10,000 Birds

JUNE 16, 2011

Most of the time when we think of birds, we think of the things that make them birds, and not the things that make them dinosaurs. But that is because we often have the relationship between dinosaurs and birds reversed in our little primate minds; Much of what is bird-like is not exclusive to birds, but rather, to a larger group of dinosaurs. Birds have taken these particular traits in novel directions, but these traits existed independently of all the birdiness we usually attribute to our feath

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4 The Love Of Animals

JUNE 27, 2011

Sneezing, runny nose, headache, even fever: these are the things that we human beings experience when we have a cold. But having a cold is not just exclusive to us humans as our beloved pet dogs can get a cold too. But how do we determine if our dog has a cold? And most importantly, what to do if your dog gets a cold? Below are some facts and tips on what to do if this does happen do your dog.

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Critter News

JUNE 3, 2011

I like this story because I can only imagine the conditions of circus animals in Portugal. When I was in the Azores, there was a circus called Atlas I think and there were horrible, gaudy posters. I just had a sick feeling about the possible treatment of those animals. Being of Azorean heritage, and, therefore, Portuguese, I know personally that animal welfare is not a cultural value.

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 17, 2011

A great number of animals owe their lives to our intention to eat them. And their lives are (or can easily be made to be) comfortable and satisfying in the way that few lives led in the wild could possibly be. If we value animal life and animal comfort, therefore, we should endorse our carnivorous habits, provided it really is life , and not living death, on which those habits feed.

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 3, 2011

The quote “ What Is So Rare As A Day In June? &# may be familiar to most readers (the sentiment certainly is!) but its source is fairly obscure. This line is but a snippet from the most famous work of the poet James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), a member of the gaggle of authors sometimes called the Fireside Poets or the Schoolroom Poets. Some of his more famous colleagues in this group include Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 22, 2011

I don’t know how many of you ever raised chickens but the old joke went something like this. Question: “Hey, do you know what that white stuff is on the top of the chicken shit?&# Answer: “Nope.&# Reply: “That’s chicken shit too!&# Well, as it turns out, it’s really uric acid (the white part of the poop). The dark part is undigested feces.

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 10, 2011

I’ve been to a lot of birding festivals—sometimes as a speaker, sometimes as a trip leader, and sometimes just because I love going to birding festivals. Last weekend I was in North Dakota attending The Potholes & Prairie Birding Festival in Carrington, ND. If you’ve never been to the potholes region of the Great Plains, you need to get it on your birding bucket list now.

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 29, 2011

Have you had trouble keeping finches at your feeder? If so, you’re not alone, it’s a common bird feeding question. American Goldfinches are one of the prettiest reasons to keep your feeders full in the summer. It seems that goldfinches are so pretty they know they can afford to be a bit more finicky than other birds. But by following a few of rules of thumb, you can keep finches around and keep them satisfied: 1.

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 19, 2011

This is all you usually see of a shitepoke. They’re shy. My father had stories he’d tell, time and time again, and one of them was from his one-room schoolhouse when he was a farm boy in Iowa. The teacher asked the kids to make a list of all the birds they knew, and they were busy scratching away with their pencils when one boy raised his hand and asked, “Ma’am, how do you spell “shitepoke?

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 22, 2011

When I first saw the post on the New York State listserv about the Hooded Crow on Staten Island I wasn’t going to twitch it. Why? It had to be an escaped bird or at least one that didn’t make it to the southernmost borough in New York City under its own power but by riding a boat.* After all, Hooded Crows are a bird of eastern and northern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East and are not known as long distance migrants.

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 28, 2011

Besides my 3rd grade teacher, I had never encountered a witch before. That is until a recent Nikon’s BATV film trip to Jamaica revealed a unique avian femme fatale, the Crested Quail-dove -- also known colloquially as the mountain witch. Widely regarded as the toughest of the 28 Jamaican endemic birds to find, this charismatic dove is somewhat of an enigma.

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 1, 2011

It’s winter down here for sure now, and winter in Kaikoura , on the coast of South Island north of Christchurch, means one thing, albatrosses! This time a few years ago I attended an ornithological conference in Kaikoura, and the day afterwards we went out to see the many seabirds that come in close to the shore there. I took a lot of photos but today I’ll just be sharing the ones of the Buller’s Albatross , Thalassarche bulleri , known here as the Buller’s Mollymawk.

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Albatross New Zealand South America Breeders 213

10,000 Birds

JUNE 22, 2011

Birds evacuate waste in many ways. It doesn’t all go out the rear end, some of it comes through the front end and these are known as pellets. It’s not fecal material, but parts that are not digestible like fur, bones and the exoskeletons of insects. Birds will barf them back up out of their mouths. They’ve got it coming and going!

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4 The Love Of Animals

JUNE 22, 2011

By Casey Selleck, King of the Web. Cooper, an American Shorthair Cat, has helped elevate dogs and cats to a higher level in the art community. I’m sure we have all seen the art left in the front and backyard, in a litter box, or sometimes placed upon the underside of an unlucky shoe, and perhaps failed to appreciate its significance. But Cooper the Photographer Cat helps breach the gap between human and pet artistic perspectives as he strolls his neighborhood taking photos that even humans can a

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 27, 2011

Back in 2006, Problogger Darren Rowse proposed a fun Group Writing Project challenging bloggers to put together a good “How To&# post. Up to that point, I’d offered Great Reasons to Become A Bird Watcher in an effort to encourage the uninitiated to try bird watching. The next logical step was to explain the right way to get started. So I did… When you’re offering reasons to pursue a particular course of action, more is often better.

