The Maleo of Sulawesi
10,000 Birds
OCTOBER 7, 2024
This is not a post about The Machine Learning and Optimisation (MALEO) group, led by Prof. The females lay their eggs in burrows at , and no further parental… Source
California Quail, The California State Bird: Now Forming Coveys
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 31, 2011
In California, coveys break up and pairs begin forming in February or March, followed by nest building and egg laying in May or June. She will usually lay 12 to 17 eggs, averaging five per week 1 , before beginning incubation. Occasionally, larger clutches occur due to egg dumping by other females. www.youtube.com/watch?
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Birding the Datang area, Yunnan
10,000 Birds
JULY 15, 2024
A paper on the species asks the important question “Does nest sanitation elicit egg rejection in an open-cup nesting cuckoo host rejecter?” ” To rephrase: if you put some trash into a nest of a bird along with a cuckoo egg, does that improve the chance that the cuckoo egg will be kicked out? How to find out?
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Birding Yibin, Sichuan
10,000 Birds
APRIL 27, 2023
It seems some Chinese researchers had an interesting hypothesis – maybe cleaning up a nest (“nest sanitation” to the ornithologists) would also make it easier for the parasitized bird to eject an egg laid by a parasitizing cuckoo. In one group, they added a blue egg to their nests.
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Breeding Crested Pigeons in Broome
10,000 Birds
MARCH 26, 2023
Crested Pigeons only lay two eggs and the nest we observed in our local park successfully hatched out two young. The Crested Pigeon would have incubated the eggs for twenty one days. The nest was quite full once the Crested Pigeons were ready to fledge.
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Are Birds Really Dinosaurs?
10,000 Birds
JUNE 16, 2011
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. Facultative (occasional, used when needed) bipedalism occurs in one group of carnivores.
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The Falcon Thief: A Book Review
10,000 Birds
APRIL 7, 2020
The proprietor of our ecolodge guides my small group of birders up a steep slope where we see, just at the point where a scope view deteriorates into pixels, a huge bird—a Chaco Eagle, also known as a Crowned Eagle—on a huge nest. McWilliam realizes he’s dealing someone special, a career falcon egg-thief. Author Joshua Hammer.
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The Art of Bird Camp
10,000 Birds
JANUARY 16, 2015
Actually, I was bested by an entire group of teenagers, all gathered – along with 36 adults – on Hog Island , Audubon’s famous camp off the coast of Maine. Each year Hog Island offers programs, taught by a stellar staff of naturalists and artists, to groups of all kinds (teenagers, adults, families).
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Pheasant-tailed Jacana courtship dance
10,000 Birds
APRIL 23, 2012
Our excitement at finding these avian gems soon turned to amazement as the entire tour group became enraptured by the fascinating behavior that we were fortunate enough to observe. When the female is ready to lay eggs, she will deposit a clutch of eggs in a nest built by each of her males and that is the end of her role in reproduction.
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Nesting Red-capped Plovers
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 13, 2023
Red-capped Plover nest We have mostly observed Red-capped Plover nests with two eggs, so she may well have laid another egg by now. The Red-capped Plover family group will move back and forth up and down the beach as the tides rise and fall and try to avoid the vehicles that use our local beaches at this time of year.
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Spoon-billed Sandpiper Baby Boom … in Great Britain?
10,000 Birds
JUNE 15, 2016
Two different females among the captive group have laid eggs , and scientists are keeping a watchful eye on a few others. While it’s still a bit early to say how many of the eggs will develop into healthy chicks, this is wonderful news for the Spoonies and their fans worldwide.
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Torresian Crows in Australia
10,000 Birds
NOVEMBER 6, 2022
The Channel-billed Cuckoos will attempt to deposit their eggs in the nests of the Torresian Crows. Torresian Crows can be very vocal in a group calling out “arr, arr, arr, arr” There’s actually a rather bad joke about why they get hit by trucks-they can’t say “truck”-only “car”!
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The Juniper Titmouse Nesting Project
10,000 Birds
SEPTEMBER 20, 2018
The Aldea Birding Group that spearheaded this project placed 70 nest boxes in our open spaces and pulled in volunteers to monitor them during the bird’s mating season. But a Bewick’s Wren did build a nest, which it promptly abandoned before laying any eggs. Well, as a birder, how can you resist getting involved? Others had more luck.
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What is Bird Poop?
10,000 Birds
JUNE 21, 2011
Bird poop is, summarized and generalized, the same thing as any other animal group’s poop: the final stage of digestion, the getting rid of the garbage. Or picture yourself as a bird fetus within an egg. Drinking and peeing through the egg shell? And it can be stored easily by the bird fetus within the egg.
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The Garrulous Jay
10,000 Birds
OCTOBER 27, 2023
David Bannerman, writing 70 years ago in the first volume of The Birds of the British Isles, noted that the Jay “is a frequent pilferer of gardens and orchards” and “an unscrupulous arch-egg-robber. Not only eggs but nestling birds of many species fall prey to the Jay.” There are no fewer than 27 recognized subspecies in six groups.
