Since it started in March 2012, 450 records have been uploaded to the BOP section of the  Virtual Museum. BOP stands for Birds with Odd Plumage. The BOP logo conveys the concept of “odd plumage”. This blog reviews a few of the records in BOP.

The Virtual Museum website describes BOP this way: “Birds with all sorts of unusual plumage variations are observed from time to time. Nowadays, with digital photography, pictures of these birds are frequently available. BOP (Birds with Odd Plumage) aims to provide a place where the photographs can be curated into one database. Any bird with any unusual plumage characteristic qualifies for inclusion in the Virtual Museum. This will provide the opportunity to look for patterns. Do certain species have abnormal plumage more frequently than others? Do unusual plumage patterns occur more in some places than in others?” The BOP section of the Virtual Museum has also become a curation place for photos of birds with deformities, especially of the bill, and also of hybrids.

Here is a collage of thumbnails of the 13 African Penguins Spheniscus demersus uploaded to BOP. The most commonly encountered plumage abnormality is a double throat band, similar to that of Magellanic Penguin Spheniscus magellanicus.  Every year there are twitchers who believe they have made the first African record of the Magellanic Penguin.

But take a good look at the two photos of penguins at the left ends of the first and second rows. They are both more or less black in front, and they have white patches in the same places. They look like photos of the same penguin. Here they are, side by side!

The left photo, BOP002, was taken on Robben Island on 21 May 2004 (curated at http://vmus.adu.org.za/?vm=BOP-2). The right photo, BOP013, was taken by Jessica Kemper on Halifax Island, Namibia, on 1 June 2008 (curated at http://vmus.adu.org.za/?vm=BOP-13). Movements of African Penguins between the the Namibian islands and the penguin colonies of the Western Cape have been recorded, but are quite unusual. Alas, we do not have a match. Jessica and I have agreed that, even though the general patterns of these two birds are quite similar, the details are very different. For example, the penguin on the right has a small throatband, the one on the left does not (the patterns stay identical moult after moult). Nevertheless, it is amazing that essentially the same colour morph, the “black-fronted African Penguin” has occurred in two colonies so far apart.

There are two more African Penguins with extremely odd plumages.

This bizarre bird looks like it has been branded as penguin number 100. It was photographed on 3 June 2010 by penguin research Lorien Pichegru on St Croix Island in Algoa Bay, a little east of Port Elizabeth. Lorien comments “This bird was seen again on St Croix Island, at the same spot in March 2013” (see http://vmus.adu.org.za/?vm=BOP-131)

And this “Dalmation”-style penguin was photographed in the penguin colony at The Boulders, in Simonstown, by Andre Coetzer on 17 February 2017. The white back would be a useful climate change adaptation, because the normal black back is a poor choice of colour when lying on nests incubating eggs. Black absorbs heat, white reflects it. (See http://vmus.adu.org.za/?vm=BOP-290).

The next case study is totally different to the records for all the other species in BOP. We do not for a moment believe that the feathers of the Cattle Egrets actually grew to be pink and blue, just like we don’t believe that the blue ones are boys and the pink ones are girls.

We have absolutely no idea what happened to dye these Cattle Egrets blue or pink. They were solitary coloured birds in flocks. The blue egret on the left was photographed by Grant Egen at Mkombo Dam, Mpumalanga, on 18 January 2015 (see http://vmus.adu.org.za/?vm=BOP-205). The photographs on the right were taken by Suzanne van Maltitz on a farm in the Northern Cape just south of Spitskop Dam. The top photo was taken on 22 January 2012, and the bottom photo three years later on 13 February 2015 (see http://vmus.adu.org.za/?vm=BOP-1 and http://vmus.adu.org.za/?vm=BOP-522). Explanations welcome.

This bizarre abnormality is fairly frequent! It’s a bald Common Myna, featherless head, and a bright yellow skin, simply known as a “bald-headed myna”.  They are sometimes also referred to as “King Mynas”, as in this blog from the Seychelles where there is another, almost identical, photograph. Wherever Common Mynas occur, both in their native range and also in the multiple areas where they have been introduced, bald-headed mynas are observed occasionally. Chris Feare, co-author of a book called Starlings and Mynas, is particularly interested in this abnormality. He says: “It is remarkable that such an obvious and widespread variant has received little mention in myna literature. The causation of this strange condition remains pure speculation. We are not even close to understanding what is going on with bald-headed mynas.” Chris was involved in a myna eradication campaign in the Seychelles.  “We don’t have enough data to uncover any seasonal effects, and we killed all the birds we caught during eradication programmes so we can’t say whether they remain in the condition for life, or recover a full head of feathers at some stage.” So here is a challenge for everyone who lives with mynas. If you have a bald-headed myna in your neighbourhood, try to watch it, and see if the baldness is permanent, or whether it sprouts new feathers after a few weeks or months! The photo above, by Doreen Wood, was submitted by Grant Egen, and is curated at http://vmus.adu.org.za/?vm=BOP-181.

The Common Myna is an alien species in South Africa.

It can’t get much worse than this for a myna. Johan van Rensburg took this photo west of Delmas in Mpumalanga on 18 May 2014. He comments: “A rather bizarre combination of two rare, unrelated plumage conditions, bald-headed as well as leucistic. One in a million?” Curated at http://vmus.adu.org.za/?vm=BOP-157.

If you want to have a look at more of the weird and wonderful plumages uploaded by citizen scientists, and curated in Birds with Odd Plumage, head over to the Virtual Museum at http://vmus.adu.org.za. Select BOP as your project, and then click on either of the “Search” buttons without choosing anything specific to search for. The next page will display the first 30 records. At the top  of this page, you can click on “Display thumb-nails only”, and you will get small versions of the first 250 records in BOP. Click on any of the thumb-nails, and you will get a display of the record.

