10,000 Birds
AUGUST 28, 2012
Birds have captivated us for time eternal, not only because of their ability to fly, but also because of the color they add to our lives. Ok, let me be clear that I’m not suggesting that ALL birds are colorful. Birds like Plain Chachalacas and Grey Catbirds hardly evoke images of stunning beauty. But a vast number of species DO exhibit dazzling displays of color.
4 The Love Of Animals
SEPTEMBER 16, 2012
It’s that time of the year again when the humans start sniffling and sneezing! If you have ever wondered if your dog can get a cold, the answer is yes ! Not just dogs though, pet birds, ferrets, and even pet rats are all able to catch a cold from a person. If you have a cold, it’s best to keep your distance from your beloved pet so you don’t spread it.
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10,000 Birds
APRIL 10, 2012
The Great Blue Heron nest camera at Cornell’s Sapsucker Woods had essentially been the typical nest camera. Bird lays eggs, sits on eggs, etc. That changed in the early morning hours when a Great Horned Owl decided that, well, watch for yourself! Wow! a.
10,000 Birds
OCTOBER 1, 2012
There can be no doubt that this year is an irruption year for Red-breasted Nuthatches. Sitta canadensis isn’t just irrupting out of its far northern home but exploding southward, with reports in every southern state except for Florida, including birds on the outer banks of North Carolina, on Grand Isle, Louisiana, in a suburb of Atlanta, and on the Gulf Coast of Texas.
10,000 Birds
FEBRUARY 14, 2012
Ethiopia , a landlocked country situated in the Horn of Africa, has firmly established itself as one of Africa’s top birding destinations. Only twenty years ago it was an out-of-bounds, desperately impoverished and war-torn ex-Marxist state. Tourism infrastructure didn’t exist then and development has been slow. Tours groups that I guided to Ethiopia ten years ago had to endure very basic accommodation, almost no surfaced roads and low levels of service.
10,000 Birds
JANUARY 10, 2012
The family Picathartidae consists of two very unusual birds; White-necked or Yellow-headed Picathartes , endemic to the Upper Guinea forests of West Africa; and Gray-necked or Red-headed , restricted to Lower Guinea forests of Central Africa. Their strange appearance and habit of communally nesting in rock overhangs and caves has given them their alternative name of rockfowl , and before that the rather charming ‘ Bald-headed Crow ‘ Further illustrating their unusual long-tailed, yet
Animal Rights Zone brings together the best content for animal advocates and activists from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
10,000 Birds
JULY 11, 2012
In responding to Suzie’s post defending wildlife rehabilitation I began to think again about the areas in which animal rights and animal welfare overlap with the field of conservation, and the ways in which they don’t. It’s a subject I’ve thought a lot about over the years, pretty much since I first started studying biology at undergraduate level.
10,000 Birds
JULY 17, 2012
Nick Sly, a friend of 10,000 Birds who writes intermittently at the thoroughly-recommended Biological Ramblings , is an ornithologist who graduated not so long ago from Cornell only to be cast out into the real world where he keeps a wry eye on all things biological! Back in October 2008, in his first field job out of school, he helped a Cornell PhD student, Karl, with his dissertation on vocal communication in Green-rumped Parrotlets Forpus passerinus.
10,000 Birds
JULY 14, 2012
Hot on the heels of recent mainstream birding movie The Big Year comes another new ‘birding’ movie A Birder’s Guide to Everything (ABGE). ABGE is currently in pre-production and is being produced by Rob Meyer. It would appear to be a ‘coming of age’ movie aimed at the teen market, more background is available at Rob Meyer Films here or from the teaser video below.
10,000 Birds
APRIL 12, 2012
Nuthatches are small, short-tailed, sharp-billed songbirds widely recognized for their ability to hitch headfirst down tree trunks and upside-down along limbs. The family has representatives throughout the forests North America, Eurasia (including North Africa), and Indomalaya. Nuthatches are related to the Wallcreeper, treecreepers (Certhiidae), gnatcatchers, and wrens.
10,000 Birds
MARCH 19, 2012
Do people go birding while inebriated? There is the blog The Drinking Bird , but what about the drinking birder? Birdchick hosts Birds and Beers but that is held in bars and the birds tend to be discussed, not seen. There is a painfully bad song called “Drunk Bird Watching” on You Tube but the only “bird” seems to be someone saying “hello” like a caged parrot.
10,000 Birds
JUNE 29, 2012
The kids can’t get enough of this stuff. “Who’s ever seen an x-ray?” I ask. “Anyone ever broken a bone?” Hands shoot up. “Here is an x-ray of a bird,” I say. “It’s a really big bird. Any guesses?” A ghostly image appears on the screen. The kids’ eyes widen. Hands raise and wave. Once we’ve established that it’s a Golden Eagle, I ask the ten-million dollar question.
10,000 Birds
APRIL 17, 2012
This week marks the 2-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico. On April 20th 2010, the world received news that eleven men working on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig died in an explosion on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect. What the world did not know was the unthinkable scale of the disaster to follow. There is no point rehashing the gruesome details of the largest accidental marine oil spill in our history.
10,000 Birds
JUNE 25, 2012
Do you grow tired of lugging a camera into the field on the off chance you’ll see something you need to document? Have you messed around with your iPhone, holding it up to your binoculars or scope, hoping to get a decent image but constantly being frustrated by vignetting and the sheer difficulty of getting your iPhone in the exact right spot?
