Xinjiang Ground Jay and Yellowish Imperial-pigeon

I'm not going to lie, I've tried to avoid birds as much as possible through this blogfest. (Except the kind that try to mate forcibly with the heads of naturalists.)

Not like I don't appreciates birds. Birds are modern-day dinosaurs, and are considered the newest entire class of organisms. Yeah, they're 150 years old, but taxonomic classes are huge. Think "mammals," "reptiles," "amphibians"... and those are just the chordates.

I've avoided birds, for the most part, out of spite. In my search for exotic endangered species, I've come across some beautiful, unique organisms, which equally unique names. But I found that, 90% of the time, that an exotic-sounding name usually belongs to a bird. Thrush, pranticole, greywader, oystercatcher, murrelet, and hundreds more of neat-sounding names all belong to birds.

So I picked two of the most unremarkable birds to feature today, of course fitting within the letter criteria-- a jay and a pigeon. Both the Xinjiang Ground Jay (China) and Yellowish Pigeon (New Guinea) are endangered/threatened by habitat loss. Kind of a trend, no?