10,000 Birds

DECEMBER 9, 2023

And then I saw the species names attached to the aforementioned gentlemen’s avian namesakes and gave up… So, my attempt at political correctness has been thwarted by the 18th century rules of taxonomy. Not only did my research show a lot of promising sites to visit, but I also have two good birding friends in the region, Laura and Brad.

Colorado 161

Colorado Denver Skunks Wildlife Reserve 161

10,000 Birds

DECEMBER 13, 2022

I have always assumed that scientific researchers can overlay weather information on checklists for their research, but absent manual entry, that such information would not be available to me. I find the information helpful and insightful, as it can shed light on why some species were or were not seen on that trip.

Research 287

Research Wyoming Portland Oregon 287

Critter News

AUGUST 25, 2009

I'm so glad I have this blog and other web outlets to highlight these kinds of stories. Here's a post on the Red, Green and Blue blog about the unspeakable trade in macaque monkeys as research subjects. Tags: animal experimentation animal research primates medical research.

Primates 100

Primates Research Medical Research Mauritius 100

10,000 Birds

JUNE 20, 2022

Or would be, had I encountered more of them – so far, I have seen only a very small share of the approximately 233 woodpecker species, and got decent photos of an even smaller number – not much more than 10% of all of them. The main point of having self-imposed rules when writing a blog is to break them whenever desired.

Woodpeckers 220

Woodpeckers South Africa China Singapore 220

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 13, 2023

It feels good to start a post with some truly attractive birds – such as two species of broadbills. Strangely, there do not seem to be many papers on this species. In one paper , you can find fascinating sentences such as “The new species is most similar to D. My cats refuse to even try Fiery Minivets.

Birds 201

Birds Sri Lanka Taiwan Cats 201

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 23, 2023

This is how it looks like: Or at sunset: A species I did not come for from Shanghai is the Black-crowned Night Heron. Its species name graydoni is in honor of Philip Newenham Graydon (1864-1940), a British planter in Sabah. Why that makes Mr. Graydon worthy of having a bird species named after him is a mystery to me.

Birds 205

Birds Eagles Elephants Rhinoceros 205

10,000 Birds

JULY 15, 2015

I was told when I first started blogging here at 10,000 Birds that I was never to use the short form, “10K.” ” But here I’m using it because someone ELSE used it … the Bird 10K project is an effort to do the whole DNA thing they do on groups of species on the whole mess of 10K (or more) birds.

Birds 221

Birds Research Groups Investigation 221

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 23, 2015

This week’s guest blog was written by Linda Hufford, who has been a wildlife rehabilitator specializing in raptors for over twenty years. But, he continued, some – but not all – of the researchers drove him nuts. Their attitude was “the rules don’t apply to me, I’m a researcher.”

Collecting 240

Collecting Wildlife Rehabilitation Solomon Islands Texas 240

10,000 Birds

MAY 2, 2023

Flight Paths traces the history of migratory research in nine chapters, starting with the earliest attempts to track birds, bird banding/ringing (which she traces back to Audubon), and ending with ‘community science’ projects such as Breeding Bird Surveys and eBird. THIS IMAGE NOT IN THE BOOK. Schulman, 2023.

Science 180

Science Illinois Investigation Research 180

10,000 Birds

SEPTEMBER 27, 2021

Of course, it is hard to justify such an obsession in a blog post ostensibly all about birds. I stopped at the Red Crossbill , realizing that the species indeed “occupies an immense range, including North America, Eurasia, and northern Africa” (HBW) – including Baxi forest, China. Progress of sorts, I guess.

China 217

China Birds Nevada North America 217

10,000 Birds

JUNE 9, 2022

This is also why you very rarely find a photo of a giraffe on top of one of these posts – the other reason of course being that a giraffe photo would be relatively pointless in a birding blog. If I was an ornithologist aiming for a grant, I would now definitely highlight the need for more research on this topic.

Singapore 147

Singapore Mountain Goats Birds Giraffes 147

10,000 Birds

APRIL 11, 2013

Peripatetic ornithologist Nick Sly has long been a friend of the blog here and has contributed such classics as Green-rumped Parrotlets from Egg to Adult and Forpus passerinus and the Ornithologists of Masaguaral. Please read and then vote for either Nick or Maria’s research! To win, we need your votes! Thanks for your support!

