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The Collared Finchbill

10,000 Birds

If you are more interested in feather mites than in birds, a paper describing two new species of pteronyssid feather mite species (one of which was collected from Collared Finchbills) may be more attractive to you than this post, despite the lack of photos. So, I guess maybe Shanghai is just too cold for it in winter.

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Birds and Us: A 12,000 Year History from Cave Art to Conservation–A Book Review

10,000 Birds

They may be about bird eggs ( The Most Perfect Thing: The Inside (and Outside) of a Bird’s Egg , 2016), or a 17th-century ornithologist ( Virtuoso by Nature: The Scientific Worlds of Francis Willughby, 2016), or How Bullfinches learn songs from humans ( The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology.

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Angry Birds, What’s Black and White and Hungry All Over, and a Little Something for the Ladies: This Week in Bird News

10,000 Birds

If there’s one common theme to this week’s bird news items, it’s their collective bizarreness: The eagle has landed—on the drone, as France trains birds to take out drones that stray into restricted airspace. Scientists ponder the feasibility of genetically engineering chickens to lay the eggs of endangered bird species.

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Birding Sepilok, Borneo (Part 2)

10,000 Birds

The species is classified as Near Threatened for all the usual depressing reasons – pollution, drainage, hunting, and the collection of eggs and nestlings ( source ). The Wikipedia entry for Pierre Médard Diard ( 1794 – 1863), a French naturalist and explorer, sounds like he was cheated by Sir Raffles.

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Feather Trails: A Journey of Discovery Among Endangered Birds–A Book Review

10,000 Birds

The tiercels (young Peregrines) must deal with Golden Eagles, Ravens, adult Peregrines, and foxes; they must also learn to navigate the skies and make their own kills, luckily these skills appear to be innately learned. Coyotes took carrion from young Condors and then killed the weakest ones. It’s not easy.

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March Miscellania

10,000 Birds

Once upon a time, people and especially children felt free to interact with wild birds in any way that would satisfy their curiousity — watching and learning, yes, but also harassing and chasing, collecting eggs and nests, stealing nestlings as “pets”, and killing birds for amateur taxidermy efforts.

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Some thoughts on scientific collecting

10,000 Birds

What wasn’t publicised at the time, but the scientist later both admitted and owned, is that the kingfisher was then killed and collected for scientific reasons. I’m not going to rehash the arguments for scientific collecting here. The large room the collection was held in was a profoundly weird place.