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Restless New Zealand Fantails

10,000 Birds

Unlike many endemic species they aren’t remotely rare, and can be seen just about anywhere in the country, and they are also amazingly confiding, allowing close approaches and even coming close to us of their own volition. The family also reaches into India and as far east as samoa and Fiji.

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Rails: The Once and Future Kings of the Pacific

10,000 Birds

One of the less well remembered awful things that happened in the Second World War (a six year period of history filled with an uncountable number of awful things) is that war’s direct role in the extinction of two species of rail. The loss of these two species was, in fact, no aberration, except in how late the extinctions were.

Hawaii 209
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The complete guide to Dodo relatives, living and dead

10,000 Birds

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. One species alive today offers a glimpse of such behavior: the Nicobar Pigeon ( Caloenas nicobarica ). .’s

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History repeating itself

10,000 Birds

How many species there were is probably lost to history, but there were certainly many hundreds. Sadly, as I’ve explained before , most of these species became extinct as humans arrived on the islands, and with it one of the most astonishing radiations of birds imaginable. But here’s the thing. It didn’t used to be.

Tonga 166
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The Long Reach of the Poor Knights

10,000 Birds

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!

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Big Ticks; What Was Your Last New Family?

10,000 Birds

Not that I don’t enjoy seeing new species myself, it’s just that they are an easy target and I am nothing if not lazy and mean spirited. 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.

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Grey-headed Robins

10,000 Birds

It is, instead, a member of the Petroicidae, the Australasian robins, a family mostly found in New Guinea and Australia but also reaching here in New Zealand and as far across the Pacific as Fiji. Until I started researching this post I didn’t know an interesting fact about the range of this species.

Guinea 154