10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 1, 2019

The first shot of Birders is of a helicopter. It’s an official-looking helicopter, photographed flying in the air at eye level, as if we’re next to it. Then, a long shot looking down of the Rio Grande delta, green and brown, but mostly green, bisected by a continuing, curving brown line. We see a closer shot of the river itself, hawks flying across the span, and then we see that brown line again, close up, a wall of brown panels filling the right side of the screen, continuing into t

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4 The Love Of Animals

OCTOBER 30, 2019

It’s hard to believe the new year is already right around the corner. What better way to ring in 2020 than with one of six unique calendars featuring Australia’s hottest firefighters with rescue cats, dogs, horses, and native animals!

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Horses 2020 Rescue Australia 160

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 12, 2019

Bird migration! In October, it’s what’s happening in Costa Rica. Our big month of bird movements in Costa Rica, the 10th month of the year, is when most of the swallows, Scarlet Tanagers , thrushes, and other species on the South American express push through. Some stop right in front of our place in the urbanized intermontane valley where the majority of Costa Ricans reside.

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 26, 2019

Global Big Day (GBD). This biggest day of eBirding kicked off in earnest a few years ago. The idea was to see how many birds could be collectively identified by folks anywhere and everywhere. Go birding, eBird the results and see what happens! People got on board, lots of people got on board and throughout the world. The tourism ministries of some countries leveraged the day to promote birding tourism, some folks wanted to showcase the avian wealth of their country, others went into full Big Day

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Speaker: Steve Romanco

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 3, 2019

Spoon-billed Sandpiper at Tiaozini, Jiangsu, China. The Spoon-billed Sandpiper is probably the most iconic bird species in China – to the point that some bird guides I know are quite tired of looking for it. And yet, I have now birded China for almost 5 years without ever really trying to see one. That changed one weekend in September when I finally decided to spend a weekend at Tiaozini, mudflats on the Yellow Sea that are well-known for having the Spoon-billed Sandpiper at certain times of the

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 31, 2019

These days, when I have to travel somewhere for business, I try to add a day for birding. Sometimes, this can be surprisingly fruitful, even without leaving the city limits. Despite being crowded, Mumbai is a place worth such an exploration. On a February day this year, I went to three different places there – Bhandup Pumping Station, Borivili NP, and Mahim Nature Park.

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 6, 2019

October oversees a general cooling of the Northern Hemisphere, but the birding tends to heat up in the beginning of the month. Plus, when else can you chase migrants while guzzling pumpkin spice lattes? I enjoyed neither birding nor guzzling lattes during this work-encumbered weekend. At least a few American Goldfinches visited me long enough to pick over the denuded coneflowers in my yard.

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 1, 2019

This past Saturday afternoon I was out on the beach in the Rockaways with my family. We were taking advantage of one of the many warm and sunny days we have enjoyed this fall, looking for cool shells, getting our feet wet in the surf, and just generally enjoying ourselves. Of course, I had my binoculars and camera with me because you never know what might show up on the coast and I was pleased to find a trio of Royal Terns present, an adult accompanied by a young bird and an additional adult who

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 14, 2019

At five-forty-five Sunday morning I started the eBird checklist while perched atop the Battery Harris Platform at Fort Tilden. It was the sixth year in a row of the Queens County Bird Club Big Sit, my favorite event of the year. As always, I was the first to the platform and in the light northwest wind and under a full moon I sipped my coffee and willed birds to make some noise so I could start checking off species.

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 8, 2019

I was poking around my eBird checklists recently and came across one from one of my more intriguing days birding. Like many birders, I’ve had “patches” where I routinely go birding. Patch birding is rewarding because the birds become familiar, as do the changes across the seasons. There is satisfaction in the everyday. But patches can also provide the unexpected.

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 6, 2019

It’s that time of year again! Not only are all of the migratory shorebirds returning to Australia, but also other migratory birds. Channel-billed Cuckoos , Eastern Koels and Dollarbirds all return to Australia around September. They travel down the East coast of Australia and in Broome, Western Australia we observe the arrival of the Dollarbirds first.

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 11, 2019

It’s been almost five years since the last time I blogged about a visit to midtown Manhattan’s Bryant Park. This pocket park is well known by New York City birders as a migrant trap and this fall has been no exception. What finally got me to lug my camera for a before work birding outing this morning was reports of a Prothonotary Warbler yesterday, a bird that was last reported in 2010 in Bryant Park and one which I never mind seeing.

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 13, 2019

Last week during a camping trip to Kununurra we encountered a Radjah Shelduck family in one of the irrigation channels around town. We had added Radjah Shelduck to our 2019 list on August 26th at the Derby Poo Ponds. There had only been one solitary Radjah Shelduck on that occasion. The Radjah Shelduck family last week were swimming in the irrigation channel right against the road and so we could pull over and admire them.

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 4, 2019

Some days just turn out really well. On one gray, drizzly morning this week, I set out to bird my local patch in Albany, New York, and found 56 species in a few hours of aimless, unhurried traipsing. I returned home thinking it had been a rather enjoyable morning of fall birding and – after lunch, gave some thought as to how I might salvage the rest of the day after losing the entire morning to mud, brambles, tangled brush, and waves of migrating fall songbirds.

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Experience

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 11, 2019

Birders know that the pairing of farms and birds represents more than mere bucolic romance – it’s a match borne out of a real avian dependence on these man-made landscapes. For many grassland species, our vast expanses of tilled and plowed fields, orchards and vineyards, pastures and rangeland offer an abundance of convenient food and shelter – and some bolder birds even wander indoors to find these things in our barns and stables.

