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The species was in the news because some scientists had finally managed (or bothered – it’s much the same thing) to locate the population high in the mountains of the Solomon Islands, and catch and photograph one. I’m not going to rehash the arguments for scientific collecting here. Box after box of egg. Bush Wrens.
The Moustached Kingfisher was known by only three samples– one female “collected” in the 1920’s, the other two females “collected” in the 1950’s, according to an Audubon Magazine article. The justification was ridiculously laughable: in order to further study the species. Can a dead bird educate the researcher on its song?
To quote from their Facebook post: It is my sad duty to report to you that the ULM administration has decided to divest the research collections in the Museum of Natural History. This includes the 6 million fish specimens in the Neil Douglas fish collection and the nearly 500,000 plant specimens in the R. Dale Thomas plant collection.
After my post about collecting two weeks ago I received a bit of feedback, some positive, some negative, and I’ve been mulling it over with the intention of writing about some of the issues that could be considered the root cause of the disagreement. You see, the bird was collected for scientific study. Its natural longevity?
More than 150 bird species are known to have become extinct over the past 500 years, and many more are estimated to have been driven to extinction before they became known to science. The Gray Crowned-Crane is a new addition to the list of the world’s Endangered species, creeping up a category from Vulnerable.
The idea was to see how many birds could be collectively identified by folks anywhere and everywhere. Whatever the reason for getting involved with this massive day of birding, every GBD has been a success where literally thousands of species are found by thousands of birders. Global Big Day (GBD).
Sometimes it’s a dignified depiction of a local species with some significance to the producer – especially when it comes to wineries, who are always eager to advertise their sense of place and a deep connection between the land and their product. Kings County Brewing Collective: Penguins in Space. Good birding and happy drinking!
Instead of going on about zip lines and other modern, adventure tourism attractions, the birding crowd talks about taking photos of Resplendent Quetzals , seeing dozens of hummingbird species, and the seemingly odd absence of raptors in Costa Rica but nope, we don’t really talk about extinction. Resplendence.
In 2021, the American Ornithological Society announced that it has now classified the Bahama Nuthatch as a distinct species, Sitta insularis. He noted that this new bird had longer bills and “darker loral and auricular regions” than the mainland Brown-headed Nuthatch, and collected two of them for science. There’s just one problem.
Perhaps our outrage at invasive species can be a bit hypocritical at times. Listers are quick to put aside their condemnation of invasive species once they attain that coveted status of exotic: not native, not fully naturalized, but established well enough to be countable by the prevailing authority. That’s where we come in.
On one gray, drizzly morning this week, I set out to bird my local patch in Albany, New York, and found 56 species in a few hours of aimless, unhurried traipsing. This is the third fall migration for which Kings County Brewers Collective has brewed Safe Flight IPA to benefit New York City Audubon’s Project Safe Flight.
’ “Is this going to be a collection of essays?” Adventures of a Louisiana Birder: One Year, Two Wings, Three Hundred Species is an enjoyable memoir about birding, birding strategies, birding people, community, life and death, and Louisiana (with some Alabama thrown into the mix). ” I wondered. by Marybeth Lima.
The Guan had never been seen in the wild after Polish Naturalist Wladyslaw Taczanowski collected one individual in 1876. The story of the White-winged Guan , in some ways resembles the re-discovery of some species thought to be extinct. A Guan was collected in 1876 in a mangrove forest near the border between Peru and Ecuador.
A final thought: whether you think collective nouns are fascinating or idiotic , the more fundamental question is, why do they exist at all or, rather, how did they come to be? There are a dozen or so recurring cast members across the four books, which allows Burrows to build character, and to make his people three-dimensional. Good one.
The species that manage to colonize these islands evolve in competition with relatively few other species, developing survival strategies based on interdependence, co-evolution, and mutualism rather than adapting to deal with a broad range of predators and competitors. A species, wiped off the earth, never to exist again.
Western” refers to a two-species complex, the Cordilleran Flycatcher and the Pacific-slope Flycatcher. But we – and by we I mean the crowd of birders that had swelled quite a bit from the lonely three birders looking early in the morning – still had the issue of not knowing what species we were actually looking at!
It covers 403 species: 172 nonpasserine species and 231 passerine species in the Species Accounts, 198 species beautifully illustrated by the author in the Plates section. The scarcity of information on the young of some avian species is astounding.
“Islands in the Sun” is about Macaronesia, the collective term used to define the Atlantic Islands of the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries and Cape Verde. My main interest lies in the endemic species and subspecies, trying to understand why some species got there and others didn’t. It’s more about staying power.
No, Madagascar is the most famous for an endemic group of mammals: lemurs, sifakas, indri, aye-aye – in total, 112 endemic species and subspecies of lemurs alone! Still, there should be no problem with larger species that allow for longer observation time (e.g. Larger species, that is, excluding dolphins and whales.
Even in the tropics there are few birds that excel some of our own in elegance and beauty of plumage and we have an unusually large number of species considering the smallness of the area they inhabit. ” (Woodward brothers, “Natal Birds”, 1899) The mighty Drakensberg Mountains run along the western boundary of KwaZulu-Natal province.
However, there are those species which have a hard time bringing attention to themselves such as Yellow-shouldered Blackbird , Giant Nuthatch , and Vinaceous-breasted Parrot. Regardless of their popularity, these species and the threatened ecosystems they inhabit are equally spectacular.
