A list of Taylor Swift-related birds to celebrate her Midnights album!

In honour of Taylor Swift’s upcoming album, Midnights, I’ve rounded up a list of birds that remind me of my fav singer!

In a few weeks, it will be 21 October 2022 - aka the day Taylor Swift is set to release her latest album, Midnights. I am a huge Taylor Swift fan, so for fun, I thought it would be cool to round up some birds that remind me of her!

First up: the SWIFT, of course!

How wonderful it must be for these birds to be named after one of the most prolific humans of our time - Taylor Swift! (I’m kidding. But it’s still a pretty name, and as I am bird-obsessed, I wish I had a bird-related name. Like Bella Swan!)

Image credit: All About Birds. A White-throated Swift shows off the white throat it is named for.

There are actually 113 species of swifts in the world, which is doubly crazy to me because Taylor Swift loves the number 13.

Swifts love dining at high altitudes, and for the most part, they get their calories and nutrients from flying insects and airborne spiders. Airborne spiders!

It turns out that even though spiders don’t have wings, they have their own way of ballooning through the skies. Spiders will climb to an exposed point, raise their abdomens to the sky, extrude strands of silk, and float away.

Image credit: University of Georgia. This is the Jorō Spider, which is originally from Japan. It is one of the many species of spiders known to ‘balloon’ by using their threads to get them airborne. In 2022, this species was found in Georgia, U.S.A, and research shows it may soon spread out along the entire East Coast due to their ability to ‘balloon’!

Random fun fact: at the end of children’s book Charlotte's Web, when Charlotte’s egg hatches, all but three baby spiders float away via this method of ballooning.

How does this work?

In the past, it was believed that once the spiders shoot out strands of silk, they get caught by the wind, and the silks and spiders are dragged away at the mercy of gusts of wind. But it turns out that’s not true.

The real explanation is way cooler than that!

It turns out that spiders can sense the Earth’s electric field, and make use of positive and negative charges to launch themselves into the direction they want to go to. As seen in magnets, positive and negative charges attract - so spiders can ‘point’ their negative-charged silks towards the positive-charged direction they wish to go to. (Or even go negative to negative, and be repelled!)

Image credit: CSIRO Twitter. In 2021, floodwaters prompted ground-dwelling spiders to seek higher ground. To do so, they ‘balloon’ outta there! This photo shows an arachnid migration that eft swathes of Australia’s Gippsland region covered in webs as the spiders sought higher ground.

So when ballooning, airborne spiders are not using the wind to guide them, but rather, electric charges that are invisible to our eyes and senses. It’s really cool, and this article goes a little more in-depth into this topic!

It’s really cool how spiders have evolved to be airborne, of course, but unfortunately for them, they sell end up as Swift chow.

Next: The Lovebird, which can be blonde with red ‘lips’ - just like Taylor Swift!!

Image credit: Image credit: Blog Ferplast. These inseparable birds are small and colorful parrots from North Africa. The technical name Agapornis, means “Birds that love each other”, in fact this is their distinctive feature: they bind with a partner for life and show strong loyalty!

The Lovebird was given its common name due to their incredibly social and affectionate behaviour. The birds form strong, monogamous pairs and will bond for life, and they spend many long periods of the day just sitting and cuddling each other!! So cute!!!! And Taylor Swift herself is such a lovey-dovey person too, so she and this bird absolutely share the same traits!

In terms of appearance, many different colour mutations of Lovebirds have come up due to selective breeding in aviculture. You can think of it like how different species of dogs can come in different colours or patterns.

Image credit: eBird. This Lovebird has a brown head, a yellow collar and a bright red beak. Perhaps if Taylor Swift ever dyed her hair brown, she could look just like this bird!

Many of the popular pet lovebirds have mostly green plumage, but you can find them in colours like yellow, peach and more.

Image credit: Fly Babies Aviary. For today’s Taylor Swift homage, I’ve chosen to include photos of a blonde bird with a reddish bill - just like her blonde hair and famous red lipstick!

Finally: a midnight bird!

Whoo’s there? An owl!

In honour of the album title, Midnights, let’s look at one of the few nocturnal bird species in the world: owls! There are over 225 different species of owls and they can be found in many parts of the world, except for Antarctica.

Owls have the same general appearance – a flat face with a small hooked beak and huge, forward-facing eyes, with a short tail, rounded wings as well as large feet with sharp talons. Some features that differ from species to species is the presence or absence of “ear” tufts, and also the shape of their faces.

Image credit: National Audubon Society. The Who’s Who of owls! (Pun intended). A series of owl portraits by Photographer Brad Wilson, including the calm and mysterious looking Barn Owl (top left) and Great Horned Owl (bottom left). I love their huge, derpy looking eyes. The Long-eared Owl, (bottom right) looks like he is suffering from weed-induced paranoia!

This is because these traits help them in their task of flying and hunting prey at night. Their ginormous eyes let in more light, allowing them to see better in dim conditions, and their rounded wings are special in that they allow the owl to have almost silent flight, so they can sneak up on prey.

The smallest owl in the world is the Elf Owl, which stands less than six inches tall! It’s a tiny little guy with grey feathers and big yellow eyes, and weighs around 40g — a bit less than a golf ball! So adorable! Imagine if you studied in Hogwarts and got an Elf Owl. This little guy probably wouldn’t be able to carry all the sweets and cakes your mum made for you, for a long distance. The package would be dropped and lost forever :(

Image credit: Ed Scheider. Two Elf Owls gossip over a midnight snack of grub.

The largest owl in the world is the Blakiston Fish Owl, which is found exclusively in northeast Asia and who shares its habitat with a menagerie of endangered and impressive animals, including the Amur tiger and Amur leopard.

The Blakiston Fish Owl gets to around 150cm tall, and has a wingspan of around 6 feet. Their primary food source is actually salmon sashimi (no joke) and so they tend to nest in large trees overlooking the lakes. What a baller bird!

Image credit: National Audubon Society. These elusive birds are thought to live in the old-growth forests of Primorye, a remote region of Russia that borders the Sea of Japan to the east and China and North Korea to its south.

And I mentioned early that most owls’ wings allow them to fly as silently as possible. For the Blakiston Fish Owl, their wings do not have this usual downy layer that helps muffle the sound of their wingbeat. This is because they mostly hunt fish (hence their name) and don’t need to spend the extra energy developing sound-muffling feathers that don’t really serve any purpose.

Image credit: eBird. Blakiston's Fish Owl, the largest living species of owl, is a fish owl, a sub-group of eagle-owls which specialize in hunting in riparian areas (the area between land and a river or stream)

I bet sound-muffling feathers would come in handy when all the Taylor Swift fans begin blasting her music, though! That’s it about birds from me today. I can’t wait to listen to the 13 tracks on Taylor Swift’s 10th studio album, Midnights! Streaming on October 21st, 2022!