Scarlet Ibis

FAA WATERCOLOR MARK WILL NOT APPEAR ON FINAL SALES
While walking around the Central Park Zoo and getting ready to leave I stopped over where there... more

by John Telfer

Title

Scarlet Ibis

Artist

John Telfer

Medium

Photograph

Description

FAA WATERCOLOR MARK WILL NOT APPEAR ON FINAL SALES
While walking around the Central Park Zoo and getting ready to leave I stopped over where there where several cave areas with running water and trees and bushes. These dwellings were meant to resemble the rain forests. As I was looking around I noticed this bright vibrant colored bird and immediately pulled my camera out. It was a Scarlet Ibis, most commonly found in Trinidad and Tobago. As I read the looked down in the cave area you could hear the water running in a stream and the Scarlet Ibis searching for some food to eat. The Scarlet Ibis was a bird like nothing I had ever seen before with its fat body covered with vibrant colored scarlet feathers. The body of the Ibis stood on these thin long legs that didn't even look like it could support him. The Ibis had long claws, along with a very long beak. His neck and bald head were mostly white with a shade of the scarlet cover on them. Overall I was happy I was able to photography this interesting bird. For more on the Scarlet Ibis, please feel free to read below;
The scarlet ibis (Eudocimus ruber) is a species of ibis in the bird family Threskiornithidae. It inhabits tropical South America and islands of the Caribbean. In form it resembles most of the other twenty-seven extant species of ibis, but its remarkably brilliant scarlet coloration makes it unmistakable. It is one of the two national birds of Trinidad and Tobago.

This medium-sized wader is a hardy, numerous, and prolific bird, and it has protected status around the world. Its IUCN status is Least Concern. The legitimacy of Eudocimus ruber as a biological classification, however, is in dispute. Traditional Linnaean taxonomy classifies it as a unique species, but some scientists have moved to reclassify it as a subspecies of a more general American ibis species, along with its close relative, the American white ibis (Eudocimus albus). The species was first classified by Carl Linnaeus in 1758. Initially given the binomial nomenclature of Scolopax rubra[2] (the name incorporates the Latin adjective ruber, "red"), the species was later designated Guara rubra and ultimately Eudocimus ruber.[3]

Biologically the scarlet ibis is very closely related to the American white ibis (Eudocimus albus) and is sometimes considered conspecific with it,[2][4] leaving modern science divided over their taxonomy. The two birds each have exactly the same bones, claws, beaks, feather arrangements and other features – their one marked difference lies in their pigmentation.[5] Traditional taxonomy has regarded the two as separate and distinct.[5]

Early ornithological field research revealed no natural crossbreeding among the red and white, lending support to the two-species viewpoint.[5] More recent observation, however, has documented significant crossbreeding and hybridization in the wild. Researchers Cristina Ramo and Benjamin Busto found evidence of interbreeding in a population where the ranges of the scarlet and white ibises overlap along the coast and in the Llanos in Colombia and Venezuela. They observed individuals of the two species mating and pairing, as well as hybrid ibises with pale orange plumage, or white plumage with occasional orange feathers, and have proposed that these birds be classified as a single species.[2] Hybridization has been known to occur frequently in captivity. However, the two color forms persist in the wild despite overlapping ranges and hybrid offspring having a distinctive color type, so according to the cohesion species concept they would be functionally different species.
Some biologists now wish to pair them with Eudocimus albus as two subspecies of the same American ibis.[2] Others simply define both of them as one and the same species, with ruber being a color variation of albus.
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August 7th, 2020