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What wasn’t publicised at the time, but the scientist later both admitted and owned, is that the kingfisher was then killed and collected for scientific reasons. I’m not going to rehash the arguments for scientific collecting here. The large room the collection was held in was a profoundly weird place. Bush Wrens.
Green-rumped Parrotlets: from egg to adult Text and photographs copyright Nick Sly (except Rae Okawa where indicated) and are used with his permission. I present here an annotated collection of photos documenting the entry of new parrotlets into this world. Empty out the rubber boots of any nighttime invaders before pulling them on.
We have often suspected that the Sand Goannas would steal eggs as a food source from the Pied Oystercatcher nests if they found them. The two pairs should have been close to hatching their eggs from their first clutch. The pair of Pied Oystercatchers to the north have now laid a second clutch of two more eggs.
They don’t nest until they are at least four or five years old, when they finally acquire full adult plumage, with the female laying just a single egg that takes 44 days to hatch. There were typically four teams of Climmers at Bempton, with each team taking 300-400 eggs a day.
Observers have noted these colorful crows flying up to 18km to and fro from an old oakwood when collecting acorns. They are normally shy and relatively secretive woodland birds, but at this time of the year when they are in full acorn-collecting mode, they become much bolder and more conspicuous. It’s a different matter in the spring.
The use of eBird data is interesting and it shows just how valuable the collected reports of birders can be in figuring out the status and distribution of species. Just as interesting is the nugget that Pin-tailed Whydah , an introduced species itself, has adapted to using Nutmeg Mannikins as a host for its eggs.
The two have built up a devoted following through years of triumph – like last season, when they fledged three young – and tragedy – like the season before, when their eggs didn’t even hatch. Ozzie and Harriet with the 2013 brood.
The text is divided, not taxonomically or chronologically, but with a weirdly visual bent – one section is devoted to what birders do, while roughly twice as many pages go to matters like decorating with a bird theme or collecting bird memorabilia and art. As I read, I realized that I had encountered books very much like this before.
The early threats of guano harvesting and eggcollecting have been replaced by the more ominous threats of oil pollution and overfishing of their favorite food source – pilchards. On the mainland they face predation from domestic cats, dogs, genets, mongoose and Cape Gulls which steal their chicks and eggs.
Next is the already noted “Illustrated Glossary” is a unique collection of photographs and drawings illustrating scientific terms for parts of the mouth and beak; bones of the leg, feet, and wings; feather tracts; feather development; as well as the standard bird topography diagrams.
Egg harvesting to sell as food was intensive then, with thousands taken annually from the breeding colonies in Chile. Eggcollection for local consumption still continues at lower scale. The initial decline in the Andean Flamingo’s population appears to have started as early as the mid 20th Century.
This laughingthrush is a cooperative breeder – nestlings are fed by all members of a group, often 6-12 (not just 2 as in Wham!): “A female may share a nest with another, and 3 or more adults may take turns incubating the eggs and feeding the chicks.” ” ( source ).
They may be about bird eggs ( The Most Perfect Thing: The Inside (and Outside) of a Bird’s Egg , 2016), or a 17th-century ornithologist ( Virtuoso by Nature: The Scientific Worlds of Francis Willughby, 2016), or How Bullfinches learn songs from humans ( The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology.
With populations plunging dramatically over the last decade, researchers from the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, Birds Russia, and a number of other conservation organizations made the always-controversial call to pluck eggs from the imperiled wild population and establish a captive breeding program as a final hedge against extinction.
We continue to have egg predation at many of the nest sites and chick loss, but one pair of Pied Oystercatchers is being successful in raising two chicks so far. There has never been two eggs hatch and two chicks survive for more than about ten days since we started to keep an eye on them in 2000.
If you are more interested in feather mites than in birds, a paper describing two new species of pteronyssid feather mite species (one of which was collected from Collared Finchbills) may be more attractive to you than this post, despite the lack of photos. So, I guess maybe Shanghai is just too cold for it in winter.
Some lingered to gaze at samples from the Field’s collection of bird specimens, such as perfectly preserved thrushes, warblers, and even a Rose-breasted Grosbeak under glass. Other hardy souls signed up for an early morning “Ostrich Run” 5k, with the prizes beinging–you guessed it–actual ostrich eggs.
It is listed as vulnerable, though its rather rigorous treatment of the second, smaller chick in a clutch (it starves to death within 1 week, rarely a month, according to the HBW) offers the potential for collecting second-hatched chicks for reintroduction programs. They are not much into flying. Is it boredom or depression, or both?
Unlike the Common Cuckoo, the young GSC doesn’t eject its foster parents’ eggs or chicks from the nest, but is reared alongside them. A Jay of the endemic Cypriot race glaszneri It was in the Botanical Gardens, too, that I watched Red-rumped Swallows collecting mud for their nests ( below ).
After 28 days of sharing the duty of sitting on three eggs we finally had the arrival of our first Pied Oystercatcher chicks for 2012 on Friday August 3rd. It is unusual for three eggs to be laid here in Broome and many eggs do not even hatch due to predation each season.
Isla Rasa was declared a sanctuary in 1964, and egg-collecting and disturbance during the breeding season are discouraged. Heermann’s Gulls form large breeding colonies on arid islands in the Gulf of California, Mexico, from March through July.
Last year not a single chick survived and there is much predation of both eggs and young birds along the length of beach. The first pair of Pied Oystercatchers to lay eggs this year was the same as last year. The first egg laid is not necessarily the first to hatch and often there is a day in between when they hatch.
