Among the shadows

The title may sound gloomy... but it's not, quite the opposite! Blame this week's fun theme for the SMAP contest: Shadow of a bird!

I thought I didn't had any shadowy birds in my photos, but after some digging, I found out that wasn't truth. And since Neli chose a crow to illustrate this week's contest, I decided to stick to the Corvidae family for this post, only with one outsider.

Corvidae family encompassed birds like crows, jays or magpies. And look who I found spreading their shadow:

^{Jackdaw - Coloeus monedula}

Probably my favourite crow species! Jackdaws have black plummage with a beautiful silvery colour on the back of head and dorso, but what really stands out are the clear eyes, quite a contrast with most of the crow species. It's not that apparent in these photos but I chose them since they had the most marked shadows of my picks.

Normally they hang around in groups and can be noisy, which is great for anyone that likes to see birds, since they don't go unnoticed!

This one was more interested in the fingernails than posing for the photo... but still casted a decent shadow!

Let's add some more colour, shall we? We fly to southern Portugal, to see one of our endemic species!

^{Iberian magpie - Cyanopica cooki}

Beautiful, aren't they? If jackdaws are my favourite crow species, these cuties are my favourite magpie species. And there they were, jumping around in a freshly cut lawn, providing shadows for a future smap contest! :)

As jackdaws, they are normally in groups, although less noisy than the former species; still, easy to spot. Not that easy to photograph, at least for me, because they are not the quietest bird.

Another bird that don't photograph that often, is the outsider of this post; mainly because I don't see it as often as I would like. But it's an awesome species, and was sharing the lawn with the magpies. And when I saw the photo, realised it fit perfectly in this smap theme, so it's the perfect way to end this post:

^{Hoopoe - Upupa epops}

It looks like she's contemplating her own shadow! :)

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