[By Chuck Almdale]

It’s Valentine’s season again and here’s a posting you may love. Or like. It answers the question indirectly posed above: how many lovebirds are there? Species of lovebirds, that is…not those people seated on park benches, heads tilted together, smiling, talking and (of course) throwing seed to the park birds at their feet.

Here are the lovebirds of the world, <snipped> from Birds of the World.

They’re all in genus Agapornis of Old World Parrot family Psittaculidae and are found primarily in sub-Saharan Africa save for the Gray-headed which resides in nearby Madagascar, and they are all quite lovely. Perhaps it’s those big eye rings that gaze at you like limpid pools, or the soft muted colors of red, orange, yellow and green. Here’s a link to their Wikipedia Agapornis (lovebird) page.

Bird tour company Rockjumper alerted me to lovebird season (link to their message) and the purely incidental fact that that have tours to see lovebirds (plus many 100’s of other birds, of course, such as the ho-hum-common-as-dirt Picathartes). They had comments on all the lovebirds including this one on Lilian’s Lovebird (Agapornis Lilianae), a species of special interest to me.

Most of us are aware of Sclater from bird names across the globe, with father and son both avid collectors during their time. Lilian however, daughter and sister, was also an ardent naturalist and this gorgeous species was named after her. Lilian’s Lovebird is however the only species bearing her name. It is a beauty, and one needs to go to very specific locations to see this gem. It favours the Zambezi Valley and adjacent lowlands where it is mostly confined to Mopane woodland. Places like Liwonde National Park in Malawi, South Luangwa National Park in Zambia and Mana Pools National Park in Zimbabwe offer very good chances of seeing this beautiful species.

And thank you to Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) and her lovely and timeless poetry, and to those Portuguese who may or may not have had something to do with inspiring her poems, but in fact did not write any of them, despite rumors to the contrary.