It is not every day that a new species of bird is described, and this definitely does not tend to happen with birds that have been repeatedly collected and sit, as skins, in museums around the world. But the Varzea Thrush Turdus sanchezorum , described in this paper in The Condor (link is a PDF), is one such species.
And apart from local people, primate researchers sometimes spot it, but it is a species seen by fewer than ten living birders. The rest of the 216 pages long book is devoted to various African bird families and half a dozen individual species. He has authored several other books and many articles, largely on natural history.
China is not that well-known for its hornbills, but in Yunnan province, on the border to Myanmar, some species can be found. On a positive note, it makes it easier for those male hornbills that do not like kids to focus on what they are good at (collecting fruit and handing them to the wife through a slit in the hole).
Many escapes and introductions have taken place over the years and some species have found the warm, dry climate to their liking. Quite a few species are well-established and breeding from San Diego to Los Angeles and beyond. In particular, subsection iii seems to be the hurdle that most species can’t clear.
Not only have we completed Birding Tourism February , but we’ve also collectively made it through what is usually one of the least exciting birding months of the calendar year. At least that’s where I added this species to my New York list. Congratulations!
The Amur Paradise Flycatcher is another species breeding in Shanghai. Some herons: a beautiful adult Black-crowned Night Heron … … and a rather less attractive kindergarten of the same species. A Chinese Pond Heron … … and the same species pretending to be a giraffe. Not so for the Little Grebe.
Now a series of these vignettes have been collected in The Mincing Mockingbird Guide to Troubled Birds , “an illustrated pocket field guide that enables anyone to quickly identify psychotic, violent or mentally unstable bird species.”
My first experiments involved rooting cuttings of several of Michoacán’s dozens of Salvia species. But starting a mini-forest around the edges of our church’s one-acre lot would require more than cuttings, and local reforestation nurseries only offer a few conifer species. All were started from collected seeds.
Birders normally care about species and make species lists, how do families fit into those? Adding more species brings a lot of excitement, as long as you bird your own country or a continent. 11,000 species require lots of money and a good portion of one’s life. That gamble is rigged, so the house always wins.
Because, let’s face it, when you get off that plane and look at those severe volcanic landscapes and then find yourself face to face with one of the islands’ four mockingbird species, you’re not going to think, “Oh, look, lava and a mockingbird.” The updating of the text is very important.
This species loves to sing while high up in pine trees. There was the Botteri’s Sparrow giving a larger Canyon Towhee a piece of its mind, on my way into town: The reservoir itself was underwhelming, only offering me a collection of white Egrets (Cattle, Snowy and Great) and a single Great Blue Heron. Brown-backed Solitaire.
The Ochraceous Bulbul looks similar to the Puff-throated Bulbul, with which it shares a genus – the similarity made one of my travel companions doubt the whole framework of species distinctions. Paul Conrad (1836-1885), a German naturalist in the East Indies, after which the species is named ( Pycnonotus conradi ).
” But here I’m using it because someone ELSE used it … the Bird 10K project is an effort to do the whole DNA thing they do on groups of species on the whole mess of 10K (or more) birds. Beagle had an enormous impact on Darwin’s thinking about ‘On the Origin of Species’. Order names are according to (36, 37) (SM6).
One of these clades holds a diversity of Old World species in several distinct groups, including an Australasian clade, the green-pigeons, the emerald- and wood-doves, the imperial-pigeons and fruit-doves (favorites of mine), and the subjects of our investigation today, the 15 known members of the Raphini. ” Beehler et al.’s
Listed as Near Threatened, this charismatic species has a tiny distribution restricted to central Costa Rica, especially in the Central Valley. Over a few years, I have already seen several places where I watched this species, even showed this species to visiting birders, bulldozed and prepared for housing.
In 2012, I reviewed The Jewel Hunter , an absorbing narrative in which author Chris Goodie travelled throughout Asia, Africa, and Australasia to observe and photograph every Pitta species in the world. Hummingbird species, on the other hand, number in the hundreds.
There are few stories in ornithology I enjoy more than those of a Lazarus taxon, a species thought to be extinct being found alive and well in some hidden part of the world. For most of its history it has been known from only three specimens collected off the coast of New Zealand in the early 19th century. Where does it breed?
It feels good to start a post with some truly attractive birds – such as two species of broadbills. Strangely, there do not seem to be many papers on this species. In one paper , you can find fascinating sentences such as “The new species is most similar to D. My cats refuse to even try Fiery Minivets.
The Yellowthroat group is an odd collection of bird species. The one migratory species, aptly named the Common Yellowthroat , can be seen almost anywhere in North America. Both are marsh-dwelling species. But the remaining Yellowthroat species, all marsh-dwellers, live in extremely small ranges. See the difference?
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.
And, some time later, during the final stages of the bird-atlassing work, computer models of Serbian ranges for some 150 bird species were produced for the first time ever: Some bias was created because of the large data set from Belgrade and environs where the majority of active eBirders live. The consequences were amusing.
August is possibly the best month there, because you gradually observe the rise and fall of numbers of various migrating species, which use it as a stopover site to fatten up ahead of the long hauls further south. Before I start, my readers are already asking themselves why are they familiar with the name of this locality?
In that deviant spirit, this week’s beer is Mash Up the Jam, a new dry-hopped sour beer by Collective Arts Brewing of Hamilton, Ontario. I suspect this will be the first and last time we’ll see a beer featuring this species, an introduced Old-World songbird best known in North America from its St. Louis, Missouri population.
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