10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 4, 2016

At the snowy Danube riverbank, we are waiting for geese to come to their roost inside the mostly submerged island. It is a January afternoon and several degrees below freezing. In front of us, the river is two miles wide… and it is paved with birds: smaller groups of Greater White-fronted and Greylag Geese , numerous Mute Swans and Mallards , plus Eurasian Teals , Gadwalls , Common Pochards , a few Ferruginous and Tufted Ducks , Common Goldeneyes and several Smews.

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4 The Love Of Animals

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

If you are looking for a cute movie that you can watch with your family The Good Dinosaur is a great choice! Sweet, funny, and with a cute twist on who the “pet” is, the movie is fun for all … Continue reading → The post The Good Dinosaur appeared first on 4 The Love of Animals.

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 2, 2016

This blog had 969 visits during January, which is an average of 31.2 visits per day. A year ago, the average was 30.8.

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10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 2, 2016

It’s time for some short book reviews. Well, short for me. All of these titles deal with birding in specific North American geographic areas: The Atlantic coast, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Two books are part of series I’ve reviewed previously (and you may want to reread those posts for more detailed info), one is a handbook that I’ve been wanting to review for a long time, but thought that a shorter piece would work better than the long ones I always seem to end up doing here.

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Pennsylvania Texas Whales Whaling 166

Speaker: Steve Romanco

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10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 26, 2016

This guest blog was written by Debbie Souza-Pappas, the director and founder of Second Chance Wildlife Rehabilitation in Price, Utah. After we took possession of an injured and weakened Golden Eagle from the vast desert area of eastern Utah, it became clear that the compound fracture of the tibiotarsus was the result of a steel-jaw trap. The trap was not attached but it was obvious this was the cause, and the x-ray confirmed it.

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10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 24, 2016

I’m beginning the process of looking to buy a first home, which as anyone my age or younger can tell you is a pretty frustrating process. House prices which were already starting at high have now progressed past stupidly high and eye-wateringly high and are now at the point where I’m contemplating abandoning civilisation and living in a cave in Siberia.

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10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 22, 2016

Back on Friday, 12 February, I was dismayed when I read the weekly New York City Rare Bird Alert email. You see, someone had reported a Greater White-fronted Goose at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens. Why would a bird like that being reported in Queens dismay me? Well, it was seen on Wednesday, 10 February, and not reported anywhere except to the Rare Bird Alert hotline, where it languished until it was compiled with other reports for the weekly email.

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10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 7, 2016

It has come to my attention that this blog needs more gulls. Of course this is self-evident as you can never have enough gulls on a bird blog, but this blog here is in an especially dire need of more gull posts for the simple reason that I have a few nice pictures of gulls that would make for a few nice posts. I am planning to have this post be the first in a (very) small series on Europe’s “large white-headed gulls” It will of course only be a small series since there arenR

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10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 19, 2016

Sometimes it’s hard to know what to think about science reporting on this vast Internet of ours. When you receive a link to an article in the Daily Mail , for instance, your thoughts do not immediately leap to “my god, a ground-breaking, perhaps even mind-blowing advance in the study of avian tool use!” And when your attempts to follow it up lead back to the coyly-named IFLScience.com , one is inclined to mutter darkly about clickbait and millenials and how you used to have to

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10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

The Vermilion Flycatcher ( Pyrocephalus rubinus ) is usually found near the US – Mexican border but we were fortunate this year to find an adult male in northern California! Click on photos for full sized images. I had reserved the photo blind at Colusa National Wildlife Refuge last weekend and figured I would stop by the Maxwell Cemetery on the way back home to try to find the male Vermilion Flycatcher that had been hanging out there for more than the past week, hoping he was still there

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10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 3, 2016

As I mentioned in passing last week, I’ve just passed nine years since I moved to the Land of the Long White Cloud, Aotearoa, New Zealand. My reasons for doing so were actually bird related, namely a PhD in bird evolution, the less said about the better. But it’s a good excuse to look back, for reasons I’ll elaborate on later. New Zealand is simultaneously birdy and not birdy.