Panama 201

Panama Research Investigation Chickens 201

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 21, 2015

With the breeding colony concentrated on one small island this species is vulnerable to a catastrophic weather event. You know what one of my favorite things is about bird blogging? It’s all of the things I learn about different birds from researching to write posts.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco North America Seals Sanctuary 158

10,000 Birds

SEPTEMBER 8, 2023

An associated issue is that the Belize and Costa Rica guides share many of the same descriptions of species, written by Howell. Similarly, descriptions of species repeated across volumes do not lose their accuracy with each publication. Other species are splits and lumped and have had their names changed. Why are these issues?

Costa Rica 202

Costa Rica Belize El Salvador Birds 202

10,000 Birds

JULY 27, 2013

It was on the island of Trinidad, at the Aripo Agricultural Research Station, where all of these photographs were taken. They are considered a Species of Least Concern by BirdLife International because of their large range and stable population. young male Red-breasted Blackbird Sturnella militaris. female Red-breasted Blackbird.

Blackbirds 166

Blackbirds Trinidad Costa Rica Nicaragua 166

10,000 Birds

MARCH 3, 2020

That’s pretty amazing–Bolivia has more bird species than India! The source of this ranking, BirdLife International, lists Bolivia as currently having 1,439 bird species, including 18 breeding endemics. The guide covers 1,433 species, the number of birds documented at the end of 2014, the cutoff point for the book.

Bolivia 167

Bolivia Birds Brazil Switzerland 167

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 15, 2017

New research in The Auk suggests that small drones may be a good way to count songbirds. In England, there’s a 14-year-old blogger whose life list already includes more than 4,400 bird species. (!! Bad news: The massive Common Murre die-off along the U.S. I know, right?!)

Penguins 100

Penguins Chicago Zoos Game 100

10,000 Birds

JULY 18, 2022

I do not get too many comments on my blog posts, but it seems that whenever I write about jacanas – whether in Africa, Australia, or Asia – there is an unusually high number of reactions (well, maybe one or two rather than the usual zero) from female readers. This is ok as birds do not have teeth anyway). That means that.

Birds 162

Birds South Korea Japan Abandon 162

10,000 Birds

APRIL 12, 2022

So armed with some knowledge from the “ Access Considerations for Birding Locations ” page on the Birdability website and some research, I twice visited the Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge near Portland, Oregon with accessibility in mind. A 5% grade is steeper than I thought, but research suggests that 5% is acceptable.

Portland 182

Portland Oregon Laws Experience 182

10,000 Birds

MAY 10, 2015

Bird blogging in May always gives me the creeps. In its natural old-world range, the House Sparrow offers an interesting identification challenge and has vagrant potential since it is a polytypic species with a highly complex taxonomy. Anyway, this current taxonomic classification has interesting implications to German birders.

Sparrows 208

Sparrows Italy Asia Austria 208

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 18, 2015

Seriously, it is much nicer to blog about a brown bird with a descriptive name than some other bird whose common name references an ancient ornithologist none of us have ever met. This post is about the subspecies rufa from Java, because that’s the only subspecies I’ve seen so far.

Vietnam 158

Vietnam Timor Myanmar Asia 158

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 27, 2015

I’ll leave today’s blog in her capable hands. Like Syngenta’s “Talon,” “Jaguar”s active ingredient is brodifacoum, which has killed mountain lions, bobcats, and house cats, plus all of the species mentioned above. Mr. Riekena, perhaps this blog will fill you in on the concerns some of us have about your products.

Mountain Lions 255

Mountain Lions Rats Rodents Lions 255

10,000 Birds

AUGUST 14, 2013

En route they will be “birding in nearly every country in mainland North and South America,” and, as they say on their excellent blog , “Our journey is about collecting valuable data on bird species, their status and distribution, current conservation issues, and more along the way.

South America 179

South America San Diego Mexico America 179

10,000 Birds

APRIL 30, 2017

Way back in the days when blog posts still got a lot of comments, I wrote a piece on why field guides that arrange species in a more or less strict taxonomic order regularly frustrate me. Taxonomy is constantly changing and so does the order of species in field guides. It was a nightmarish thing to do.

