TopTen Photos of the World

Blue Peacock

Blue Peacock, also called peafowl, any of three species of resplendent birds of the pheasant family, Phasianidae (order Galliformes).

Strictly, the male is a peacock, and the female is a peahen; both are peafowl.
The two most-recognizable species of peafowl are the blue, or Indian, peacock (Pavo cristatus), of India and Sri Lanka, and the green, or Javanese, peacock (P. muticus), found from Myanmar (Burma) to Java. The Congo peacock (Afropavo congensis), which inhabits the forested interior of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was discovered in 1936 after a search that began in 1913 with the finding of a single feather.In blue and green peacocks, the male has a 90–130-cm (35–50-inch) body and 150-cm (60-inch) train of tail feathers that are coloured a brilliant metallic green.
This train is mainly formed of the bird’s upper tail coverts, which are enormously elongated.
Each feather is tipped with an iridescent eye spot that is ringed with blue and bronze. In courtship displays, the cock elevates his tail, which lies under the train, thus elevating the train and bringing it forward. 

At the climax of this display, the tail feathers are vibrated, giving the feathers of the train a shimmering appearance and making a rustling sound.
The blue peacock’s body feathers are mostly metallic blue-green.
The green peacock, with a train much like that of the blue, has green and bronze body feathers. Hens of both species are green and brown and are almost as big as the male but lack the train and the head ornament.
In the wild, both species live in open lowland forests, flocking by day and roosting high in trees at night.

During the breeding season, the male forms a harem of two to five hens, each of which lays four to eight whitish eggs in a depression in the ground. The eggs are incubated by the peahen until they hatch some 28 days later.
The chicks have all of their feathers when they emerge from their eggs and are capable of flight roughly one week after hatching.
Most blue and green peafowl become sexually mature at age three. However, some male blue peafowl have been known to breed as early as age two.As an ornamental bird, the peacock is a staple resident of many of the world’s zoos and has long been famous throughout the Old World.
Green peacocks in captivity must be kept apart from other fowl, though, because of their aggressive disposition. Blue peacocks, though native to warm humid climates, can survive northern winters. Green peacocks, however, cannot tolerate much cold.
The Congo peacock is the only large phasianid in Africa. The cock is mainly blue and green with a short rounded tail. 

The hen is reddish and green with a brown topknot.
The species is smaller than those in genus Pavo, growing to roughly between 64 and 70 cm (25 to 28 inches) in length by adulthood.The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List classifies the blue peafowl as a species of least concern. However, the green peacock is classified by the IUCN as an endangered species.
The green peacock’s population declined significantly during the latter half of the 20th century because of over hunting and the destruction of large parts of its natural habitat; the species is now thought to number between 10,000 and 20,000 adults. The IUCN has classified the Congo peafowl as a vulnerable species. Its population has fallen to fewer than 10,000 adults because of hunting and habitat loss..

Happy New Year 2022

 

Satellite image of sand and seaweed in the Bahamas

We have NASA’s Landsat programmed to thank for this rare view of the Atlantic Ocean in the Bahamas as captured by satellite. The patterns you see are sand and seaweed beds that have been sculpted by ocean currents. That dark spot? It’s called the Tongue of the Ocean. The tongue is a deep, dark trench that separates the islands of Andros and New Providence in the Bahamas and connects to a larger geological feature known as the Great Bahama Canyon. 

The world’s second-largest animal

This year marks the fifth anniversary of this United Nations-backed celebration of the world’s wild animals and plants. And this is the first year that World Wildlife Day is focusing on marine life. Fin whales, like the one in our photo today, are listed as ‘vulnerable’ on the conservation status rankings. They’re threatened by climate change, pollution, shipping and other concerns, but they’ve bounced back from the brink of extinction in the early 1900s. It is the second-largest mammal in the world after the blue whale, reaching up to 27 meters (nearly 90 feet) in length when fully grown.

A Bohemian Feline

This young lynx will grow up to be the third largest predator in Europe. (The brown bear and wolf hold the first and second spots, respectively.) With an adult male lynx growing taller than two feet at the shoulder and weighing more than 60 pounds, it’s capable of hunting roe deer and sheep. And while the Eurasian lynx is a ‘least concern’ status species, habitat loss is affecting how widely dispersed they are across Europe, Russia and Central Asia. But protected locations, like the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands in the Czech Republic, where our lynx was photographed, help preserve habitat to keep this vital predator thriving.

A bite of ancient hist

Apples can be traced back to the mountains of Central Asia. In late 4th century BCE, Alexander the Great was busy conquering that region, and while in what is modern-day Kazakhstan he came across wild apples. Alexander’s military machine brought some of the plants back to Europe, and over the centuries, cuttings and seed splices began to produce the fruit as we know it now. The apples ready for harvest in this photo are on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, Canada – a long way from Central Asia.