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The most successful kiwi breeding season in the history of New Zealand’s National Wildlife Center has ended on an extraordinary note with the surprise hatching of a rare white kiwi chick. The North Island Kiwi shown here is not albino, just naturally white. It is considered a sign of good things to happen by the local Maori community.

The flightless birds are as a rule only seen in the wild every couple of years and the last one born in captivity was released almost a hundred years ago - in 1915. The kiwi is a brown bird (as shown in the video) and this is an incredibly rare occurrence.

She has been called Manukura or Chiefly One by the local Maoris and is being hand-reared in a specially maintained nursery where the keepers will care for her for a minimum of twelve months before hopefully she is released in to the wild.

Fred Margulies is a lucky man.  A pair of robins decided to nest in a flower basket on his porch.  Being a film producer he captured this wonderful footage over the next four weeks.  Add the most appropriate soundtrack – When the red red robin comes bob bob bobbin’ and you have something magical.

This is a rough cut of a proposed documentary by David Mrazek but you can see from this fifteen minutes or so that the finished product is going to be something really special. It tells the story of the demise of the great American species the Passenger Pigeon, the numbers of which went from the billion to none by the early twentieth century.

It details not only how the destruction of the species was speeded up by what amounted to industrialised harvest but warns that we are still doing the same thing to the planet – and depriving future generations of possibly countless species.

The documentary points out that at least our ancestors had the benefit of ignorance (with which I disagree a little it has to be said – that is letting them off the hook too easily!) yet that is something we most certainly do not have.

This documentary is already extremely well put together and I really look forward to seeing the complete version. The story of the Passenger Pigeon is tragic – if you have never heard of it you really should watch this eye opening film.

This is simply stunning. Loom tells the story of a successful catch. A moth inadvertently flies in to a spider’s web and its fate is sealed. As it disturbs the web with its struggles so its nemesis advances upon it from behind. This will – hopefully – blow your mind, as it did mine!

It is the creation of Polynoid, the design and storytelling loving collaboration of Jan Bitzer, Ilija Brunck, Csaba Letay, Fabian Pross and Tom Weber.

Founded in 2007 as a creative platform and playground for their own films and experiments, Polynoid today uses that same spirit but combines it with the resources of a production studio. It looks, from this superb animation, to have a very bright future ahead of it.

Spring is such a magical time of year and it is wonderful to come across a piece of film which captures it in all its majesty. On the Way Home was shot over two days at FreezeOut Lakein North Central Montana in the US this spring.

The shots of the migrating birds, especially the geese are captured on HDV and the music is absolutely spot on here. So, go and grab a coffee (or whatever you drink while near your computer keyboard!) and take in this amazing spring spectacle for yourself.

The Bronx Zoo is home to many animals, all of which deserve the attention of the photographer. Yet one day in 2010 Tom Warren spotted something different about the gorilla enclosure.

A tiny motherless duckling had wandered in. At first the gorillas were bemused but as they became used to their miniscule visitor their wariness grew in to acceptance.

One of the pictures that Warren took became the winning photo in the 2010 Nature's Best Photography Windland Smith Rice International Awards, in the Zoos and Aquariums Category.

The photo will be on display in the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. until September 25, 2011. The photos are by Tom Warren. This is the story behind that amazing picture.

Marco Polo wrote about them. Sideshows exhibited them as a cross between a chicken and a rabbit. Some say it is the closest thing the bird world gets to a tribble. Others that it must be some kind of refugee from The Muppet Show. This is the Silky. It is quite probably the coolest breed of chicken on the planet, particularly when it comes to its fabulous plumage. The general fluffiness of the Silkie makes it unusual, not to mention attractive, but it has many other endearing qualities as well as an interesting history.

They are one of the calmest chicken breeds and they generally never run around like, well, like a headless chicken.  In fact they love nothing more than to grab a perch and just watch the world go by.

They are kept for pets but the hens are renowned for being wonderful mothers. As well as incubating eggs they have laid themselves they are quite happy to do the same thing for any other eggs you might wish to pop underneath their fluffy frame.

In fact, it is not unusual to see them trotting around a farm yard with a host of (not so) ugly ducklings in tow behind them.

The Silkie makes a great mother and is unusually docile and trusting, even for a chicken.

Perhaps too trusting. BEHIND YOU!!!

I said, BEHIND YOU!!!  I can't look! You may not want to see the third picture in this sequence, reader. Seriously, rest assured that no silkies were injured in the creation of these pictures. In fact, cats and silkies have been known to share a crib.

"Excuse me? Could you make a little room? Just a little? Oh, sigh. Never mind."

Though sometimes a silkie can get home and discover unwanted house guests crashing the place. If that ginger tom could talk he would be just about to say one short sentence.  "What d'ya want, birdie?"

