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If you are old enough, you will remember birding without a phone? Not too long ago, it was the norm. Then I started to carry a phone just in case my car stopped or something. Later I carried it because of a stash of bird songs I compiled in it. And now I carry it for the same reason, only now they are a part of the bird ID app. Yesterday, I carefully packed my scope and binoculars and left home, only to realise, still in a car park, that I had forgotten the bloody phone and my notebook.
Author: Lincoln Smith The modern world asks a lot of B2B business owners. Between long-term evolution like the digital transformation and (hopefully) short-term disruptions such as economic downturn or the coronavirus pandemic, it’s a lot to navigate. As a longtime member of the incentives industry, I am often asked what businesses can do to better manage their sales teams and their relationships with their channel partners in the constantly changing world.
Menglun in Xishuangbanna is less than 50 km away from the Chinese border to Laos and Myanmar, and it has a big botanical garden. That means it also has many tropical birds that a foreigner living in China can see without risking to leave the country (which would mean 2 weeks of quarantine on reentry at best and complete exclusion at worst, depending on the ever-changing regulations).
Thanks to steadfast advances in optics and digital cameras, bird photography has become quite the popular way to appreciate birds. Unlike the old days of slide film and carefully managed shots, today, with the right equipment, just about anyone can take some pretty fine pictures of the avian kind. The new style doesn’t erase the challenges of bird photography, nor does it delete the importance of learning tricks of the bird photo trade.
This past Tuesday marked the centenary of the première of The Lark Ascending , a work for solo violin and orchestra by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. One of the most famous of all pieces inspired by birds in the Western classical music canon, The Lark Ascending was influenced by an 1881 poem of the same name by the Victorian novelist and poet George Meredith.
I don’t know what those so-called meteorologists are doing: they all claim a moderately cold morning, but do not say a word about the fog! Yet, tree branches are covered in hoar frost and the fog is so thick one could cut it with a machete! Of course, I was going – birding, so the view of the fog (certainly not through the fog) has drawn several comments which I will not share here with you… While the Lada 4×4 is bumping along the dirt track (road??
It was the month of March, 2017, when I went to Lake Cuitzeo to check up on our migratory waterfowl and shorebirds one last time before they travelled north to breed. But that time, I was shocked to find that about half the birds I had expected were missing — along with half the lake. Lake Cuitzeo is Mexico’s second largest lake, and its uniformly shallow waters make it a powerful magnet for dabbling ducks and shorebirds.
It was the month of March, 2017, when I went to Lake Cuitzeo to check up on our migratory waterfowl and shorebirds one last time before they travelled north to breed. But that time, I was shocked to find that about half the birds I had expected were missing — along with half the lake. Lake Cuitzeo is Mexico’s second largest lake, and its uniformly shallow waters make it a powerful magnet for dabbling ducks and shorebirds.
The winds of December blow in a dramatic shakeup of birding conditions in most parts of the world, especially the ones with fair odds of a white Christmas. The excitement of those not-likely birds of November has died down, but the new regime of real winter birds in the Northern Hemisphere hasn’t fully asserted itself yet. Which is all to say that not much was going on around here this weekend!
November and early December can be a frustrating time here at Nanhui – on the one hand, there are fewer and fewer birds as migration slows down. On the other hand, it seems there is a better chance of getting some strays and really rare birds, such as the Ryukyu Minivet described in my last post. Similarly, the light is either brilliant (when it is sunny), making photography a delight, or it is almost absent.
As the year is closing, I am looking back to realise, despite it being such an awful year, it’s far from the worst I had, it doesn’t even come close (it’s the mileage that’s killing me, I guess). Yet, I feel depressive and so tired – and I haven’t even caught Covid yet (but did something else, a friend of mine asked: Are you sure it’s not malaria?).
As birders, we’re all well aware of our brain whipping our body awake at some ungodly hour, no matter how tightly wrapped in the sheets we may be. Last year, I was on transit via Curaçao – twice on a single round trip. The first time, we booked our flights with a five hour daylight window (during which I had planned to do some serious birding before catching my next flight).
There are owls in New York City. Big owls: Barred Owls on Riverside Drive and down the path from Harlem Meer, a Great Horned Owl in Central Park’s Ramble. They are the city’s latest, maybe only, celebrity media sensation, and photographs show crowds of New Yorkers craning their necks up as far as their masks allow, holding phones at arm’s length, using opera glasses and huge binoculars that remind me of the ones my dad used at the racetrack.
As anyone who knows quality photography can tell, I am not the sort of birder who tends to stay in one place for long. There are no photographic hides or tripods for me. I am always off to see what the next spot might have to offer, rather than taking the whole day searching for that one perfect shot from a single location. Still, even hyperactive birders occasionally stumble on that one spot that is so birdy you just can’t move on.
I suspect that most non-birders don’t particularly like the word “split”, since the first thing that it brings to mind is perhaps a bad end to a romance, or in the worst case, a divorce. For birders, however, a split can be a decidedly positive thing, producing that serendipitous wonder, the armchair lifer. For, in birder lingo, a split occurs when subspecies are determined to be, in fact, entirely separate species.
As I gather the relevant documentation for our upcoming CBC this Sunday I caught myself daydreaming of CBCs past. The very first CBC I attended was eight whole years ago – but I remember it quite vividly. A fact to which my wife will begrudgingly attest, as my memory is excellent when it comes to anything bird-related yet exceptionally poor otherwise.
