These Cute Glacier Birds Will Blow Your Mind
High in the Andes among frozen glaciers, where pretty much nothing manages to survive, a tiny and chubby, blue-gray feathered bird lays their eggs and raises their young. It’s the only bird, apart from emperor penguins, known to nest on ice-one of the most inappropriate environments for raising young ones.
This bird species known as the white-wing diuca-finch (Diuca speculifera), can be found in the high mountain meadows in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Peru. The diuca finch is a member of the big Emberizidae family, members of which are known to breed on the Arctic tundra, even though only the diuca finch is known to build nests directly on the extremely cold ice.
This peculiar behavior was first discovered in 2003 by the University of Massachusetts Amherst geoscientist Douglas Hardy when he was on a trip to the Peruvian Andes. Hardy was very baffled to find a number of intact bird’s nests perched atop a glacier approximately 19,000 feet above sea level. He even found abandoned eggs in one of those nests. With every return to the glacier, Hardy noticed more nests and even managed to capture a photo of the bird. When Hardy was on this trip, his 9-year-old son, Spencer, a bird enthusiast, spent hours pouring over the photos and identifying species with the help of books. When Hardy returned from the site with feathers found around the nest, the father and son duo managed to get a conclusive answer from a bird expert at the Smithsonian Institution: the nest belonged to diuca finches. In 2008, Douglas hardy published an article about what he found in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology. His son, a grade-school student, also helped him write that article. Hary made more than one trip to the Andes, however, all he found was abandoned nests. In 2014, they finally managed to observe the first active bird nests on a glacier. The nests are bulky structures and they are cup-shaped, made of grass, twigs, and feathers, and can weigh around half a pound at most. The bottom is approximately 10 inches thick, and that’s about as much insulation eggs receive. In 2016, a BBC documentary team managed to capture the first-ever footage of diuca nesting on an ice cliff in the Quelccaya Ice Cap in the Peruvian Andes.
Even though hatching eggs and raising young birds on ice is peculiar, there are a lot of bird and mammalian species that thrive in the cold. They are called chionophiles (from the Greek word chion meaning “snow”, and -phile meaning “lover”). The most ordinary order of birds that survive in these habitats is the passerines, also known as the songbirds. However, other groups are also represented, just like the golden eagle of the falcon order, and the common raven, which is a corvid. A couple of species of ptarmigan are also well adapted to the cold. A lot of mammals depend on the cold for survival, such as large furry animals like bison, musk ox, elk, reindeer, mountain goat, ibex, chamois, and bighorn sheep. Because of all their fur and hair, these animals have a rough time regulating their body temperature during hot periods. These animals either just lie down on the ice, or they use the cold air that drains off glaciers to cool themselves. Other animals use ice in different ways for survival. Carnivores like bears, snow leopards, and wolverines travel across glaciers and snow patches in order not to leave their scent. But because the glaciers are melting and shrinking, many of these organisms that depend on ice, snow, and cold temperatures will find their habitats reduced, and some may even be facing the risk of extinction.
