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Birding Mount Kinabalu, Sabah, Borneo

10,000 Birds

The Borneo-endemic Chestnut-crested Yuhina is a cooperative breeder – the vast majority of breeding pairs (97%) in a study conducted here at Mount Kinabalu had helpers. This laughingthrush seems to have a different taste in color, opting for a pale blue eyering rather than the orange-yellow one of the previous one.

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A Strategic Arms Race Among Birds

10,000 Birds

In the former, a female lays her fertilized egg in the nest of another species, in the hopes that her offspring will be raised by the unwitting hosts. In the latter, three or more adult individuals contribute to the raising of offspring. It turns out that the two strategies may be related.

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Birding Shanghai in October 2022

10,000 Birds

Of course, it is hard to resist looking at a paper titled “Host personality predicts cuckoo egg rejection in Daurian redstarts” Basically, the personality of a female redstart (bold or shy) predicts the responses to parasitic eggs – bold hosts are more likely to reject parasitic eggs.

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Birding Nonggang, Guangxi, China – part 2

10,000 Birds

Rufous-faced Warbler Rufous-capped Babbler Pin-striped Tit-babbler Chestnut-crowned Warbler Puff-throated Bulbuls are cooperative breeders, but somewhat strangely, the number of helpers does not really affect the survival chances of the chicks ( source ).

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Some Ingenuity Can Go a Long Way

10,000 Birds

Among birds the Egyptian Vulture uses rocks to crack Ostrich eggs, the New Caledonian Crow and Woodpecker Finch (one of several Darwin Finches of the Galapagos Islands), uses sticks to extract grubs from inside a branch. This is similar to the fact that all birds, even first time breeders within a species build identical nests.

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What to Do at High Island When the Winds are South

10,000 Birds

I’m sure regular visitors to this area could tell you more about how the winds and tides affect the migrating birds and when the breeders start to nest. The birds are so busy, finding sticks, flying with sticks, fixing nests, tending to eggs in nests, preening feathers, touching bills, feeding chicks, refusing to feed chicks.

Houston 225