Navigated 360° tours, like YourVRTours, advance pipelines by engaging clients further along the sales funnel. These immersive experiences provide comprehensive property insights, increasing buyer intent and readiness. By embracing navigated tours, agents can optimize property exposure, better qualify leads, and streamline the sales process. Stay ahead in the ever-evolving real estate landscape with innovative technology that elevates buyer journeys and progresses pipelines more effectively.
The De Grey River rest area is a good place to take a break if you are travelling the long journey between the two towns of Broome and Port Hedland in Western Australia. After over 500 kms most people need to at least stretch their legs before they get to Port Hedland. The highway is not the most exciting, but there is also very little traffic and no need to stop along the way.
Should you ever come to bird in central Mexico, and you are only interested in our wonderful endemics, feel free to come in the summer. It’s green, and there are refreshing rains almost every afternoon. Food sources will be abundant, and the endemics will be taking advantage of a relative lack of competition. But if you really want to rack up the numbers on each and every outing, you should definitely come here in the winter.
2020 is almost over… finally. Rather than belabor the obvious, I’ll just point out that the global pandemic may have spawned a new wave of birders, but collectively we’ve seen far fewer species of birds. Responsible social distancing has savaged the travel and tourism industries, which means that all of our favorite birding lodges, vendors, and guides have suffered and continue to struggle as we enter 2021.
Some of you know that I’m an active podcaster, churning out two episodes a week on testing, admissions, learning, and education on the Tests and the Rest podcast. But as much as I love hosting, I also enjoy being a podcast guest–especially when the topic is birding! No wonder I was so enthusiastic when Michael Hawk invited me as a guest on his own show, the Nature’s Archive Podcast.
Author: Paul Nolan Nick Kavadellas is thankful for golf, not only because he’s enjoyed playing it for years, but also because it is one of the few face-to-face selling tools he has continued using during the COVID-19 outbreak. In fact, Kavadellas, CEO of Georgia-based Orasi, a software developer, reseller and consulting firm, was scheduled to play a round with a client and a prospect the day after we spoke with him in November for this story.
Author: Staff Meg Scales is chief marketing officer of SlickText , which helps businesses market through short message service (SMS), aka text messages. In this Q&A, she speaks to the effectiveness of text messaging incorporated into events, virtual or live. Q: What do you think corporate events are missing, now that they’re online? Event organizers are doing an excellent job of trying to recreate interactive sessions, networking cocktail hours and dinners.
Author: TIM RIESTERER Sales training and enablement leaders, it’s time to level up. Buyers are searching for more information on their own. That means they are engaging with your content further down the funnel. As a result, your content can’t be just a companion to a sales-led customer conversation?— it needs to be able to stand on its own, address your buyers’ big questions, showcase your unique value and motivate action.
Author: Staff One of the surest ways to advertise your business online is through search engine optimization (SEO). Simply put, your site needs to rank among the top websites that Google or other search engines list on the search engine result pages (SERPs) for the keywords you’ve optimized in your web content. Your website will not be discovered by potential clients if it isn’t ranking high enough. .
Author: Tom Pisello If there's one thing that's true about 2020 it’s that everything changed. From our personal to professional lives, we’ve had to make adjustments that weren't always comfortable at the moment. For sales, 2020 brought on restrictions and social distancing, leading to less face-to-face interactions and remote sales. However, reports show more than three-quarters of buyers and sellers favor remote human engagement over face-to-face interactions and only 20% of B2B buyers say they
Author: Stephanie Quilligan With in-person meetings on hold for the foreseeable future, it’s hard to imagine a circumstance that would allow a traditional media roundtable anytime soon. But there’s no reason to write off the roundtable as a casualty of the COVID-19 crisis, particularly with all the videoconferencing tools that are now at everyone’s disposal.
Author: Rachel Krug It’s no surprise – buyers are more educated than ever, with new information available daily to influence decision making. And with nearly all purchase decisions beginning online, positive brand recognition is a linchpin to success. Product reviews provide an effective way for prospective customers to understand real experiences with products and/or services.
Author: SMM Staff News of promising COVID-19 vaccines has many people anxious to kick what remains of 2020 off their heels. But that requires planning for a new year. Jim Kruger, chief marketing officer at Veeam Software , a developer of disaster recovery and intelligent data management software, predicts three key . . Virtual events started out of necessity, but are here to stay because of ROI and accessibility.
Author: Paul Nolan Customers will drive the stickiness of virtual sales calls, so sales teams need to recognize how the shift affects their go-to-market strategy. Jess Pingrey of Fit Small Business offers these insights. Buyers are not afraid to make big purchases online. Seventy percent of decision-makers now say they are comfortable making remote purchases over $50,000, and 27% say they would spend more than $500,000 in a fully digital sales interaction.
Author: Russell Wurth Although sales kickoffs will look different in 2021, the circumstances give companies the opportunity to plan a truly unforgettable event. The key to a successful remote SKO is tailoring the event to a virtual setting. Likely each employee will be remote, separated from their team members and unable to genuinely connect with them during the event.
Author: Jake Miller Until the promising COVID-19 vaccines are produced, distributed and widely received by the public, virtual selling will continue to be the norm for B2B sales. Many believe it will be embraced long after the pandemic is behind us. Navigating the world of virtual selling may seem simple, but being a great virtual salesperson takes more than simply shifting every meeting to a video conference.
Author: Charles Brennan Jr. Prior to COVID-19, reps could often pop in and see a prospect or existing customer without an appointment. Or perhaps they would could linger a bit, ask for a favor and get access to the person they wanted to meet. Remember those days (less than a year ago)? It was like driving a car on the highway. A rep could cruise along at 60 mph, flip on a blinker, move to the left lane and drive a little faster without any concern of confronting a problem.
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