The Eurasian hoopoe (Upupa epops ) is the most widespread species of the genus Upupa. It is a distinctive cinnamon colored bird with black and white wings, a tall erectile crest, a broad white band across a black tail, and a long narrow downcurved bill. Its call is a soft “oop-oop-oop”. It is native to Europe, Asia and the northern half of Africa. It is migratory in the northern part of its range. It spends most of the time on the ground probing for grubs and insects. The clutch of seven to eight eggs is laid in an existing cavity. The eggs are incubated by the female and hatch asynchronously. Some ornithologists treat the African and Madagascar hoopoes as subspecies of the Eurasian hoopoe.
Appearance
The Eurasian hoopoe is a cinnamon-colored bird with black and white wings, a tall erectile crest, a broad white band across a black tail, and a long narrow down curved bill. The bird has broad and rounded wings capable of strong flight which are larger in the northern migratory subspecies. The hoopoe has a characteristic undulating flight, which is like that of a giant butterfly, caused by the wings half-closing at the end of each beat or a short sequence of beats.
Eurasian hoopoes are widespread in Europe, Asia, and North Africa, and northern Sub-Saharan Africa. Most European and north Asian birds migrate to the tropics in winter. Those breeding in Europe usually migrate to the Sahel belt of sub-Saharan Africa. The African populations are sedentary all year. Eurasian hoopoes require bare or lightly vegetated ground on which to forage and vertical surfaces with cavities (such as trees, cliffs, or even walls, nestboxes, haystacks, and abandoned burrows) in which to nest. These requirements can be provided in habitats such as heathland, wooded steppes, savannas and grasslands, as well as forest glades.
Habits and Lifestyle
Eurasian hoopoes are active during the day spending most of the time on the ground probing for grubs and insects. They are solitary foragers who typically feed on the ground. More rarely they will feed in the air, where their strong and rounded wings make them fast and maneuverable, in pursuit of numerous swarming insects. More commonly their foraging style is to stride over relatively open ground and periodically pause to probe the ground with the full length of their bill. The rest of the time is typically spent sunbathing by spreading out their wings and tails low against the ground and tilting their head up; they often fold their wings and preen halfway through. They also enjoy taking dust and sand baths. The typical call of these birds is a trisyllabic ‘oop-oop-oop’. Other calls include rasping croaks, when alarmed, and hisses. Females produce a wheezy note during courtship feeding by the male.
Diet and Nutrition
Eurasian hoopoes have a carnivorous (insectivorous) diet. They eat mostly insects, although small reptiles, frogs, and plant matter such as seeds and berries are sometimes taken as well.
Mating Habits
Eurasian hoopoes are serially monogamous, meaning they form pair bonds that last for a single breeding season. They are solitary and territorial breeders. The male calls frequently to advertise his ownership of the territory. Chases and fights between rival males (and sometimes females) are common and can be brutal. Birds will try to stab rivals with their bills, and individuals may be occasionally blinded in fights. The nest of Eurasian hoopoes is usually located in a hole in a tree or wall. It has a narrow entrance and may be unlined, or various scraps may be collected. The female alone is responsible for incubating the eggs. Clutch size varies with location and can contain from 4 to 12 eggs. The incubation period lasts between 15 and 18 days, during which time the male feeds the female. The chicks hatch with a covering of downy feathers. By around day 3 to 5, feather quills emerge which will become the adult feathers. The chicks are brooded by the female for between 9 and 14 days. The female later joins the male in the task of bringing food. The young fledge in 26 to 29 days and remain with the parents for about a week more.
Fun Facts for Kids
- It is suggested that hoopoes received their name from their common ‘oop-oop-oop’ call. However, an alternative explanation of the English and scientific names is that they are derived from the French name for the birds, huppée, which means crested.
- When foraging Eurasian hoopoes beat larger prey items against the ground or a preferred stone to kill them and remove indigestible body parts such as wings and legs.
- Hoopoes have well-developed anti-predator defenses in the nest. The preen gland of the incubating and brooding female is quickly modified to produce a foul-smelling liquid, and the glands of nestlings do so as well. These secretions are rubbed into the plumage. The secretion, which smells like rotting meat, is thought to help deter predators, as well as deter parasites and possibly act as an antibacterial agent. From the age of 6 days, nestlings can also direct streams of feces at intruders and will hiss at them in a snake-like fashion. The chicks also don’t hesitate to strike with their bill or with one wing.
- Hoopoes are distinctive birds and have made a cultural impact over much of their range. They were considered sacred in Ancient Egypt, and were “depicted on the walls of tombs and temples”.
