Here is a small sample of contributions on a range of families and from several continents.

From USA on California Quail
I last saw a quail here in early April when the hills had burst into their technicolor glory before drying to their summer brown. The bird seemed to echo in its small form every colour that blazed in this huge landscape: the blues and violets of the sky and the lupins that covered the hills, the white flashes of the patches of wild garlic and the bright surf of the ocean, the golds and sun-bleached yellow-whites of sand and driftwood and the rich red-browns of the redwoods’ soft bark. Its face was the deep charred brown-black of the burnt trees and scrub left by past wild fires. At first I felt surprise that California should have picked so diminutive a specimen as its state bird. I suppose I rather expected a condor, or an eagle or some other equally grand symbol of power and strength. Now, however, I see an aptness in the choice of this small, more (literally) down-to-earth bird. California is, after all, the place where the little guy can make it big.’ [Bella Bigsby, California, USA]
 
From Panama on Tanagers
In El Valle we can buy 100 bananas for US$5, we spend approximately $1,250 a year on bananas, which comes out to 25,000 bananas per year. I estimate 4-5 bananas make a pound so our little feathered friends consume between 5,000 and 6,250 pounds of bananas every year! That is a lot of bananas! I enjoy sitting and looking at the feeders. Especially to see how the tanagers defend the bananas aggressively from the Clay-colored Thrushes. Some individuals of the Blue-grey, Crimson-backed, Flame-rumped, or Dusky-faced Tanagers will resist and even scare away the much bigger thrushes, others will not. Aggression among the family seems to be an individual trait not a species trait. However, all bets are off when the big guys show up, by this I mean the Rufous Motmot or the Chestnut-headed Oropendolas. When they come, everybody scrambles. [Raul Arias de Para, El Valle, Panama]

From Uruguay on Screamers
Noticing 'Torta Chajá' on the dessert menu, and knowing that a chajá is a Southern Screamer, I asked the waiter to explain the name. A baker called Clemente in the small village of Paisandu used to make a cake, especially for birthdays. It quickly became popular among local residents, who called it to the 'torta chajá' on account of the spongy texture resembling that of chajá meat (this also suggests that screamers are indeed eaten and a friend tells me that he has seen chicks on sale, because their meat is nice and oily!). Realising that he was on to a good thing, Clemente patented both name and recipe, and the cake is now cooked - presumably under licence - all over Uruguay. [James Lowen, Buenos Aires, Argentina]

From Serbia and Bulgaria on Storks
The white stork’s fertility associations are still widely felt. ‘In Serbia and Croatia a lot of nurseries and playgroups will either be called "Roda" -- the Stork in Serbian or Croat - or have the bird in the logo. The connection between storks and babies is embedded in the Serbian language too "Roditi" is the verb “to give birth”. [Vesna Goldsworthy, London, UK]

The Bulgarian belief that storks bring health to people is at the root of an old ritual. The moment one sees a stork for the first time in spring, he or she takes off the martenitza [a special spring adornment made of red and white yarn] and throws it in the direction of the stork’s flight. People believe that this symbolic exchange will protect them from illnesses, especially from back pain. If you greet the storks standing on your feet, your work on the field will be easy. But if the first time you see the bird it is perched, then this means languor and tiredness during the agricultural season. There are still old people who predict the weather looking at the first storks. If the wings of the storks are dirty with mud, it means the year will be rainy. All the Bulgarian myths and beliefs protect storks. It is forbidden to kill one or destroy a nest. It is so deep-seated even nowadays. The fact that every year the stork come to its nest makes its a symbol of a ‘solid’ family. If someone destroys a stork nest the human home will be blighted; the kids will become orphans, or they will leave home and settle far away. Because the stork couple is so devoted, it is believed that storks can be used in a love charm: a girl takes a piece of straw from the nest to kindle the love of her sweetheart.  There are no beliefs in Bulgarian folklore that storks bring babies. These birds are only symbol of the spring, love, health, strength, fertility. [Nada Tosheva, Sofia, Bulgaria]

From Australia on Kingfishers
 We've seen a kookaburra swallowing a native Bush Rat whole and another time one grabbed a juvenile Forest Kingfisher in front of a group of Japanese guests. They came running into the reception absolutely mortified asking us to stop it but we tried to explain this was a natural occurrence and nothing we could do to stop it. [Keith and Lindsay Fisher, Queensland, Australia]

We had a cabin on the Yarra River in East Warburton [Queensland] and whenever we had a barbecue the kookaburra would swoop down and take a sausage off a hot coals of the barbecue. It would then take it up to the roof of the shack and then whack it hard on the roof before eating it. [Gael Patterson, Queensland, Australia]

From Tanzania on Bustards
In south-western Tanzania there are only two species, the commoner Black-bellied Bustard Lissotis melanogaster (known by three names, Namume, Talanye, and Ntasilalupweko, and the rare Denham's Bustard Neotis denhami (Chimilamatuze). The name Namume does not appear to have an extant meaning, but Talanye and Ntasilalupweko both refer to the bird’s habit of defecating a streak of liquid faecal matter as it takes off while escaping a predator or approaching person. Talanye means literally ‘first let it shit’ and Ntasilalupweko means ‘my diarrhoea never ends.’ [David Moyer, Iringa, Tanzania]

From Israel on Sunbirds
The mother of sunbird feeders in Israel – ‘Saint Nectarine’ - was a South African lady named Ziva Altman, who immigrated to Israel and made Jerusalem her home. She fed hundreds of sunbirds with an array of makeshift feeders: small bottles, water bottles for mice, recycled roll-on deodorant bottles and more. She wrote a great children's book about her adventures with sunbirds. I had the honour of documenting her before she died, she was very ill with cancer. She prepared her famous nectar recipe (1 kilo of sugar cooked in a litre of water ). It was a rare snowy morning in a cold Jerusalem winter and there were more than 50 sunbirds drinking like there is no tomorrow on her kitchen window. Without her they would have surely perished during the freezing night. Some of them had on Jerusalem Bird Observatory rings. They had travelled a distance of about 23 km to her house. She was the best sunbird city bar and she is missed to this day by sunbirds and birders alike. [Amir Balaban, Jerusalem, Israel]

From Indian on Parrots
The road side fortune-teller (in white dhoti and shirt with his forehead smeared with holy ash and vermilion) has a series of pre-written cards (27 fortune cards based on the Indian cosmic system) predicting what the future will be (mostly they are optimistic messages). The lovable parakeet, known as tota in Hindi, with wings clipped so it cannot fly away, walks daintily across and digs into the pack of cards or picks up one of the tarot cards with its beak which are neatly displayed on a small table/stool and the fortune teller takes it from there to interpret the prediction in exchange for a small sum of money.  [Ananda Banerjee, Delhi, India]