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Birds of Belize & Birds of Costa Rica: A Field Guide Review Doubleheader

10,000 Birds

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?

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It’s time for a new understanding of tanagers

10,000 Birds

Most of these birds are small, finch-like species with thick, conical bills for cracking seeds or eating insects. Male and female Blue-black Grassquits ( Volatinia jacarina ) in Peru © David J. He goes on to describe how early classifications of the nine-primaried oscines relied on bill shape to determine family boundaries.

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Birds of Bolivia: Field Guide–A Book Review

10,000 Birds

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.

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Peterson Field Guide to Birds of Northern Central America: A Book Review

10,000 Birds

Peterson Field Guide to Birds of Northern Central America covers 827 species, including resident, migratory, and common vagrant birds. The end result is that the whole “biographic” area (NCA plus southern Mexico and northern Nicaragua) is home to 41 endemic bird species.

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The Blackbird that is a Meadowlark – Red-breasted Blackbird in Trinidad

10,000 Birds

In the new world all meadowlarks and blackbirds, along with grackles, cowbirds, orioles, oropendulas, and some others, are members of the family Icteridae , the New World Blackbirds. You can also find Red-breasted Blackbirds in Costa Rica and Panama and south to Peru and Brazil. Blackbirds are blackbirds. Meadowlarks are meadowlarks.

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Why Do Penguins Wear Tuxedos?

10,000 Birds

Artists rendition of Inkayacu paracasensis There are 17 living species of penguins, which make up their own Linnean family (Spheniscidae), which is the only family in the order Sphenisciformes. Penguins are flightless, but some species locomote over long distances on antarctic ice to travel between breeding grounds and the sea.

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Meet Suliformes, one of the newest orders of birds

10,000 Birds

Brown Pelicans , and the northernmost Brown Booby breeding colony on this side of the Pacific. That larger clade is in turn sister to a clade containing the four remaining totipalmate bird families, which do still seem to be related, and which needed a new order name once pelicans were removed.

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