Vol. 6 // This bird looks like it flew through a rainbow 🌈

Found in Northern Australia

If a bird flew straight through a rainbow, it might come out looking like the Gouldian Finch. This prism of a bird was named by “The Bird Man”—the 19th century ornithologist John Gould—in honor of his late wife, Elizabeth, who made many of the drawings in John’s famous naturalist books. (Her credit for this work was lost to history for many years, but that’s another story.)

Both sexes of the Gouldian Finch are brilliantly colored in maturity, though males have royal purple chests while females’ chests are more rosy. 

Fun fact: These birds were once the most exported Finch in the world in the 1930s, sold by the tens of thousands by the Perth Zoo. It is now illegal to take them from Australia.

Give a Hoot

Three birding bits you should know about this week.

🌬️Blown away
Wind turbines are using cameras and AI to save birds
New technology from Australia helps detect bird flight patterns when they’re headed toward a wind turbine—with enough time to pause the blades and avoid deadly collisions.

🪶Birds of a feather
Birding on Capitol Hill: An Audubon expert gathers a bipartisan flock
D.C. Audubon Society president and “bird lobbyist” Tykee James has been taking legislators out for monthly birding walks since 2019.

🐦Special delivery
Hargila
This half-hour documentary from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology tells the story of the Greater Adjutant Stork and those helping to protect them in Assam, India. There are only 1,200 of these storks alive, making them the rarest stork in the world.

A Product We Love

Unique and worthy products from the wide world of birding you might enjoy.

Look at That Bird! A Young Naturalist’s Guide to Pacific Northwest Birding by Karen Dewitz. A full-color guide to 50 of the most common birds in the PNW for young learners. $19.99

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Flying Colors makes premium organic wild bird food, offering ethically sourced, toxin-free seeds and nuts of the highest quality to nourish wild birds of all types and inspire birders of all ages. Each specialty blend and single origin creation is rigorously sourced & researched, and every jar is produced with love & packaged by hand in small batches in New York's Hudson Valley and tested in our own backyards.