Himalayan Monal female

HAPPY THANKSGIVING to all Americans today, whatever part of the world they may be living in. Our Canadian Thanksgiving was on 13 October 2014. We have so much to be thankful for, even when times are tough.

On 3 November 2014, I spent a few hours at the Calgary Zoo with my youngest daughter. Snow was in the forecast again, so we thought we’d better fit in a visit while the sun was shining. I still had to clear the snow off my vehicle before I left home. The snow had been melting and now formed a thick, solid layer that had to be chipped away, banged, pushed, shoved, levered, until it finally broke up into fairly large slabs that simply slid off my car. Oh, the joys of winter. This irritated the inflammation of the rotator cuffs in both my shoulders yet again, just as I feared it would.

One of the fairly new birds at the Zoo was this Himalayan Monal. The male, which of course is far more colourful, didn’t stop once while we were there, pacing or running back and forth, making it totally impossible to get any photos. He's such a beautiful bird. Oh well, maybe another time. The female ended up on a tall piece of dead wood for a few minutes, so I was able to get a few shots. Such beautiful feathers and that wonderful blue around the eyes. The IUCN Status: Least Concern.

“This colourful bird is commonly called the Impeyan after Lady Impey, wife of the British chief justice of Calcutta, who first kept them in captivity on the grounds of their estate in the late 18th century. Lady Impey kept extensive notes about habitat and behaviour which were of great use to biologists in their work on native species.

These beautiful birds have a very large range throughout Asia in Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Tibet. However, in some areas they are threatened due to poaching and other human disturbances to their environment.

They are to be found primarily in mountainous regions; in summer, they are found in rocky, grass-covered meadows and winter in coniferous and mixed forests.

Their diet includes seeds, tubers, shoots, berries, terrestrial insects and their larvae. They dig extensively with their bill, up to 25 cm deep, creating distinctive dug-over areas in their territory. They forage throughout the day.” From the Calgary Zoo.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_monal