A national bird! Israel finally has a national bird.Today President Peres announced the winner-- the hoopoe. In Hebrew it is a duchifat.
The duchifat won 35% of the ballots cast by over 155,000 Israelis.
Voters chose from a list of ten species on the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel website. Interestingly, some 46% of the hoopoe's votes came from Israel Defense Force soldiers.
Israel is a big crossroad for birds migrating between Europe and Africa.
Mazal tov, congratulations, pretty duchifat!
This photo is from the online Haaretz newspaper article of today.
UPDATE: To learn how the hoopoe helped King Solomon see Friday's Jerusalem Post.
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it's certainly a very impressive looking one, with its tuft of crown and bright orange colour!
ReplyDeleteHi Dina please go to my blog, because I have something for you!
ReplyDeleteWhat a beautiful bird! I've never seen it before, even in a book. It's very striking looking, isn't it? Congratulations National Bird!!
ReplyDeleteA beautiful creature to adopt as the national bird.
ReplyDeleteThis is a beautiful bird, love the feathers on his/her head.
ReplyDeleteWhat a fantastic looking bird Dina!
ReplyDeleteIt is a beautiful bird indeed! Wow! Such an amazing creation!
ReplyDeleteGORGEOUS looking National Bird! Much better looking than our funny Emu ;)
ReplyDeleteoh how cool, I adore hoopoes! We get them here in Port Elizabeth too, although not in the inner city where we are now. When we lived on a smallholding on the edge of town, we had whole families of them, and i never tired of watching them probing the ground with those scimitar-like beaks, hunting for subterranean goodies!
ReplyDeleteOH my gosh! That is one incredible looking bird. The name sounds quite Hawaiian.
ReplyDeleteLooks like a great choice, I've never seen this type of bird before - very striking.
ReplyDeleteWhat a beautiful bird! I can see why it won the competition.
ReplyDeleteIt's simply spectacular! I got to see some, at a distance in some trees, in Hungary a dozen years ago - nothing like this detail.
ReplyDeleteThat's great, having a vote for a national bird. And what a fitting winner.
ReplyDeleteI like this bird, it looks like it has drawn from a mix of a lot of different birds!
ReplyDeleteI am intrigued by what other birds were on the list?
Kris shalom,
ReplyDeleteThe candidates were
night owl, red falcon, spur-winged plover, Griffon vulture, finch, kingfisher, hoopoe, nightingale, warbler and the sunbird.
Each one had a nasty trait that would not look good for a national bird. And the nightingale is called bulbul, what both Jewish and Arab kids use for referring to the male "private part."
More at
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iJs5cfn5My-eXVRc4oMZOsDQFBqg
I like the night owl myself, but any one of them would have been a good pick!
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