Helmeted Guineafowl

[John Chardine]

From a local zoo. I had no intentions of using 1/8000s at f4. The camera set itself!!! This created minimal DoF and the "helmet" is slightly OOF.

Slight crop. I lightened the eye a little to bring up the detail, and used Noel Carboni's fractal sharpening action on the downsized image, which I think worked very well.

Biology note- many birds related to chickens have wild sexually selected traits like this one. Just think of the Indian Jungle Fowl, Peacock, Turkey, and pheasants.

Date: 2 August, 2010, Time: 17:00h
Model: Canon EOS-1D Mark IV
Lens: EF70-200mm f/4L IS USM @ 200 mm
Program: Aperture Priority
ISO 800, 1/8000s, f/4
Exp. comp.: 0.0
Flash: off

[Krijn Trimbos]

The detail looks great, and the HA is good considering the higher position of shooting. Boy that bird has a lot of wattles. Nice one!

[Randy Stout]

Well John, I am glad the female guniea fowl thinks its sexy!

Tremendous detail and IQ here. Good color in background.

Cheers

Randy

[John Chardine]

Thanks Randy. Mate attraction is one side of sexual selection, the other is male-male competition for mates. The latter has produced the common trend in the animal kingdom of males being bigger and more robust than females, and males tending to have better developed weapons of one sort or another- tusks, teeth, claws and the like.

[Randy Stout]

John:

Are you saying the guniea fowl males fight by slapping each other with their wattles :D

Randy

[John Chardine]

Kind of like being gummed to death by a duck (I have fun with my duck colleagues on this point!). No Randy, but I bet the helmet is used between males for fighting. I forgot to look at their feet but many males of chicken-like birds have very well developed spurs for fighting.

[Stu Bowie]

Incredible detail John, and overall tack sharp. We have a species of Helmeted guineafowl over here, but they dont look at all like yours.

[John Chardine]

Thanks Stuart. The guineafowl are endemic to the African continent so all we have here are farmed ones or ones in zoos. The Helmeted Guineafowl (Numida meleagris) comes in several varieties or subspecies, and because they are essentially domesticated in many places, the captive ones may not look quite like the wild-types because of cross-breeding between subspecies. This one is very similar to N. m. galeata which comes from west Africa east to southern Chad, and south to Zaire and Angola, and is distinguished from the rest by the white face and upper neck.