Waterbird Photo Albums
These photo albums group together bird families placed under the same and related Aves orders. Each primary gallery displays adult portraits of individual species and juvenile/immature birds when I’ve been able to photograph them. Additional galleries supplement the portrait galleries to features behaviour such as foraging, hunting, feeding and action including flight.
The photo album displays a large group of cosmopolitan birds placed in several Avian Orders. They inhabit coastal, wetland and a variety of terrestrial environments around the world.
This album includes galleries of gulls, skimmers and terns. These cosmopolitan birds that inhabit all regions of the world. They are mainly coastal birds that, but also occupy a wide variety of inland habitats.
The photo album features grebe and flamingos. Grebes occupy freshwater habitat in summer and marine waters in winter while flamingos prefer saline, brackish or alkaline water bodies.
This album display rails, coots and cranes which have a worldwide distribution, except for polar regions and waterless deserts. Habitat includes wetlands, grassland, forest and dense scrub.
The waterfowl album includes several galleries of waterfowl. Habitat is areas of wetlands such as marshes, rivers, lakes, ponds and oceans. Distribution is worldwide, except Antarctica.
Waterbird Taxonomy
The Ramsar Convention lists the species of birds that are “ecologically dependent upon wetlands” and takes a whole-taxon approach in defining these waterbird families. However, the holistic approach does result in the inclusion of a few non-wetland species such as some seabirds and stone curlews. I follow J Boyd’s Taxonomy in Flux Checklist to map the Ramsar Convention list into to the two waterbird groups of Aves Orders. And to resolve some non-wetland bird inconsistencies. The non-Aequornithes taxonomic branch follows:
Waterbirds (others) album page also has five Aves Orders as follows:
(a) Charadriiformes (Waders/Shorebirds and Gulls). This order includes Auks. These are part of the Penguin and Auks Album;
(b) Gruiformes (Rails and Coots);
(c) Podicipediformes (Grebes);
(d) Phoenicopteriformes (Flamingos);
(e) Anseriformes (Waterfowl: Ducks, Geese and Swans).
Eurypygiformes (Kagu & Sunbittern) are part of this waterbird group.