After mating, a single egg is laid and incubation duties are shared by both parents. The egg can stand a fair degree of chilling, so a single parent can afford to leave the burrow for sometime to feed without losing the egg if its partner does not return quickly. While one bird sits, its mate feeds out at sea for a week or so.
Occasionally the Tristan Thrush Nesocichla eremita will prey upon chicks from the two-egg nest of the Inaccessible Island Rail but this not enough in any way to threaten the species. So desirable was it, however, to find out what this flightless rail was like that he left collecting material with the late Rev.
As a Northeast birder I am familiar with the alarming decrease in the number of Red Knots along Atlantic shores and have signed petitions and written e-mails calling for legislation and rules that will limit the overharvesting of the horseshoe crab, whose eggs Red Knots depend on. million in the late 1990’s. Should the gulls be controlled?
The Red List category is justified as follows: “This poorly known species qualifies as Critically Endangered because it is estimated to have a tiny population, which is in decline owing to egg-collection, disturbance and the loss of coastal wetlands” So it was quite exciting to see 3 of them at Nanhui, Shanghai – two adults and one (..)
Rock Hyrax Stuart provided a wonderful field lunch alongside a stream with samosas, a field-standard hard-boiled egg, and other snacks. We did not make too many other stops other than to head back to the “Highest Bar in Africa” for a celebratory beer and I was able to add to my foreign currency collection with a $20 Lesotho Loti.
En route they will be “birding in nearly every country in mainland North and South America,” and, as they say on their excellent blog , “Our journey is about collecting valuable data on bird species, their status and distribution, current conservation issues, and more along the way.
The species is classified as Near Threatened for all the usual depressing reasons – pollution, drainage, hunting, and the collection of eggs and nestlings ( source ). The Wikipedia entry for Pierre Médard Diard ( 1794 – 1863), a French naturalist and explorer, sounds like he was cheated by Sir Raffles.
After collecting nearly 70K bird photos, he felt that it was time to share them, so he now has his bird blog in order to do just that! Once the nest was done, she began sitting on it, preparing to lay her eggs. They’ve been traveling the world ever since!
There is a lot of extreme behavior here (and a lot of that behavior takes place in Australia), but this is not simply a collection of the world’s most fantastic bird tales.
If we had been predators, their actions would have (hopefully) led us away from the nest, keeping their eggs and chicks safe. Next to it lay an egg, the baby inside fervently pecking and tapping until it too could break the shell and emerge onto the dunes. While not as adorable as chicks, I still love to see bird eggs!
The team explored Nevada and Utah, with Ridgway collecting thousands of bird specimen, plus nests and eggs for the Smithsonian. Ridgway spent the rest of his career in the Castle, the Smithsonian building that then housed the National Museum’s bird collection.
However, the lockdown forces me to go deeper and deeper into my photo collection, if I want to write anything at all. It has been more than 5 years since I last went to Australia, and I was even less of a qualified bird photographer then than I am now. And that seems to be the only vaguely satisfying thing left to do at the moment.
The Indochinese Green Magpie is one of four species of green magpie (it used to be only three, but one of the subspecies collected enough frequent flier miles to get an upgrade to full species). Altruism, fortunately not of the Sam Bankman-Fried variety, though probably not very effective either.
If there’s one common theme to this week’s bird news items, it’s their collective bizarreness: The eagle has landed—on the drone, as France trains birds to take out drones that stray into restricted airspace. Scientists ponder the feasibility of genetically engineering chickens to lay the eggs of endangered bird species.
A schoolboy eggcollection and a house near the sea, as well as a childhood that allowed me to become acquainted with almost every nook and cranny for 4km in any direction. was perhaps no different to many of my peers.
April 6, 2011 Center for Biological Diversity files a petition to list the Dwarf Seahorse as endangered as a result of the destruction of its habitat by the BP oil spill and over collection for the aquarium trade. The babies that hatched from these eggs were released on Florida’s east coast.
Speaking of pregnant snakes, do sea snakes lay their eggs ashore like sea turtles or do they keep them internally until the young are ready to hatch/ be born, like some sharks? These do lay eggs on land and are (reasonably) mobile once they hit the beach. It seems like there is great diversity in this continent.
Do not buy these books, unless you are collecting old bird books. The back of the book material consists of the “Species Checklist for Trinidad and Tobago, with Locations of Collected Specimens,” a Bibliography, and two indexes, one of Scientific Names and one of Common Names. The Bibliography is extensive (14 pages) and scholarly.
I enjoy collecting children’s books about birds and nature that I come across in the expected (book stores) and unexpected (academic library conference reports) places. Here are three excellent but very different children’s books I enjoyed this year (two were published in 2013, one in 2011). Other Europeans came.
For instance, I can lay my hands on data for primates and rodents (because I’ve collected those data for research) but I don’t have comparable data for bovids (just selected data) and zero data for birds (in spreadsheets on my computer). To remedy this, I visited the Animal Diversity Web site at the University of Michigan.
That strategy determined the fact that all mammals would have the risk of somatic mutations that accumulate over time affecting their eggs. Er, I mean, to not include the whales when you collect data on food type, body size, and ranging patterns. Think about it. But here’s the thing. Monkey is a common, not scientific, term.
To make a great omelet you've just gotta break eggs. The fishing is best where the fewest go and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone is aiming for base hits.” – Tim Ferriss. So what are you afraid of most? Is it your success? Ruffling feathers? An Experiment.
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