Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Ovenbird: uruguayan national bird



Today I would like to introduce to you this bird we all love and respect in my country: Furnarius rufus, “hornero” for us, ovenbird in English.

It has around 18 cms long, brownish coloured, with chest and throat in beige.
It flyes in straight line for shorts distances, and uses to live around the same place all year round.


They really don’t have a sweet song, but we feel so much respect and affection for them that we enjoy their intense clatter.





Very laborious, they build up their oven shaped nests with mud mixed with dryed herbs or straw, setting it on branches, fenders, or even posts of telephone. When the mix is wet, it becomes extremely hard so as to protect the family against rain and wind.



Hornero is monogamous: the couple lives happily together all the way, and each season they build up a new home for their new brood. Other birds make good use of the old one.

Everyday they come into my backyard looking for insects or worms in the ground, and sometimes a bit of rice or some crumbs I sparse for them.


See you soon, bye bye !
Mama Flora

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Aren't the ceibo and the hornero the national flower and bird of Argentina? I'm from there and that's what I was always taught at school.. oh well.. maybe Uruguay adopted them as national symbols too.

Unknown said...

i have looked on like 4 sites and they all say the diffrent names for the bird of uraguay this is sooooooo annoying