- Hoopoes were seen as a symbol of virtue in Persia, while across much of Europe these birds were thought of as thieves, and harbingers of war in Scandinavia.
SOURCE: ANIMALIA.BIO
Sew Colorful 
Good morning, Pat and Filly,
Smelling like dead meat might not be a good defense in the Deep South, but would make the Hoopoe attract buzzards.
Hope y’all have a fun safe Labor Day weekend!
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Morning GA!
hope your weekend is a good one too!!
I thought this bird was so different and pretty!
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Good morning, GA! IDK about fun but I can get on board with safe fer sure! LOL – my fun comes from seeing the improvements I’m making in my landscaping. Considering the rainy weather that is predicted this week-end, fun isn’t on the calendar! LOL
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Good Morning All!
it’s 40* here and looks to be a sunny day coming.
gonna move and stack the 3 cords of wood we bought so it’ll be a busy day.
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Good morning! Be careful about your backs while y’all are stacking wood!
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this makes it easier to fire HIM for cause
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“The Left is upset because the Trump administration is giving Ashli Babbitt full military funeral honors”
Not The Bee, Dr. Jones, Aug 29, 2025
ENTIRE ARTICLE: “The Trump administration has announced that Ashli Babbitt, the unarmed woman killed during the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, would be given full Air Force funeral honors.
Babbitt was denied such military honors by the Biden administration when she was shot and killed by Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd, labeling her an insurrectionist.
As reported by the New York Post:
Even now, Babbitt’s death remains a point of debate, with some arguing that her role in the Jan 6 riot supported the previous administration’s decision to refuse a military funeral, while others maintain that Babbitt’s death was unnecessary.
Babbitt’s family filed a $30 million wrongful death lawsuit against the federal government, which the Trump administration later settled for $5 million.
Leftist media, meanwhile, framed this story a bit differently.
Liberals, who built statues of serial felon George Floyd after he overdosed on fentanyl while resisting arrest, are upset that a “criminal” is being honored.”
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“20 Years Later, New Orleans Triumphs Over Hurricane Katrina’s Tragedy — The way the citizens of New Orleans united to restore their home and regain their destiny should serve as an inspiration to us all.”
The Federalist, Christopher Jacobs, August 30, 2025
ENTIRE ARTICLE: “Twenty years later, it still seems unbelievable: an entire metropolis underwater, evacuated, and turned into a ghost town. That the city — slowly, eventually, painfully — recovered sounds little short of miraculous.
The story of Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast two decades ago this week, includes those elements and more. It features the fury of nature, the collective failures of institutions intended to protect the citizenry, and the indomitable fortitude of a people to persevere — sometimes with the assistance of their government, sometimes despite it.
Failure of Levees — and the Government That Built Them
Tragedies often unfold not as a single event, but as a catastrophic sequence of failures. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, a series of problems in rapid succession magnified mistakes into a cataclysmic event.
So it proved with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The city’s levees and flood barriers, often constructed on shaky soil, failed in dozens of locations. A shipping channel intended to aid commerce magnified the effects of the hurricane’s storm surge. A hurricane the previous year that had created traffic gridlock on the roads — only for the storm to turn east and avoid southeastern Louisiana — made residents hesitant to evacuate yet again.
Every level of government failed. Many of the officials involved — from FEMA Director Michael Brown at the federal level to Democrat Gov. Kathleen Blanco to New Orleans Democrat Mayor Ray Nagin — looked well out of their depth. “Brownie” resigned 10 days after President George W. Bush infamously claimed he was doing “a heck of a job.” Nagin, who did not order a mandatory evacuation until hours before Katrina made landfall, was eventually indicted and convicted on federal corruption charges following his term as mayor.
The Katrina response revealed a fundamental failure in the first and most important role of government: to keep people safe. And that failure had the worst effects on the city’s poorest residents, many of them African American, who had no means of transportation to escape the storm before landfall and were effectively abandoned by their government for days afterward.
One would have hoped the city would have learned the lessons of Katrina when it comes to storm cleanup and response. But four years ago, following Hurricane Ida, garbage piled up in the streets for weeks, rotting in the heat and creating another potential health hazard.
Resilient Residents
Yet, despite it all, the people of New Orleans and southeast Louisiana worked to reclaim their city and their homes. Federal assistance and private insurance payments helped, of course, but it also required countless hours of sacrifice by residents to battle red tape, their bank accounts, and Mother Nature to return to the city, fumigate and renovate their houses, and pick up the pieces of their lives.
