A man holds his umbrella during snowfall on the Areopagitou pedestrian street beneath the Acropolis hill during snowfall in Athens, Greece, January 10, 2017. (Photo by Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters)

The North Side Skull & Bone Gang stand together during the wake up call for Mardi Gras, Tuesday, February 9, 2016, in New Orleans. Their costumes are intended to represent the dead and they bring a serious message, reminding people of their mortality and the need to live a productive and good life. (Photo by Brynn Anderson/AP Photo)

Farmhand Beatrice Jasiewicz (L) looks on as a colleague carries an injured goose on an open field at the Oekohof Kuhhorst organic farm near Berlin on November 24, 2011 in Kuhhorst, Germany. Goose is the traditional Christmas Eve dinner in Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

This perfectly-timed GoPro snap captures the moment an angrymagpiecame within inches of a biker, as swooping season takes hold in Australia. The notoriously aggressive bird can be seen flying with its wings tucked in so it looks exactly like a torpedo in the magnificent photograph from Middlemount, Queensland. Retail businesswoman Monique Newton, 53 was riding pillion with a friend when she spied the divebombing bird – but rather than speed off, they slowed down to capture it up close. (Photo by Monique Newton/Caters News Agency)

This is the hilarious moment a terrified baby hippo ran screaming for its mum when a flock of bird landed on its back in South Luangwa National Park in Zambia. The hippo was seen screaming, running and twisting from side to side in a desperate bid to shake off the red and yellow ox-pecker birds. Ox-peckers and hippos usually have a mutually beneficial relationship where the birds help free hippos of ticks and other parasites by feeding on them. (Photo by Marc Mol/Caters News/SIPA Press)

A bird is cleaned at the International Bird Rescue in Fairfield, California January 20, 2015. A gooey, unknown material discovered on the eastern shores of San Francisco Bay is clinging to the feathers of birds, and more than 100 birds, mostly species of oceangoing, diving ducks, have died after their feathers were fouled by the viscous substance now undergoing testing at state labs in Sacramento. (Photo by Robert Galbraith/Reuters)

Sharon Beals is a San Francisco based photographer who has photographed nest and eggs specimens collected over the last two centuries at The California Academy of Sciences, The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, and The Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology. While few nests are collected today, these nests and eggs are used for research, providing important information about their builder’s habitats, DNA, diseases and other survival issues.

Potoos (family Nyctibiidae) are a group of near passerine birds related to the nightjars and frogmouths. They are sometimes called Poor-me-ones, after their haunting calls. There are seven species in one genus, Nyctibius, in tropical Central and South America.
These are nocturnal insectivores which lack the bristles around the mouth found in the true nightjars. They hunt from a perch like a shrike or flycatcher. During the day they perch upright on tree stumps, camouflaged to look like part of the stump. The single spotted egg is laid directly on the top of a stump.