Most of the head structures are labelled with "pop-up" boxes.
Click on the bird icon to go back to the main menu.
Shift-Click on this button for more general help info.
Close message boxes like this one by clicking on them.
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card button id 3
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The Great Blue Heron is one of the most common and spectacular members of the heron family, and is found throughout North America in both freshwater and saltwater environments.
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The bill is one of the most obvious and interesting physical characteristics of birds, and can tell you a great deal about how the bird feeds and makes its living in the world. The Great Blue Heron shown here has a long stabbing bill adapted for capturing small fish, amphibians and invertebrates in marshes and other aquatic environments. It occationally takes small land animals and rodents as well.
Because the bill is so intimately linked with the lifestyle of the bird it is one of the most diagnostic physical features in analyzing the ecological role and evolutionary history of the bird. As a species begins to evolve away from the original physical type into two or more new groups changes in the bill are often the first sign that related animals are evolving to fill seperate ecological niches. The classic case in point are the Galapagos Finches ("DarwinΓÇÖs Finches", see Lack 1953 in the References section), a group of closely related finches that became isolated on the Galapagos Islands have evolved a wide variety of bill shapes to exploit many feeding niches that the original ancestral finch bill wasn't well adapted to.
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Command-Option shows you where the hidden buttons are.