However, back to the breed itself rather than interspecies mingling. The plumage of the Silkie is what instantly attracts and the feel of it gives the bird its name. It also makes the Silkie unique among chickens. The light and soft feathers, so reminiscent to the touch of fur, can appear in individual chickens as a result of a recessive gene. However, the Silkie is the only chicken to possess it as a breed.

They come in a variety of different colors, from white to black, taking in red, blue and buff in-between. What you can’t see, however, is their black flesh and bones below, very unusual among chickens. Other features that set them apart from most chickens are their five (instead of four) toes and those striking blue earlobes.

The species is thought to have originated in China and, true to say, there in something eastern in their look and certain inscrutability. They arrived in Europe (and from there the New World) via the Silk Route. The most famous European to follow that path was Marco Polo and his accounts tell of a furry chicken which was possibly the Silkie.

They certainly didn’t fly out of China. Their feathers, so soft and downy render them incapable of flight. You may have noticed that in some of these wonderful pictures the bird(s) seem to have a muff of feathers under their beak which covers their blue ears, while some do not. These are not separate breeds but varieties and are known as bearded and, you guessed it, non-bearded.

It took quite a while for the breed to be formally recognised in the US. In fact it was accepted in to the Standard of Perfection in 1874 (which was, admittedly the first time it had been published0. Yet despite this acceptance rumors about the Silkie have abounded and persisted.

One of the most unrelenting tales is that the Silkie is, in fact, a hybrid of a chicken and a rabbit. While you can see – obviously – while the more credulous people may have believed this in centuries gone by it is a legend which has proven fairly difficult to dispel. In Victorian times they were often shown in travelling shows and billed as such an interspecies cross, with people being told that they had mammalian fur. You can just imagine Barnum buying a dozen and crossing his fingers. You can see why, perhaps.  Do these chickens have heads?

Today, however, the Silkie has become a popular breed of ornamental chicken. They are popular with smallholders not only for their looks but because the hen is about the broodiest bird on the planet. Any extra eggs from any breed of poultry will be gladly welcomed in to the brood to be of a mother Silkie who herself produces around three eggs each week.

Some of you are probably asking the question, yes, but what do they taste like? Perhaps because of their black skin (see a dead pair here if you must!) the breed has escaped intensive farming in the West – or it could be the simple fact that it does not produce as much meet as other breeds of chicken. Underneath that ball of fluff is quite a skinny chicken, believe it or not. In China, where they are known as wu gu ji – literally the chicken with black bones – they are regarded as suitable for gourmet tastes.

Although this is not a site that marks out animals as pets (or tells you where to buy them or how to look after them), it has to be admitted that if you want a chicken as a pet then the Silkie is an ideal. They are composed, amicable and sociable and they like children. In other words they are quite docile. Although this means that they can be bullied by other birds they tend to do well in human company.

We have now, hopefully, firmly established that the Silkie is not a rabbit – or indeed a tribble – but very much a bird. It has to be said it is an unusual looking winged, bipedal, endothermic, egg-laying, vertebrate but you know something? However, this, with apologies to EB White and Charlotte is some bird. Some bird indeed.

We recently posted a photo essay on the amazing Jellyfish of Palau.  Every day millions of golden jellyfish migrate – no big surprise there.  However, you might not expect them to migrate horizontally across a lake.  Still, a visit to Jellyfish Lake on Eil Malk, an island in Palau, in the Pacific Ocean, will confirm just that.

We looked for a video at the time but didn't find one we liked (that much) until now.  This great piece was shot by Sarosh Jacob - who filmed the amazing contents of the lake.  Add a soundtrack by Radiohead and it's perfect!

Sir David Attenborough reflects on the early days of conservation and more specifically the work of Peter Scott, who was instrumental in the formation of WWF - the World Wide Fund for Nature.

He talks about the issues facing environmental organisations today and speaks passionately about the need for conservation groups such as WWF.

On a lighter note he touches on his career in the broadcast industry and the love he holds for the natural world.

This may not be the highest quality of videos, but nevertheless I found it very amusing. Who can say what goes on in the head of the average cat – let alone one like this.

This cat likes to play with boxes – or more accurately I should say that this cat likes to be in boxes.

It may be a case of go figure, but if it’s happy and it’s not hurting anyone – who can argue? It does, after all, take all types to make a world.

When spring had arrived in Vienna, Gunther Machu thought about showing the beauty of nature in terms of the landscapes and the insects – to take a journey in to macro space.

He started initially to just reverse mount his 50mm f1.4 lens (taping it to the adapter on his Lumix GH1), but then for quality reasons he bought a used 50mm f3.5 FD macro lens with a 25mm extender.

Almost everything was filmed in his garden, apart from the first sequence which was on a small hill very close to his house – he realized that the flowers there became extremely rare and are under severe protection!

