An abundance of tawnys

If there’s one thing the Bird Team has in abundance this year, it’s tawny frogmouths. These quirky birds often get mistaken for owls due to their large faces, big eyes, and brown coloration. However, this species isn’t related to owls at all! Tawny frogmouths belong to the order Caprimulgiformes, which also includes species found here in Georgia such as nightjars, whippoorwills, and chuck-will’s-widow.

Tawny frogmouths are named so due to their tawny coloration and their large frog-like mouths (creative, we know). These birds are nocturnal, primarily active at night, and use that big mouth to hunt down food such as insects, small rodents, lizards, and even small birds. Here at Zoo Atlanta, we have two breeding pairs of tawny frogmouths: Mama and Barkley, and Small Fry and Jabba. This past breeding season both pairs were very successful, and we ended the season with four tawny frogmouth chicks!

The Bird Team likes to have fun with naming chicks when we can, so each pair has a theme we stick to when choosing names for each season’s chicks. Mama and Barkley are the “tree/nut family” whose chicks we named Cashew and Pistachio, and Small Fry and Jabba are the “potato family” whose chicks are Pierogi and Latke. You may remember some other “potato” babies from a previous year, Hashbrown and Tater Tot, who went on to be parents of their own at other AZA institutions. All four of this year’s chicks are still here on Zoo grounds but look more like mom and dad by now, rather than fluffy baby chicks. So next time you’re at the Zoo, keep an eye out for the tawny frogmouth families scattered throughout our habitats and see if you can guess who is who!

Katherine B.
Senior Keeper, Birds