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10,000 Birds
SEPTEMBER 18, 2012
We know that the human mind has capacities that are not common in other animals. Some of these capacities seem to be linked with language or with complex thinking or inference, and probably evolved in connection with our linguistic and complex social behavior. For example, humans have “Theory of Mind” which is not a theory in the scientific sense, but rather, a capacity whereby we have an internal theory of what is going on in other people’s minds.
10,000 Birds
FEBRUARY 7, 2012
Torrent Ducks are the thrill-seekers of the avian world. Very few birds – or animals for that matter – would plunge head-first into the churning cauldrons of some of South America’s most treacherous rivers. But Torrent Ducks are fearless and to witness some of their daredevil feats ranks pretty high in the book “1000 Avian Spectacles to See Before You Die” A book that I have not yet written.
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 14, 2012
The wonderful family Meropidae contains 27 dazzling species, of which Africa is endowed with no less than 20 species, the balance occurring across Asia and with one as far afield as Australia. These charismatic, colorful and finely formed birds are favorites amongst birders from experts to novices, and lie within the group of birds whose beauty even non-birders really appreciate.
10,000 Birds
JULY 27, 2012
I’m not a big fan of bird banding. When I see a band I imagine something slipping beneath it and trapping the bird, I’ve seen photos of birds with so many bands it looks like they’re wearing stockings, and then there’s the awful story of Violet , whose band eventually killed her. Yet I realize banding is a very valuable tool, and gives us information we could not otherwise gather.
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 25, 2012
The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago may share equal billing in the dichotomous nation’s name, but Trinidad boasts the lion’s share of the land mass, population, and hummingbirds. My focus during my June 2012 visit was obviously on the hummingbirds. Visitors to Trinidad can scarcely help encountering stunning hummers just about everywhere.
10,000 Birds
APRIL 20, 2012
This unhappy-looking tar baby is covered with a green, environmentally-friendly product called Tanglefoot. It is a non-drying, sticky compound that is used to protect trees by forming a barrier against climbing insects. Normally it might not be a problem, but last October a farmer in upstate New York spread it on an apple tree so thickly that the product slid down the branches and pooled in the tree’s crotch.
10,000 Birds
MAY 31, 2012
Let’s say you’re at a fast food restaurant and you have a few french fries left over and a gull is eagerly staring at you and the fries. Do you toss the bird your leftovers? What if you are eating a sandwich on a park bench and a pigeon walks over and waits for your crumbs? And if you have a small kid and are in the vicinity of some ducks and geese?
10,000 Birds
APRIL 13, 2012
Here is another in a series of posts that celebrates the beauty hidden in plain sight, the astounding in the ordinary. Our subject today is the humble Mallard. While we all love birds for their spectacular and stupefying relationship to the air, waterfowl have another element to navigate and they are equally attuned to its demands. Above, a Mallard preens in New Zealand and sends pulsing waves into the morning light.
10,000 Birds
APRIL 5, 2012
How to Be a Better Birder is a very different kind of birding book, and, once you think about it, the perfect book to be written at this particular moment in the birding universe. Reading it might take a little bit of adjustment, because for many of us, being a better birder has meant perfecting our identification skills. We buy field guide after field guide, have long discussions on which is the best, listen to bird song CDs in our cars, and invest in large, expensive handbooks.
10,000 Birds
SEPTEMBER 13, 2012
If you ever wonder why so many American birders leaven their love of nature with a little self-loathing, look no further than the National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation , which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conducts every five years or so. Many of our most puzzling statistics arise from this otherwise innocuous report.
10,000 Birds
MARCH 9, 2012
In North America there is really only one duck that could even come close to competing with the Wood Duck for the title of most fair, and the Harlequin Duck is just too much of a trollop to really compete. Wood Ducks are essentially in a class of their own and seeing a drake in good plumage is usually the highlight of any birding outing. When I heard that a pair of drakes were wintering in the pond at the south end of New York City’s Central Park and were rather confiding, well, how cou
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 9, 2012
The end of January is a cold time for those of us who live in the northeastern United States. This past January I had the great pleasure of temporarily escaping winter by going to the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival. I had a great time and hoped to be back again in 2013 but life gets in the way sometimes and we don’t always get what we want.
10,000 Birds
JUNE 5, 2012
Birding’s Holy Grails. They lurk ever-present in our sub-concious as sacred items on an unobtainable, yet highly desirable, list. We pour over photographs, read with envy the eye-witness accounts of the “lucky ones” and fabricate secret plans to abandon our loved ones and embark on expensive trips to track them down. For many birders, the Pel’s Fishing Owl roosts in a lofty position on just such a list.
10,000 Birds
MARCH 30, 2012
This is going to be a rave review. I like Julie Zickefoose’s art , her writing , her blog , her blog posts here on 10,000 Birds , and, of course, I like birds. So a book about birds by Julie Zickefoose, featuring her writing and art, some of which has been featured in different forms on her blog, is guaranteed to be a hit with me. How could it not be?
10,000 Birds
MARCH 26, 2012
Jason Kessler is back with the funniest birding movie of the year. Sh*t Birders Say delivers more laughs in 3 minutes than… well, actual birding! Even the credits are amusing. Take the test: if you laugh at least twice, you are definitely a birder. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaX7i1Q7-Rw a.
10,000 Birds
MARCH 20, 2012
Colombia is not only home to nearly 20% of all avian life on the planet but this birding mecca also accommodates an incredibly high percentage of highly sought after species. Nearly 80 species are endemic and found nowhere else in the world. Moreover, Colombia remains the best destination to see many species that are very tough to find elsewhere in South America.
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