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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. Bush Wrens.

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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.

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The Bird Way: A Book Review

10,000 Birds

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. Many popular science books have neither. As Ackerman explains in her Introduction, studying extreme behavior brings new insight into what we think we know.

Science 232
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Birding Sepilok, Borneo (Part 2)

10,000 Birds

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 MĂ©dard Diard ( 1794 – 1863), a French naturalist and explorer, sounds like he was cheated by Sir Raffles.

Sri Lanka 221
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Where the People Are

10,000 Birds

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. But not, mind you, on any shelf of popular science or ornithological memoir.

Science 177
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Birding Nonggang, Guangxi, China – part 2

10,000 Birds

If you have always wondered what the minimum anesthetic concentration for isoflurane and sevoflurane for the Crested Serpent-eagle is, science has an answer. As you can easily judge from the dullness of this information, it is not something I made up but rather an appalling example of nepotism in the naming of birds.

China 236
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Feather Trails: A Journey of Discovery Among Endangered Birds–A Book Review

10,000 Birds

49-50) She is also adept at writing about conservation’s larger context in terms of its history, public policy struggles, and the science behind species re-introduction. They weren’t hard to find, but I would have appreciated, if publishing them in the book is too costly, a small collection on the publisher’s web site.