Remarkable Birds of South Africa, by Peter le Sueur Milstein

Remarkable Birds of South Africa, by Peter le Sueur Milstein. Briza Publications. Pretoria, South Africa 2010. ISBN 9781875093588 / ISBN 978-1-875093-58-8

In Remarkable Birds of South Africa Peter le Sueur Milstein sheds light on many of the fascinating aspects of bird behaviour and taxonomy and shares interesting anecdotal information collected over a lifetime dedicated to nature conservation.

Peter le Sueur Milstein  

What is a bird?

Birds belong to the advanced group of animals that have backbones and are called vertebrates. Among the vertebrates, birds are second only to fish when it comes to diversity of species, with about 9 000 bird species worldwicie, of which over 900 occur in South Africa. It is a sobering statistic that there are as many species of birds on earth as all the reptiles, amphibians and mammals combined. While not all people know clearly by definition what a reptile or a mammal is, almost everyone, whether uneducated or ultra-sophisticated, knows what a bird is. In a nutshell, the main reason for this is that all birds have feathers, but only birds have feathers. Furthermore, with a few rare flightless exceptions, most birds can fly, even though some species have limited powers of flight. Unlike the early heavily boned proto-dinosaurs and even recently extinct mammals like the Woolly Mammoth with still-edible meat found frozen in glaciers, very little fossilized evidence for the origin and ancestry of birds exists. This is due to the fragility of their bones. This rarity of avian fossils led one scientist to describe the discovery in 1877 of the best-preserved complete fossil of the first known bird, as possibly the most important natural history specimen in existence. He considered it to be the 'missing link' between reptiles and birds. It is scientific fact that birds originated from reptiles. Birds have been flippantly described as 'glorified reptiles'. It is interesting to note here that birds did not develop from the flying reptiles known to us as the pterodactyls and pterosaurs, but from cotylosaurs, the first primitive reptiles, which later gave rise to advanced reptiles called thecodonts. A branch of thecodonts, the pseudosuchians, gave rise to dinosaurs, dating from the Jurassic Period about 140 million years ago. The first discovery was of a single asymmetrical flight feather, indistinguishable from those of modern birds, adapted for flying. The second was of a complete skeleton of the animal from which the feather was presumed to have come, a bird similar in size to the Knysna Lourie or Turaco, and showing man}' reptilian characteristics like teeth. It was named Archaeopteryx lithographica. Another specimen was discovered in 1956, and subsequently two additional less-perfect specimens, previously considered to be small coelurosaurian dinosaurs, have also been assigned to Archaeopteryx. Although all these specimens have minor differences between them, these can probably be ascribed to intra-specific variation in age and sex. Many features of Archaeopteryx resemble modern birds rather than modern reptiles. These include the backward-directed pubis that facilitates egg-laying, the unique feature of fused clavicles to form the wishbone or furcula, and the fusion of foot-bones for added strength with an opposite hind-toe which aided in gripping branches when climbing trees. Both the evidence and modern theory suggest that early bird ancestors were tree-dwellers before they developed the ability to fly. Archaeopteryx had prominent wing-claws that would have aided it in scrambling around in trees. Interestingly, similar wing-claws are still found in the nestlings of a modern bird, the Hoatzin of South America. A number of birds still have rudimentary wing-claws, and one of them is our African Finfoot. [...]

This is an excerpt from the book: Remarkable Birds of South Africa, by Peter le Sueur Milstein.

Title: Remarkable Birds of South Africa
Author: Peter le Sueur Milstein
Publisher: Briza Publications
Pretoria, South Africa 2010
ISBN 9781875093588 / ISBN 978-1-875093-58-8
Softcover, 21 x 26 cm, 208 pages, 450 colour photographs