To an outsider watching the scenes of devastation at the Louisiana Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center 20 years ago, it seemed unlikely anyone would want to reconstruct these venues that became known for such human agony and suffering. Yet the people of New Orleans did not want those places and their city to be defined by a few days of devastation. And they certainly wanted their beloved football Saints to return, to provide a few hours of respite and distraction from their real-world struggles on fall Sundays.
This February, that Superdome, formerly the scene of chaos and destruction, again played host to the Super Bowl, the second time the famous venue has hosted one of the world’s biggest sporting events since the storm. And just like the Saints’ triumphant return to the city following the hurricane in September 2006, it represented yet another hallmark of New Orleans’ rebirth.
A Special Place
Having worked for the man who succeeded Blanco, Republican former Gov. Bobby Jindal, I have had the pleasure of traveling to Louisiana many times in the past decade-plus. Those visits have allowed me to witness the city’s renaissance over time and develop a deep admiration for the culture that makes New Orleans one of the most distinct — and one of my favorite — cities on Earth.
While scars from the storm remain — the Lower Ninth Ward and other parts of the city contain a fraction of their pre-Katrina population — some continue to heal. Train service between New Orleans and Mobile just returned a couple of weeks ago for the first time since the storm. As one passenger put it, “It’s almost like it’s one more step toward the healing,” not just for New Orleans but for the entire Gulf Coast that Katrina slammed.
Few would wish the horrors of that storm on their worst enemy. But the way the citizens of New Orleans, scattered and dispersed by the winds and waves, united to restore their home and regain their destiny should serve as an inspiration to us all.”
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“Christian Baker Pleads For SCOTUS To End California’s Lawfare Against Her Religious Beliefs”
The Federalist, By: Shawn Fleetwood. August 29, 2025
ENTIRE ARTICLE: “A Christian baker is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to end California’s attempts to force her to violate her deeply held religious beliefs. In her petition filed with the high court on Wednesday, Golden State resident Cathy Miller requested that the justices take up her case and issue a ruling in defense of her First Amendment rights. (At least four justices must agree to hear a case before it can be considered by the full court.)
“All I want is to serve my neighbors as the Gospel of Jesus Christ calls me to without being forced to create messages that violate my beliefs,” Miller said in a statement. Miller is represented by the Thomas More Society, Becket, and LiMandri & Jonna LLP.
The case first came to fruition in 2017 when Miller, a Christian cake artist, was asked to design a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. After declining to do so due to her Christian beliefs about the sanctity of marriage and referring the couple to another baker, Miller was subjected to “an investigation and legal action by the California Civil Rights Department,” according to Newsweek.
While a California trial court initially sided with Miller in the dispute, a state appeals court later reversed that decision, allowing such lawfare to proceed. Miller later appealed to the California Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case earlier this year.
In petitioning SCOTUS to consider their client’s case, Miller’s attorneys argued that “California’s eight-year civil prosecution of Miller violates both the Free Speech Clause and the Free Exercise Clause” of the First Amendment by forcing her to undertake actions that conflict with her Christian beliefs.
“The Bill of Rights does not leave ‘it open to public authorities to compel [Miller] to utter what is not in [her] mind,’” the filing reads. “And because designing and creating one of the most well known and universal of all wedding symbols involves both Miller’s speech and her religion, both Clauses are implicated.”
The lawyers went on to note recent cases that have come before the Supreme Court “involving religious objections to participating in same sex wedding ceremonies.” They specifically cited the high court’s 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission and 2023 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis decisions.
Miller’s case bears a striking resemblance to the Masterpiece Cakeshop incident, in which Colorado cake artist Jack Phillips was sued for declining to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple due to his Christian beliefs. As The Federalist’s Joy Pullmann previously noted, while the Supreme Court ultimately “ruled in Phillips’ favor,” it offered “such a narrow ruling as to allow a venomous transgender activist to immediately haul him back into court after speciously demanding that Phillips bake a transgender celebration cake.”
“The Supreme Court allowed this unconstitutional and anti-freedom regime to proliferate while pretending to check it with weak and ineffectual action,” Pullmann wrote.
The narrowness of the Masterpiece ruling and others was an issue raised by Miller’s attorneys in their Wednesday petition. Writing on their client’s behalf, they emphasized that such decisions “have not yet stopped government attempts to suppress religious objectors,” and encouraged the high court to take up Miller’s case.
“The promise of religious pluralism in this country has always been that ‘every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid,’” the petition reads. “This Court should grant review to allow Miller and millions of other religious Americans to lay equal claim to that promise.”
