Birds
About 280 species of bird have been recorded on Madagascar and about 200 of these breed. Although these are relatively low numbers for a large tropical island, there is a high degree of endemism. Over 100 bird species are endemic and 49 of these are restricted-range endemics with a range of less than 50,000 km2. There are five bird families unique to Madagascar or shared only with the Comoro Islands: the mesites, the ground-rollers, the cuckoo-roller, the asities and the vangas. In addition, recent studies suggest that several songbirds should be grouped together in a new endemic family: the Malagasy warblers.
Elephant Birds (Aepyornis maximus): These enormous birds were over 3 meters tall and half a tonne in weight. They are thought to have become extinct within the last millennium, as a result of human activity, like the dodo on the neighbouring island of Mauritius.
Read more about this topic: Fauna Of Madagascar
Famous quotes containing the word birds:
“One ought not to have to care
So much as you and I
Care when the birds come round the house
To seem to say good-by;”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“... to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.”
—Sharon Olds (b. 1942)
“poems direct as what the birds said,
hard as a floor, sound as a bench,
mysterious as the silence when the tailor
would pause with his needle in the air.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)