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Acorn Woodpeckers: The Clowns of the Avian World
10,000 Birds
FEBRUARY 29, 2012
Most Acorn Woodpeckers are cooperative breeders and live in family groups of up to a dozen or more individuals. Within a group, 1–7 male co-breeders compete for matings with 1–3 joint-nesting females who lay their eggs in the same nest cavity. This is a photo of a juvenile at my water feature.
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Thousands of Tricolored Blackbirds Saved Through Farmer/Conservationist Partnership
10,000 Birds
JUNE 17, 2013
In these situations, the birds have been treated like pests and targeted for extermination, or lost their eggs and nestlings to harvesting of the fields. So the conservation groups are working on ways to provide attractive alternatives. federal level, and a Species of Special Concern in California.
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Masked Lapwings breeding
10,000 Birds
JANUARY 1, 2012
They generally lay four eggs, but we have only seen a maximum of three surviving chicks after a few days. A good indication that they have eggs or young is the extreme noise that they make. They will often fly at both people and other animals in defense of their eggs and young. Masked Lapwing chick hiding in a cow footprint!
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Yellow-billed Spoonbills breeding
10,000 Birds
JUNE 6, 2021
By the size of the juvenile birds the adults must have laid the eggs several months ago when the rains came to that area of Western Australia. One family of Yellow-billed Spoonbills all lined up together on the one branch over the river and made for an impressive group of birds. Juvenile and adult Yellow-billed Spoonbill.
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Newly Hatched Baby Birds Actually Look Kinda Like Dinosaurs
10,000 Birds
MAY 7, 2014
According to Wikipedia, birds (class Aves) are feathered, winged, two-legged, warm-blooded, egg-laying vertebrates. The featured image at the top of the post is the same group of nestlings showing one of them begging for food. Most researchers agree that modern-day birds are the only living members of the Dinosauria clade.
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The Endangered Andean Flamingo
10,000 Birds
NOVEMBER 5, 2015
Egg harvesting to sell as food was intensive then, with thousands taken annually from the breeding colonies in Chile. Egg collection for local consumption still continues at lower scale. Conservation organizations such as the Flamingo Specialist Group is actively trying to inform the public on the vulnerability of flamingos.
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Stuck in the middle (of the AOU/COS meeting)
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 20, 2013
Handing out T-shirts at the registration desk with a summer intern from the Field Museum (one of the conference’s sponsoring groups) gave me a good feel for who was around and what ornithologists are like. Exhibitors ranged from book publishers to purveyors of telemetry equipment to local bird and wildlife groups.
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Around the World For Penguins: A Penguin Fan’s Book Review
10,000 Birds
NOVEMBER 3, 2020
If you have any doubts whether you want to see a Snares Penguin, you can read the species description, directly following, and drink in photos of their bright, droopy yellow eyebrows, bulbous dark-red bills with bare pink skin at the base, and peek at a group of the penguins, walking en masse within the thick island scrub.
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Bird Butts and Other Matters
10,000 Birds
APRIL 15, 2014
The local Bald Eagles are getting busy, I suspect there is an egg in the nest. One group is trying to make a better list of which species of birds to pretend to be doing something about vis-a-vis imminent extinction using a unique approach: Identifying the most genetically unique species. All I see are their buts.
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214 Outstanding Pied Oystercatcher parenting!
10,000 Birds
NOVEMBER 23, 2014
There is egg predation, chick loss and sometimes possibly just some “bad parenting”! One pair of Pied Oystercatchers laid eggs the first year and did not appear to realise they were supposed to sit on them, but they have since learnt it is an essential part of rearing a chick and they have done so since.
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Sand Trap: Netting Red Knots for Science
10,000 Birds
SEPTEMBER 23, 2013
What if, however, you want to nab a group of shorebirds that will scurry or take flight at the merest approach? One scientists posits that harvesting of horseshoe crabs (their eggs are a preferred Red Knot food source) at a crucial refueling stop on the birds’ migration could be part of the problem.
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Emus and fences
10,000 Birds
MARCH 24, 2013
They will only breed if the conditions are good and the male will be responsible for nest building and incubating the 6-12 eggs for approximately 60 days. There had been good rains the previous year and as a result of that there were numerous family groups. He will then rear the young Emu for up to 18 months.
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Where the People Are
10,000 Birds
NOVEMBER 11, 2011
Today, I bring you an equally lavish look at a group bipeds that are perhaps a little more confusing: people. Contentious issues like parrot ownership, the role of hunters in conservation, and the romaniticization of bygone eras of egg and nest collecting are passed over with nary an acknowledgement that they are controversial.
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The Dracula Bird
10,000 Birds
JUNE 3, 2020
Instead, they lay their eggs in other species’ nests, and let those nest-making birds (often significantly smaller than the cowbirds) raise their young. In fact, this is not even a particularly large group. This is a rather typical group size for Bronzed Cowbirds. So that is a negative mark on both their records.