If you have photos to contribute to BOP, please do upload them! If you are new to the Virtual Museum, and want to get involved, please make contact.

We asked citizen scientist Altha Liebenberg to select a few of the Virtual Museum records which had given her the greatest pleasure in submitting during 2018. Altha lives in a small town called Daniëlskuil, in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa, about 140 km northwest of Kimberley.

Traditionally, coverage of this vast area of the Northern Cape north and west of Kimberley is pathetically thin in biodiversity projects. Altha has turned Daniëlskuil into one of the coverage hotspots for the Virtual Museum. Over the past six years, she has submitted almost 12,000 records from the town and its immediate surroundings. This is close to the number of citizens of Daniëlskuil.

This is the sixth time Altha has photographed this “form” of baboon spider at Daniëlskuil for the Virtual Museum.  This is her only record of it for 2018 – see http://vmus.adu.org.za/?vm=SpiderMAP-9631. This spider belongs to the genus Harpactirella. Ian Engelbrecht, who has a specialist interest in the baboon spiders, comments:  “The genus Harpactirella is complex and we don’t know what the species boundaries are. This particular form only occurs around Daniëlskuil.  At Griekwastad, Kuruman and Campbell, the next closest points from which we have records, different forms occur. These various forms occurs across the Karoo. They make very distinctive round burrows along drainage lines and the edges of pans. The females  have striking orange markings on the front legs. All of Altha’s records so far have been of males.” So there is lots of taxonomic research needed just to sort out the species of the genus Harpactirella.

Altha uploaded 14 records to ReptileMAP in 2018, and is responsible for 88 of the 109 records of reptiles for this grid cell. This was her “reptile of the year”. She wrote: “OK, I’m still in shock. I was slowly creeping up on some springbok for MammalMAP when this snake came across the electric fence. I thought he was going to be a dead snake, but luck was on his side and he just sailed away.” This is a Northern Boomslang Dispholidus typus viridis and is curated in ReptileMAP at http://vmus.adu.org.za/?vm=ReptileMAP-168928.

BOP stands for Birds with Odd Plumage. It is the smallest section of the Virtual  Museum, and contains photos of birds with abnormal plumages or with deformities, such as abnormally long bills. There are currently 441 records in BOP. Whether or not this section of the Virtual Museum ever delivers any real “science” is a moot point. We believe that, sooner or later, someone will discover some amazing pattern within these records. Altha highlighted this African Red-eyed Bulbul as her record of the year for BOP. She comments: “There was a flock of these bulbuls present, and in among the flock was this black one. It really stood out from the rest, and looked out of place.” This is an African Red-eyed Bulbul, curated at http://vmus.adu.org.za/?vm=BOP-476; the inset photograph of a normal bird is by Vaughan Jessnitz (http://vmus.adu.org.za/?vm=BirdPix-3460) and was taken at Witsand Nature Reserve, not far from Daniëlskuil, in the Northern Cape.  (I will do a blog post soon on a selection of the weird and wonderful records in BOP.)

Identifying the “green lacewings” of the family Chrysopidae to species from photographs is notoriously difficult. This member of the family Dichochrysa tacta is an exception. LacewingMAP has 80 records of this species, and 40 of them are photographic. The emerging distribution is shown on the map inset. In broad-brush terms it consists of the arid parts of western South Africa and southern Namibia. But it would be nice to have a lot more records to see the pattern in detail.

This photo is one Altha’s 17 records from Daniëlskuil).  (See http://vmus.adu.org.za/?vm=LacewingMAP-15393). There is special value in multiple records for a species at a site.  They help define aspects of the “phenology” (timing of the annual cycle). The records for Dichochrysa tacta are spread throughout the year, but the overwhelming majority are in September-December. This was the first of Altha’s five records of Dichochrysa tacta for 2018, on 25 August.

Daniëlskuil is inside the red circle in the inset map above, so Altha’s records are at the “edge” of the distribution. If there are 17 records here, the obvious question is: “How much farther east does the real distribution extend?”

Altha took this photo on 26 December 2918, during an expedition to Douglas, a town near the confluence of the Orange and Vaal Rivers. Her comment: “Dragonflies were scarce, and I was getting very down-hearted that I had not seen any for the whole morning. Then this little guy popped in and said hullo and then was gone again. He just gave me time for two quick photos. I picked this record as one of the highlights of the year because it made a bad day marvelous.”

The species of dragonfly that made Altha’s day for her is Red-veined Dropwing Trithemis arteriosa. This record is curated at http://vmus.adu.org.za/?vm=OdonataMAP-62887. Red-veined Dropwings occur throughout Africa, and the distribution extends beyond Africa in a northeastwards direction to the Arabian Peninsula and to Turkey in southwestern Asia.

This is the distribution map for the Red-veined Dropwing in Africa, based on 6,497 records; there are 3,823 records in OdonataMAP (ie the photographic records such as Altha’s) and 2,674 records in the Odonata Database of Africa, known as the ADDO database (African Dragonflies and Damselflies Online). The ADDO website also contains a profile of the taxonomy, identification and ecology of the Red-veined Dropwing. In this map, the grid cells in which Virtual Museum records of the species has occurred are green and the ADDO records are blue. The ADDO database contributes massively to our knowledge of distribution everywhere north of southern Africa. As amazing as this map is, the reality is that there are still lots of grid cells where Red-veined Dropwings occur, but for which we do not yet have a record!!

It would make the most remarkable difference to our understanding of biodiversity and its distribution if every community across Africa had a citizen scientist just like Altha Liebenberg.  Thank you,  Altha.