Brunei 149

Brunei 2009 2016 2014 149

10,000 Birds

APRIL 2, 2019

I like observing them, reading about them, grappling with species and subspecies identification, and even—on a good day—talking about sparrow taxonomy. Peterson Reference Guide to Sparrows of North America covers 61 species of the New World sparrow family Passerellidae that breed in Canada, the United States, and northern Mexico.

North America 141

North America Sparrows America United States 141

10,000 Birds

MARCH 19, 2013

They are a commensal species, meaning that they are a wild animal that lives in close association with humans, not as a pet or as a farm animal but more like a parasite, to the extent that it is hard to find them in truely wild settings, and it is hard to find human settlements without them. When a car comes along they fly away.

Killing 189

Killing South Africa Nebraska Collecting 189

10,000 Birds

JULY 16, 2013

The positions of sun and moon don’t change, they can still see features of the landscape and we know some bird species have mental maps of rivers, mountains, and coast lines. The photograph of Cory’s Shearwater is from this blog post. Birds Navigation Olfaction research Sheawater' So maybe that.”

Investigation 187

Investigation 2013 Research Humane 187

10,000 Birds

JANUARY 11, 2013

I was intrigued to read this piece over at the ABA Blog. Or, we had a different way of seeing, depending on how poetic you want to get about it and how much weight you want to put on the mysterious and sometimes necessarily arbitrary nature of the species concept. One the one hand, science is awesome. What’s a birder to think?

Science 171

Science Research Humane Birds 171

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 2, 2018

We saw sparrows–a total of 14 species–and we saw many other great prairie birds, and we often saw them perched on posts. I don’t know much about prairies, but I have discovered that there is more to them than just grass, and that they are home to hundreds of butterfly and bee species and thousands of moth species.

North Dakota 134

North Dakota Birds Sparrows Blackbirds 134

Critter News

JULY 20, 2009

I occasionally read Scienceblog when there is mention of animal research issues. It's a site that, according to its own description, is half reader blogs and half press releases from research institutions. I'm not going into why I do not support animal research. If you oppose it, then I'm preaching to the choir.

Medical Research 100

Medical Research Animal Research Medical Research 100

10,000 Birds

MAY 30, 2011

Our northern winters and highly developed landscape make New York City inhospitable to most species of lizard and it is no surprise that the two species that do occur in the Big Apple have their strongholds in the outer boroughs.* The range of the species extends as far south as Florida and as far west as Mexico and Texas.

New York City 209

New York City New York Reptiles New Jersey 209

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 19, 2015

Not so long ago, there was a question on this blog : which is the most interesting gull in the world? When you count some 40,000 gulls of four species and find the fifth or the sixth species among them, represented by only one individual – that one becomes the most interesting. For the day, at least.

Serbia 166

Serbia Birds Ukraine Europe 166

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 5, 2012

So, to cut things short, there is sickness all around me, and I have thus decided to have my February post whistle to that tune as well and give an update to the mysterious die-off amongst our Eurasian Blackbirds that occurred around my home turf in Heidelberg last summer – blogged about here.

Germany 159

Germany Blackbirds 2006 Denmark 159

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 10, 2011

For me, writing good quizzes has meant working long hard hours, researching, emailing, reading field guides, conferring with master birders around the world. A different coast, many different bird species. Thank you to Corey and Mike for the opportunity to blog with the premier bird bloggers in the world.

2011 152

2011 Portland Oregon New York 152

10,000 Birds

MARCH 4, 2011

Among these white-headed/dark-winged gulls formerly lumped into the genus Larus , there were 18+ recognized species the last time I checked, sharing similarities that make telling them apart for the amateur birdwatcher very difficult. 1998), then the proper name for this species is L. fuscus – should be separated as species.

2011 157

2011 Cyprus Deer Species 157

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 10, 2016

We are facing a plague of poaching that is again decimating the species. A different research says, from 2002 to 2011 the known populations of forest elephants declined by 62%. The way I see it, it is a cruel joke leading towards the extinction of a threatened species. How much time did you need to read this blog?

Elephants 180

Elephants Botswana Zimbabwe Africa 180

10,000 Birds

MAY 6, 2016

Once you eliminate the risque jokes (I know, I know, but it’s a family blog) the Northern Beardless-Tyrannulet might have the most comical name in American birding. How did this itty-bitty bird come to be saddled with a moniker that sounds exactly like a punchline about bird names? Please do not yell at me.

Costa Rica 102

Costa Rica 2014 Family Collecting 102