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175 Bird Banding the Dry Tortugas
10,000 Birds
MARCH 31, 2014
The Dry Tortugas National Park is located some 70 miles off of Key West in a small group of keys that makes up the farthest points included in the state of Florida, so it was no surprise that we had a four hour boat ride ahead of us before landing in the park. Banding is best done in teams split into three, potentially four groups.
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Common Mergansers or Goosanders Frolicking on Clear Creek
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 7, 2011
The female chooses the nest site, builds the nest, lays around 10 eggs over a two week period and incubates them for about a month. I believe these videos are of a group of immature Common Mergansers enjoying the day without their parents INSERT VIDEO 1 HERE INSERT VIDEO 2 HERE What do you think? entrance hole.
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Teaching Ornithology in High Schools
10,000 Birds
FEBRUARY 9, 2021
” His classes attracted diverse groups of students, often with little scientific background: “Students have to first pass biology, but most come in knowing next to nothing about birds except that they can fly, that they have feathers, and that they lay eggs.”. But once a week, they were “out the door by 8:05 a.m.
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The Changing Fortunes of Europe’s Vultures – Part 1
10,000 Birds
MAY 26, 2024
This time it’s a group of Griffon Vultures Gyps fulvus that have just arrived from the south. The chicks need six months to develop so the adults lay their eggs in January. As I write these lines, it is the screaming of agitated Y ellow -legged Gulls Larus michehellis just outside my window that alerts me to another raptor overhead.
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Wattled Cranes
10,000 Birds
JULY 3, 2012
A group of Wattled Cranes in the Okavango Delta Wattled Cranes are the only African cranes with all-white necks, rendering them unmistakable in the field. They are not bound to wetlands the entire year and large groups of birds will disperse to dry grassland and savanna outside of the breeding season.
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Black Kites breeding
10,000 Birds
MAY 10, 2020
The adult Pied Oystercatcher that is sitting on the eggs will lay as flat as possible to protect the eggs. The header photo shows the small group of trees where the Black Kites have chosen to nest this year. We really don’t like the presence of Black Kites along the beach when the Pied Oystercatchers are breeding.
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The long journey home
10,000 Birds
JANUARY 22, 2012
Typically there are four eggs in a brood especially on good year. Once the eggs hatch the family begins the long walk down to the shoreline. The peak of this activity is over in about a week, and the birds head upland to nest (for the most part, as some have nested right at the edge of the water. This was a later nest.
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178 Critically Endangered: Sociable Lapwing
10,000 Birds
NOVEMBER 27, 2014
These birds even lay their eggs on piles of cow or horse dung, most likely to elevate them from the cold ground and possibly provide some heating through the process of rotting plant material. Back to Gipsy and toward a distant group of farmers working their fields.
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Birding Hongbenghe, Yunnan (Part 1)
10,000 Birds
MARCH 11, 2024
This laughingthrush is a cooperative breeder – nestlings are fed by all members of a group, often 6-12 (not just 2 as in Wham!): “A female may share a nest with another, and 3 or more adults may take turns incubating the eggs and feeding the chicks.” ” ( source ).
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Construction of a Pied Oystercatcher nest
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 11, 2018
One of our male Pied Oystercatchers has been marked with an engraved leg flag “A1” and was one of the first pairs to lay eggs this season. Sadly the two chicks did not survive very long at all and the pair of Pied Oystercatchers were soon getting ready to lay more eggs. “A1” Preparing another nest site.
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130 Busan to Broome
10,000 Birds
SEPTEMBER 18, 2011
Everywhere I have hiked around the city there have been single women, couples, groups of hikers and very little rubbish is dropped. The mystery of an egg with no markings The big mystery is that one of our pairs of Pied Oystercatchers has laid a white egg… anyone heard of our seen that before????
Chipmunks 154
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Stamps in a Weathered Passport
10,000 Birds
FEBRUARY 25, 2024
In one stretch of rocky outcropping, a group of Ground Woodpeckers foraged along boulders searching for ants and as their name suggests, they forage on the ground in sparsely vegetated country. The herders are nomadic groups that move sheep from place to place, staying in brick structures that dot the landscape.
Lesotho 246
246 An unusual auk baby
10,000 Birds
JULY 18, 2012
Seabirds are one group of birds that go for the latter strategy. A few families have a small number of eggs in the clutches, like gulls or cormorants. Others, like the petrels and some of the auks, will lay a single egg per breeding attempt.
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Bird Talk: An Exploration of Avian Communication–A Book Review
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 3, 2021
Signaling theory examines communication between individuals and groups, within and across species, focusing on whether signals–communications containing complex information–are honest or deceptive and how the exchange of these signals impacts the individuals involved and the larger group or groups to which they belong.
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Birding Ruoergai, Sichuan, China
10,000 Birds
SEPTEMBER 13, 2021
The HBW accurately hints at the difficulties of getting a photo of this bird: “Generally hiding deep in shrubbery, where it forages in small groups for seeds on and near the ground, and revealing itself only when singing from the top of a bush, this is not an easy bird to study.”
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