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 24, 2011

Mark Carter is an independent professional birding guide and wildlife surveyor living in Alice Springs, Central Australia. Originally from Scotland, Mark has lived and worked in continental Europe and North Africa before settling in Australia’s “Red Centre&# to work for the Northern Territory Parks Service. In 2008 Mark founded the annual Red Centre Bird Week and Twitchathon which occurs each September/October in Alice Springs.

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 25, 2011

The next time a bird poops on your car, think carefully before you act. Consider who the rightful owner of this rich resource might be and weigh the consequences of hasty action. Now a car manufacturer might suggest that you remove the caustic substance immediately with a soft cloth, but are they really the right people to be giving advice on such a sensitive issue?

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 11, 2011

Who doesn’t love a macaw? Big, bold, beautiful parrots full of character and charm, macaws make us long for some of the world’s wildest places and assure us that, as long as they fly free, those magical wild places are still intact. One of the most majestic macaws is the Hyacinth Macaw ( Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus ), a brilliant blue South American bird that weighs in as the largest flying parrot in the world.

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Speaker: Gabriel Wagner Presenter 2

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 21, 2011

or, How bird poop can get you a degree in Homeopathy. As a teenager, my uncle bought me a t-shirt with a bird poop ID system printed on the front. 20 bird poop splats and their respective names. Essentially a quick-guide to bird poop identification. Amazing what you find at flea markets. Anyhow, whenever I wore the shirt, I was always greeted with people pointing and laughing.

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 12, 2011

Feathers are the unique ingredient when it comes to birds. Platypus have bills, bats and bugs can fly, and reptiles lay eggs, but only birds have feathers. Despite feathers being such a large and essential aspect of birdness I did not know much about them, at least until I read Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle , the fascinating new book by Thor Hansen.

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 18, 2011

As the children’s book says, everyone poops. People poop. Birds poop. People who look at birds poop – sometimes from the excitement of looking at a bird, or so I have been told. Pooping is a simple fact of life and we here at 10,000 Birds are not going to let any topic – no matter how smelly – that touches upon the world of birding go uncovered.

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 15, 2011

The order Suliformes holds a lot of special birds from anhingas and darters to cormorants and shags as well as frigatebirds, pelicans, and tropicbirds. But the sleekest of the sulids may be found in the family Sulidae. Gannets and boobies are pulchritudinous plunge divers possessed of long wings, conical bills, and totipalmate (all four toes are webbed), sometimes garishly colored feet.

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Speaker: Steve Romanco

10,000 Birds

JUNE 7, 2011

As I may have mentioned before , I have been spending an occasional hour or so doing the auto loop at the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, better known as Brigantine. One of the amazing aspects of Brigantine in late spring is the sheer volume of turtles one can encounter. On a single trip I have seen four species of turtle, which must be my all time high in one day.

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 22, 2011

There is a very distinctive smell found on seabird colonies, where thousands upon thousands of birds come to breed and, coincidentally, deposit large quantities of waste. It is a smell, however, that I am barely able to smell anymore, as three years of working breeding seasons on seabird islands of the Farallones in California have apparently dulled my ability to do so.

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 6, 2011

It is not every day that one gets to explore Central Park with a friend, birder, and first-time visitor to the Big Apple. It is even more odd to be birding Central Park in June, when migration has essentially wrapped up and all that is left are breeders and stragglers. But that is what I did yesterday morning because Nate was in town, I had some time available, and we are birders!

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 4, 2011

Despite my manic work schedule of late my positioning in southern New Jersey does lend itself to an occasional, if brief, birding outing when the stars align properly and I am near a birdy spot when I suddenly find myself with a free hour or so. A couple of times I have had this happen near the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, universally known to birders as Brigantine or “The Brig&# and took advantage of the time I had to take a spin around the auto loop.

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 11, 2011

The Black-headed Gull , Larus ridibunus, is similar in many ways to Bonaparte’s Gull , Larus philadelphia of North America. They are both small “black-headed&# gulls which take two years to reach maturity and retain their black, immature tail bar through their first winter and summer. The white wedge on the leading edge of the outer wing is another shared feature.

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 13, 2011

On a recent all-too-brief visit to that Mecca of birding in my home borough I was doing my best to get some good flight shots of the Forster’s Terns , Common Terns , and Least Terns that were frequenting both the West Pond and the bay across the trail. I didn’t get much that was usable, but I did get one shot that really confuses me. Until I got home and uploaded my images to a computer I had no idea I had captured such an odd image and since then I have stared at it and pondered w

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10,000 Birds

JUNE 5, 2011

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission will be meeting on Wednesday and will be voting on the removal of sixteen species from the state’s endangered species list , including four birds – Snowy Egret , Brown Pelican , Limpkin , and White Ibis. There is not much controversy around the delisting of the four birds, all of which have recovered substantially from their population nadirs.

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Endangered Species Florida Species Pelicans 175

10,000 Birds

JUNE 15, 2011

It is unclear how or why this happened and it might be a sign of the apocalypse, but mere days after Jochen’s post about surfing grebes a video of surfing geese has surfaced on the interwebs. Weird. And those geese are alright, right? I mean, it doesn’t seem like they would choose to be surfing… a.

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Speaker: Gabriel Wagner

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