10,000 Birds
AUGUST 7, 2013
Fantails are a family that, apart from the aberrant Silktail and Pygmy Drongo, are extremely similar in appearance and behaviour. The family also reaches into India and as far east as samoa and Fiji. Even then they were very quick, and I got many shots like those above. Fantails don’t do necks.
10,000 Birds
SEPTEMBER 11, 2014
We’ve only recently begun to completely piece it together, using fossils and scientific analysis, but what is shows is that, once upon a time, the rail family was one of the most, if not the most, species rich family of birds in the world. But they are, as a family, prone to remarkable wandering.
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10,000 Birds
JUNE 8, 2011
The two endemic species found in Tonga are not found in these islands, and the other species present are also found on more traditional destinations of Fiji and Samoa. Seeing Buff-banded Rails in Tonga is harder than seeing the extinct species would have been, as they have not lost the wariness that keeps the family often highly cryptic.
10,000 Birds
SEPTEMBER 14, 2011
I’ve subsequently managed to dive in some spectacular destinations, including Turneffe Atoll in Belize, the Great Astrolabe Reef in Fiji, the kelp forests of Monterey and the wreck of the President Coolidge in Vanuatu. In fact no less a figure than Jacques Cousteau rated it in his top ten, and he was no slouch when it came to diving!
10,000 Birds
SEPTEMBER 7, 2014
Not, as Linneaus thought, an ostrich, nor even, as later scientists concluded, a distant cousin of pigeons deserving of family rank, it was an honest-to-goodness pigeon, deeply embedded within the family Columbidae. The Dodo ( Raphus cucullatus ) — that towering icon of modern anthropogenic extinctions — was a pigeon.
10,000 Birds
NOVEMBER 30, 2011
But there is one kind of tick that I genuinely do enjoy, and as I do more and more birding it becomes harder and harder to get; new families. Getting entirely new families is easy when you start birding. Sometimes you may even lose them, like the aforementioned woodswallows which are probably no longer a family.
10,000 Birds
SEPTEMBER 12, 2012
Enter the Silktail , an odd little bird found only on two islands, Taveuni and Vanua Levu, in Fiji. Indeed it was part of that family. Until then the fantails were a family of rather personable flycatcher-like birds ranging from India to New Zealand.
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