon are aggressive, territorial and often vibrantly coloured, with a large orange anal fin edged in black and white. Its name comes from the partial webs between its toes. Males and females are identical in rather plain brown or grey plumage although females are slightly larger. The species can be difficult to distinguish from other small sandpipers. Semipalmated Sandpipers moult, or shed, their body feathers twice a year.
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