Remove Collecting Remove Eggs Remove Killing
article thumbnail

Seabird City Spectacular

10,000 Birds

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. After being killed they were plucked and salted for consumption during the winter. It’s then another 90 days before the youngster is ready to fly.

Puffins 245
article thumbnail

African Penguins in Peril

10,000 Birds

The early threats of guano harvesting and egg collecting have been replaced by the more ominous threats of oil pollution and overfishing of their favorite food source – pilchards.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.

Penguins 250
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Trending Sources

article thumbnail

Birds and Us: A 12,000 Year History from Cave Art to Conservation–A Book Review

10,000 Birds

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.

article thumbnail

March Miscellania

10,000 Birds

Once upon a time, people and especially children felt free to interact with wild birds in any way that would satisfy their curiousity — watching and learning, yes, but also harassing and chasing, collecting eggs and nests, stealing nestlings as “pets”, and killing birds for amateur taxidermy efforts.

Montana 210
article thumbnail

Angry Birds, What’s Black and White and Hungry All Over, and a Little Something for the Ladies: This Week in Bird News

10,000 Birds

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.

Penguins 100
article thumbnail

At Sea With the Marine Birds of the Raincoast: A Book Review

10,000 Birds

The Achiever’s survey voyages took place from 2005 to 2008; the goal was to collect baseline data on sea mammals and marine birds. The species was seemingly killed off by feather hunters, but then, after years, reappeared at the site of one of the deserted breeding colonies, Torishima Island in Japan.

Fox 100
article thumbnail

Some thoughts on scientific collecting

10,000 Birds

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.