193 : African Pied Wagtail

African Pied Wagtail - Motacilla aguimp

I have written before about how on safari the birds can provide the glue between the big animals. Taking time out from the giant Hippos at our first real Safari stop at Lake Manyara I soon got onto this small wagtail feeding on the side on the flies. This is a very long range shot so you will forgive the lack of detail. The head pattern is the reverse of "alba" - the pied wagtail that is seen in the UK. Here you have a black eye with a white throat and crown rather than the reverse for "alba".

One fact about wagtails that I can share is that they are the smallest family of birds that can walk. Many perching birds of course hop. I would be interested to know on their way up the evolutionary foodchain from dinosaurs via Archeopterix where the perching and hopping and walking divide came in. The simple difference between a sparrow that hops and a lark that runs. If the dinosaurs walked did Archeopterix (the first known bird with feathers) hop or walk ? If the first birds hopped did birds then reinvent walking as clearly a Tyransoaurus rex walked ? Or did some birds forget how to walk and start hopping and what advantage did that give ?

When you a look at a bird walking, surveying the ground and then picking at a piece of food on the ground you are looking at a dinosaur in miniature. Look at the feet of a bird and the nails and then visit a Natural History Museum. Designs that have barely changed over hundreds of millions of years.

African Pied Wagtail, Motacilla Aguimp
Lake Manyara NP, Tanzania
July 2012