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“While the traditional five senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell) are widely recognized, humans actually have many more senses, including:
Proprioception: The sense of knowing where your body parts are in space without looking.
Vestibular sense: The sense of balance and spatial orientation.
Thermoception: The sense of temperature (hot and cold).
Nociception: The sense of pain.
Interoception: The sense of the internal state of the body, such as hunger, thirst, and internal organ sensations.
Equilibrioception: a sense of balance. This is what keeps us upright, and helps us make our way around without getting hurt.
Kinaesthesia: sense of movement.
Thermoception: we know whether our environment is too cold or too hot. Being able to sense the temperature around us helps keep us alive and well.
Nociception: the ability to feel pain.
Chronoception: how we sense the passing of time.
What’s the one sense that most people these days appear not to have at all?
Common Sense: Common sense is the sound, practical judgment that relies on basic knowledge and common experience to make decisions in everyday situations, often without extensive reasoning. It represents a shared understanding of obvious facts and practical abilities that most adults are expected to possess.”
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“They exempted yelling fire in theaters from the First Amendment – maybe we should give this a little more thought. I honest-to-God don’t know how I’d react if I came across some jerkoff burning a flag. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’d accept it as a legitimate protest or some crap like that. No, I’m more concerned with whether I’d go tactical or just go straight to nuclear. No matter what, don’t do that shit in front of me. That’s the flag that me, my father and both of my brothers served and fought for.”
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Just The News: “A New Orleans FBI agent who blew the whistle on a case involving multiple women being sexually harassed finally got his position restored after a nine-year battle. This story comes just days after FBI Director Kash Patel announced that his agency had concluded agreements with 10 whistleblowers to restore their positions and security clearances, as well as to offer back pay.
In 2016, New Orleans FBI Agent Mike Zummer investigated a district attorney who used the power of his office to have oral sex with five women, sexually battered eight women and asked nine others for sexual favors.
During the investigation, Zummer observed that New Orleans U.S. Assistant Attorneys had conflicts of interest, including the first AUSA owning property with the district attorney’s defense attorney.
Zummer said he reported this conflict of interest and the case ended up being closed.
References to sexual abuse were deleted
“We were able to get the case re-opened again with a new U.S. attorney, but they ultimately found 22 victims of this DA,” Zummer said on the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show on Friday. “We got approval to charge them with racketeering, which is a huge charge. But unfortunately, the new U.S. attorney allowed his office to basically lead this guy down to harassing a witness with a three-year maximum sentence and essentially cut out all of the sexual abuse from the factual basis that was filed with the court.”
He asked permission to notify the presiding judge of the misconduct that favored the district attorney. When permission was denied, he submitted a draft letter to the FBI before publishing it. When the FBI didn’t review the letter, he sent it to the court. Even though it contained no classified information, Zummer was labeled a whistleblower and was suspended. He had his security clearance revoked for sending the letter to court.
Zummer did get his job back, and that the deal made under Kash Patel would allow him to retire and get his security clearance back, according to a local media outlet.
Agent: the FBI “was worried about their reputation”
“It’ll be nine years September 30,” Zummer said. “So [I was] suspended indefinitely without pay, and I filed a lawsuit. I’ve been fighting in court ever since, really, until this deal.”
He said he felt like at the time this event happened, the Justice Department wasn’t interested in justice, but protecting reputations. “I think they were really just so worried about their reputation and looking bad because they previously declined the case and I don’t think they wanted to allow an FBI agent to have blown the whistle on them,” he said.
Another whistleblower who got an agreement was Marcus Allen, who lost his security clearance after speaking out against alleged FBI corruption amid the Capitol Hill Jan. 6 riot in 2021.
Allen told “Just the News, No Noise” that he was thankful for the restitution, but the fight was long and hard. “It does take a lot out of you, but the spiritual fortification and our faith in God has increased over this fight,” he said. “We’ve really tended to our faith.” Allen, a practicing Catholic, told The National Catholic Register that “I felt convicted in my actions by the Holy Spirit.”
Empower Oversight, a nonprofit group that supports whistleblowers, has been behind government whistleblowers’ cases and supported them for the last few years. “We’ve actually kind of been overwhelmed in the last few days after the announcement came out,” Empower Oversight founder Jason Foster said, referring to the announcement about deals with the whistleblowers.
“The fight for these 10 clients is over, and we’ve been working on their cases for a long time,” he later said. “But the fight for whistleblower protection, for the FBI and other agencies, is definitely not over. We’ve had tons of contact from other people who haven’t been able to get this kind of justice.”
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Did DOGE help DC unemployment numbers?
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IDK
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