Pixel Art Birds

Today's pixel art bird of the day is the secretary bird, or Sagittarius serpentarius! It is in the order Accipitriformes and the family Sagittariidae. You can see a photo of one stalking through brush on this Instagram post by Adele Sneyd, a South Africa based photographer.

Plot twist, I took a break from pixel art to make a winter fruit inspired design. :) If you ever see a tree with slices of orange stabbed on the branches, it’s likely someone is trying to attract orioles to their yard!

Today’s pixel art bird is the rufous-collared sparrow! This photograph was taken in the same tree as my emerald toucanet and orange fronted parakeet photos if you look closely. Grey-headed chachalacas also abounded.

Not to be confused with the rufous-crowned sparrow, this sparrow species is widespread in South America. In Costa Rica, it is known as “come maíz.”

Today’s pixel art bird of the day is the blue jay! I ended up cross-stitching this pixel art bird to use as a patch on my overalls. :) The DMC thread colors I used are in the tags.

(I give blanket permission for my pixel art to be used as cross stitch patterns for personal use, but not for those patterns to be sold.)

My favorite blue jay fun fact is that their feathers are not blue in pigmentation! They are actually brown! If you find a blue feather and hold it up the light, moving it at different angles, you can see that the blue coloration is a result of how the structure of the feather reflects light. You can see this in the video I took below:

[Video ID: A hand raises a blue and black striped feather up to the light. As the lighting changes, the feather turns brown. A lush green forest is in the background. /.End ID]

Today’s pixel art bird is the American woodcock! Another species I have yet to have the pleasure of seeing, this bird lives in the eastern half of the United States. In this clip record by nature author and photographer Lang Elliot, you can see an American woodcock calling.

You may notice that the tip of its beak flexes— This is because American woodcocks are one of many species that have a “prehensile” bill that aides them in foraging for worms in soil. They are not the only species with a flexible bill— In a photoset of a snipe by Howard Stockdale featured on a blog, one can get a good look at how much the bill actually flexes. They are able to do this due to something called the craniofacial hinge.

Today’s pixel art bird is the tree swallow! My older sibling requested the species of the bird character Tiny from Barbie Island Princess, and tree swallow was my best guess. I don’t have a knack for photographing swallows, but Maine based wildlife photographer Laura Zamfirescu has a beautiful closeup photo of a tree swallow with insects clasped in its beak.

I often see swallows swooping over my local lake, snatching insects out of the air. Like swifts and martins, swallows are adept acrobats. In a Cornell University run project sponsored by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, it was estimated that “approximately 100 billion insects are consumed annually in NY State by tree swallows alone.” This project focuses on monitoring tree swallow populations because of the valuable ecosystem service they provide us, specifically, pest control.

Today’s bird is the pine warbler! I don’t have many photos of this species, as usually I am left with just a blur of tail feathers as they hop out of frame. I fiddled around a lot with this pixel art, as I kept finding it looking too goldfinch-y.

According to All About Birds, “The Pine Warbler is the only warbler that eats large quantities of seeds, primarily those of pines.” Thus it makes sense that a pine forest is a good place to find them. I’m rather fond of them, as the stay in the Southeastern United States during the winter.

Today’s pixel art bird is the yellow throated toucan! The Wikipedia page for this species lists them as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List, but as of an assessment in February 2023, they are listed as Least Concern. Unfortunately, their population is still decreasing.

I heard this species before I saw it while in Costa Rica. Its call sounds a bit like a high pitched yelp. The subspecies I saw was the chestnut mandibled one, the two other yellow throated toucan subspecies being black mandibled.

Today’s pixel art bird is the turkey vulture! I took this photo in California, but they can be found all over the US. Turkey vultures are one of my favorite birds. They are very recognizable as they soar through the sky, wings held in a V, wobbling distinctively on the wind, with the back edges of their wings being cream in color. They are easily distinguished from black vultures this way, as black vultures only have lighter colored wing tips.