It makes for a fascinating glimpse in to a world we only rarely consider – that which is right underneath our noses. Enjoy!

Shawn Landersz recently visited Cahuita National Park in Costa Rica. The animals seemed so chilled that when he put his footage together the only tune he could possible accompany it with was Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds. You have to admit, it does go extraordinarily well with the footage of animals just doing their own thing!

If you would like to know more about the park, here is a little clip from Wikipedia:

Cahuita National Park is a National Park in the Caribbean La Amistad Conservation Area of Costa Rica located on the southern Caribbean coast in Limón Province, connected to the town of Cahuita. It protects beaches and lowlands and attracts tourists and other visitors who are able to scuba dive and snorkel in the protected marine area which contains the Coralline Reefs, as well as being a nesting ground for sea turtles. This is also one of the nicest and least developed beaches in Costa Rica.

The Sanderling is a small wader. It is a circumpolar Arctic breeder, and is a long-distance migrant, wintering south to South America, South Europe, Africa, and Australia. It is highly gregarious in winter, sometimes forming large flocks on coastal mudflats or sandy beaches.

Oh and it is also a very funny bird to watch. They often stand on one leg and hop along like Long John Silver. Plus although they congregate close to the sea they really don’t seem to want to get wet so every time a wave comes in, away they hop and run!

This marvelous piece of filmmaking was created by Javier Salinas Laguna. It’s a gorgeous piece of film and the music ("Playful by the dozen" by Daniel Pemberton) is particularly well chosen.

Yes, you read correctly. Otters and gibbons are not normally associated with inter-species rivalry but strange things can go in those places which we refer to as zoos.

Here, Zagreb Zoo is the scene of an encounter between a gibbon – who just seems to be minding his own business – and two pesky otters, seemingly intent on ruining the gibbon’s day.

Fortunately the gibbon has one thing up his sleeve – height. Swing away, you funky gibbon!

Sometimes the world can seem very large – at other times miniscule.  This amazing short film plays on both of those feelings.

Mirko Faienza shot his father’s garden in Bologna, Italy, with all the requisite wildlife.  It is all shot in gorgeous colors and the attention to detail is quite amazing. 

Add to that the fact that the music suits it so very well and you have six minutes of bliss!

Spring is a wonderful time and it can be experienced in so many different ways.  There is nothing quite like taking in the beauty of a spring day from the top of a hill, just to take in the panorama. 

On the other hand, if you look closely there are whole worlds beneath your feet.

This charming short film does just that and focuses in on one plant pot. After a harsh winter, life begins to stir again.  However, around any corner danger may lurk!

Hats off to Gunther Machu who made this film and captured numerous insects very up close and personal.

The Luminous Deep is a short animated documentary made by Kevin Adams and Amy Scott-Murray, two final-year Animation students at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art.

The fact that it was made by two undergraduates makes it even cooler in my opinion – the quality of the animation is awesome, particularly when you realize that their budget was hardly Spielbergian. The documentary was made with the assistance of researchers at Aberdeen University's Oceanlab.

During the short animation, we learn the fate of a dead whale that sinks to the darkness of the seabed, and how its carcass can come alight by nourishing a huge interconnected community of scavengers and predators. Most of these creatures produce glowing lights that researchers theorize would create a brilliant firework display in the abyssal night.

This is a sad story, but it could have a happy ending. Easter Island is one of the most remote inhabited islands on earth. In the 1860s horses and cows were introduced by missionaries. The few thousand people who live there now depend on the animals for transportation for food. However, recently some of the horses have become emaciated, slowly dying.

For the past twenty years the horses had been getting sick with what the islanders called Mad Horse Disease (aka Caballa Loco). No one knew where it came from or what caused it. He made a discovery – that the livers of horses had been poisoned. Then, a holiday visit to the island by Jonathan Arzt, a veterinary, led to a discovery which could mean a solution.

This film was directed, shot, written and edited by Laura J Boyd.

I am trying to avoid a royal theme, what with the media saturation of the royal wedding between William and Kate coming up, but although the Queen’s favorite dogs are corgis, I would be very much surprised to see one of hers acting in this manner!  It’s funny but I always think of corgis as sedate little animals – I stand corrected!

Add a soundtrack – Breaking the Law by Judas Priest and you have a short, but perfect record of one small pooch’s attempt to usurp authority and do things his way.  I just hope the owners of the golf course don’t find out anytime soon!

You just do not get to see this every day – a rat on a cat on a dog. It sounds like something out of a bizarre yet ancient nursery rhyme which has been banned by the politically correct brigade.

Yet, here it is, shot in downtown San Francisco.

Yup, a rat on a cat on a dog – all acting as if it is the most normal thing in the universe.

Well, we all make our own normal, so who are we to argue?