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 13, 2019

Mid-October birding can be as exciting as you–and wind and weather conditions–allow it to be. Did everything needed for a phenomenal weekend come together for you? Our Little Big Day (only half a day birding… feel free to use the term) turned out a little smaller than Ivy and I had hoped, but we mustered 38 species on a day most migrants seemed to spend getting as far from Rochester as possible.

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 5, 2019

The autumn is upon us. Southbound migrants are passing through in torrents. Are you getting any action? The beats have been ranging far and wide. 62 species have been added to our combined life list, breaking through the next hundred which has been proving very stubborn. However ticks from Argentina, Brazil, China and Mexico have pushed it to 3836. There is also a chance that we will achieve 5,000 complete checklists by month’s end (5000 exactly!).

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2019 China Italy Argentina 120

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 23, 2019

As we march ever closer to the end of 2019, I continue to marvel at the number of birds that pass thru, or reside in this relatively small area. After an extensive year of travel in 2018, I have mainly focused on Pima County and the Tucson area for my birding. The early part of the year found me learning my way around, and meeting some incredible people.

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Speaker: Gabriel Wagner Presenter

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 11, 2019

For many Americans, a three- or four-day weekend–no matter its provenance–arrives at the perfect time to enjoy peak autumn excitement. Fall migration only adds to the festivities. If you’re planning any kind of Big Day or Big Sit , this may be your best chance. My daughter and I are planning to piece together a semi-Big Day on Sunday by hitting all the local hotspots along Lake Ontario.

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 11, 2019

Photo by Mac Stone. Yesterday, Audubon released a report years in the making, entitled, “ Survival by Degrees: 389 Species on the Brink. ” As Communications Director for Audubon Florida, I wanted to both digest their findings and reflect on what their conclusions mean not only as a birder, but as an environmentalist as well. The data and modeling are complex, but the story these numbers tell us simple: Audubon scientists used over 140 million data points to analyze which North Americ

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 9, 2019

Back in November of 2017, I travelled to the tourist town of Puerto Vallarta, on Mexico’s west coast, to sing in a Christian event. (Yes, I sing. You can find my music on YouTube under the name of Pablo Lewis. If you are into that sort of thing, you might enjoy clicking on one of the songs. You will be surprised. I guarantee it.) Puerto Vallarta is a hard 9-hour drive from my home city of Morelia, so I chose to travel by bus.

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 30, 2019

Some of my readers may recall that my wife and I went to Spain a few months ago. That was a work trip, although I still managed to find a few mornings to bird. This month we were able to go to Europe again, for our first real vacation in a few years. So you can bet some more birding was in order. An October trip meant many European birds had already flown south for the winter.

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Speaker: Steve Romanco

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 20, 2019

If the timing of Global Big Day means anything, this weekend saw massive birding excitement all over the world. Obviously, your experience may have diverged from the norm. How did it go for you? Rochester did host a really rare and improbable vagrant this weekend, but I missed it. My consolation prize was a large raft of American Coots. Corey got out birding for awhile on Sunday and while he didn’t find the rarity he was hoping to see he still enjoyed a nice autumn morning in the midst of

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 27, 2019

October birding can either surprise us or confirm our worst suspicions. How many of you ended this weekend feeling optimistic about your next one? I acted in good faith, checking the last known location of our most recent superstar vagrant fruitlessly before making the long drive to our most auspicious lakewatch site. Lousy winds led to a lousy take, but we did happen upon a raft of waterfowl sheltering from rough weather.

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 25, 2019

In our times, it seems foolish to be fearful of birds. It’s an hopeful point of view, perhaps, but I like to think that these days, most people are enlightened enough to consider even the most foreboding flock of vultures circling overhead, or an owl giving a momentarily unnerving call in the dark woods at night, as nothing more than the wonderful living creatures they are, simply going about their natural lives in the wild.*.

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 19, 2019

We are all guilty of concentrating on the exotic and sensational to the exclusion of “trash birds”, but occasionally something mundane, or close to home has the ability to make us catch our breath. It might be the setting. Perhaps it’s the light. Maybe the character of the individual makes it stand out from the rest of its ordinary family.

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 27, 2019

It is always interesting observing the bird-life at Marlgu Billabong in the north of Western Australia. The water levels vary tremendously throughout the year and you cannot always access the area. During the wet season the land is flooded and in coming months it should flood once again. At the beginning of the dry season the water levels are high and the crocodiles are active.

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 17, 2019

October is a good month to see owls in Shanghai, where these birds are rare in most other months. Two species can be seen quite regularly – Northern Boobook and Oriental Scops Owl. Northern Boobooks are mostly found as individuals. They look a bit like cartoon birds, with ridiculously huge yellow eyes. In contrast, Oriental Scops Owls seem to often migrate in slightly larger groups of maybe 10 or so.

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 20, 2019

On our recent trip to Kununurra we travelled our usual route around the township. It is always hot in Kununurra and you can easily observe many of the bird species around town from your air-conditioned vehicle. We always visit the Poo Ponds on the way into town and also go to Ivanhoe’s Crossing. We then go along Research Station Road, Stock Route Road and complete the circuit back into town along Weaber Plains Road.

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10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 18, 2019

Did you know that October Big Day falls this weekend? Did you even know October Big Day was a thing? Apparently, Team eBird decided that May didn’t deserve all the fun. Since birders hardly need an excuse to explore the best of fall migration, you were probably already planning to spend Saturday, October 19 in the field. If you had other plans, here’s your excuse to break them!

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Speaker: cha cha dwyer

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