Their scientific name, Cathartes aura, can translated from Latin to “golden purifier.” This name is very regal for a bird that uses vomit as a defense mechanism and urinate on their legs to cool down, but I think it suits them nonetheless.

Turkey vultures were also the subject of an infamous experiment by John James Aubudon (an ornithological titan) where he incorrectly concluded that vultures did not use their sense of smell to find food, leading to the widespread generalization that birds have a bad sense of smell. This was challenged over the course of many years by the work of people like Betsy Bang, a biologist and medical illustrator, and Dr. Gabrielle Nevitt, a neurobiologist who is still conducting research after some breakthroughs involving seabirds and fishy liquid soaked tampons.

Today’s pixel art bird is the American coot! This American waterbird is perhaps best recognized by their horrifying feet. Rather than having webbed feet to aid in swimming, coots have long, flat, lobed toes with a large surface area.

Coots have been observed exhibiting kleptoparasitism, meaning they will sometimes simply steal food from others instead of hunting for themselves. This gives them a piratical charm only complemented by their Jolly Roger color palette.

Further, coots often build floating nests out of plant material. I like to think this is equivalent to a little pirate ship. The photo featured in this post was taken at a reservoir in 2021.

Today’s pixel art bird of the day is the white-tailed kite! Elanus leucurus is a fully protected species in the state of California, where it almost when extinct in the 1930s. Juveniles have a rusty orange mixed in with their feathers, turning to a sleek grayscale in their adult plumage. The mature adults have striking red eyes.

While at one point these faced extinction in the US, their range extends as far south as Chile. In terms of their US range specifically, they tend to be found in California, Texas, and sometimes Florida. 95% of their diet is small mammals, meaning they are small mammal specialists.

Today’s pixel art bird is the Canada goose! I took this photo years ago at a reservoir in California. It was a wonderful day for birdwatching, as there were Canada geese, American coots, American white pelicans, and double crested cormorants about.

A fact that I find fascinating about Canada geese is that their subspecies vary notably in size across the USA and Canada. They varied so much, in fact, that the source in that hyperlink is now out of date. The smallest 4 subspecies of the 11 were regrouped into the cackling goose! Smaller in stature, cackling geese have a much shorter neck and boxy head. They also co-mingle at times with Canada geese, so they can be tricky to spot.

Today’s pixel art bird is the eastern bluebird, Sialia sialis! It differs from the western bluebird in that the orange on its breast extends up to its throat, whereas the western bluebird has a blue throat.

Female bluebirds are a bit grayer than their male counterparts. Of the bluebird species in the US, the classic, all blue bluebird you see in cartoons more closely resembles the mountain bluebird.

Today’s pixel art bird is the red-winged blackbird! This bird holds a special place in my heart due to the children’s book The Magic Thief by Sarah Prineas, in which the protagonist, Connwaer, is named after the magical setting’s name for a specific kind of blackbird. Imagine my surprise as a child when I looked outside one day to see they were real!

In some areas, red-winged blackbirds have a totally red shoulder patch (or epaulet) instead of a red and yellow one. I saw this first hand while living in California, and I was delighted to see the color variation on the East coast after moving.

Another fact I find fascinating is that “[m]ale red-winged blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) often cooperate with their neighbours in defending nests against predators.” I find this particularly interesting because otherwise, from what I have read, they are fairly territorial.

Today’s pixel art bird is the emerald toucanet! I saw this one over the summer. I spotted it through a window over breakfast and raced outside to get a better look. It did spook some orange fronted parakeets with its arrival.

They are among the smaller toucan species, and are a fairly social, omnivorous species with an appetite for fruit. The funky thing about taxonomy is whether something is a species depends on who you ask. For example, the International Ornithological Congress may not concur with the American Ornithological Society, which may not concur with Jim Clements, author of Clements Checklist of Bird of the World.

So this might be a northern emerald toucanet according to the IOC, but as that all confuses me a great deal, I think I am satisfied calling it an emerald toucanet for now.