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10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 20, 2016

We watch birds for a number of reasons, but no matter how much a birder may enjoy staring at the primary extensions of small brown birds and discussing the tone and quality of their chip notes, that same birder will breath a happy sigh of relief when confronted with a tanager or two. This big, happy family of Neotropical birds is high on the list of any birder on their way to Ecuador, Brazil, Costa Rica, and other places where literally dozens of glittering tanagers brighten the pages of the fie

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Costa Rica Ecuador Brazil Woodpeckers 105

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 28, 2016

Australian Bustards- Ardeotis australis are one of those birds that you hope to see if you are in the north of Australia and often encounters are accidental as they move quietly through the grass finding food. You are more likely to find them walking than flying and they are the heaviest flying bird in Australia. The average weight of a male bird is 6.3 kilograms whereas the Wedge-tailed Eagle only weighs in at 5.8 kilograms!

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10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 13, 2016

In answer to the oft-asked question, “What is your favourite bird”, I can usually only narrow it down to three families; Rails, Cuckoos and Owls. To that three, I would add a fourth, if only they really existed. Bitterns are birds of fable. Existing photographs are grainy and out of focus. Like all good Bigfoot or Yeti pictures, distance is the key.

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Hunters Owls Family Animal 104

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10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 1, 2016

While I was at the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival in January I spent most of one afternoon taking my time driving around the Viera Wetlands and digiscoping anything that crossed my path. One of the creatures that didn’t so much cross my path as follow it was a Cattle Egret that seemed to think my car was a suitable substitute for cows.

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10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

Colorado is unique in many respects, so it comes as no surprise that its residents went in a different direction when selecting their state bird. Unlike many other official birds, the Lark Bunting is not a year-round resident. Instead, they are summer visitors, moving up to Colorado in the warm months to breed before returning to wintering grounds in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico.

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10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 28, 2016

Erratic weather patterns signal flux. These are the days when birds of one season overlap with those of another. Cherish them! I couldn’t quite turn a runt among Canada Geese at Genessee Valley Park into a Cackling , so my best bird had to be a flyover Sharp-shinned Hawk. Corey’s Best Bird of the Weekend was one of the several Canvasbacks he saw at World’s Fair Marina in Queens.

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2016 New York Geese Canada 101

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 14, 2016

For every state vagrant that shows up at a feeder or in a public park, there seems to be one that turns up in a logistically impossible part of the state. North Carolina is perhaps unfortunate to have a lot of such places. Along our sizeable coastline there are a great many islands that are more or less impossible to reach unless you have a boat and an Off-Road Vehicle on the other side.

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North Carolina Colorado Wounded Groups 101

Speaker: Gabriel Wagner Presenter

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

Many of us picture owls in the sky, silently soaring, or perched atop tree branches or light poles as they sleep or keep an eye out for prey. However, on my first trip to Aruba I scanned the ground for a very special type of small owl, known for its terrestrial antics. The Aruban Burrowing Owl hunts primarily from the ground, hopping and running after lizards, insects, and small mammals.

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Prairie Dogs Tortoises Owls South America 101

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 7, 2016

Sometimes birds just don’t do what you expect! Black-tailed Native-hens are an irruptive species that can show up anywhere, but generally when they do show up there are large numbers of them. You would expect to see them at the ephemeral lakes around Broome some years, but not every year and they are more common in the south of Australia. It came as quite a surprise on January 11th when we pulled up at the Sport’s grounds near the Broome Airport to look at the Eastern Yellow Wagtails

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10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 27, 2016

It was a delightful afternoon. A weak winter sun lit the battlements and a slight breeze ruffled the surface of the water in the moat. “Shall we take a turn arind the grinds Dear?” asked Lady Gannet (she really does talk like that). These are not actually our grounds you understand but, for the price of admission, one can enjoy the splendour of Leeds Castle for a full year.

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Collecting South America Blackbirds Adoptable 100

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 26, 2016

Keep your eyes to the skies… maybe you’ll see a noddy ! Have you denizens of the Northern Hemisphere seen all the winter birds you wanted? Have those of you south of the Equator had your fill of summer residents yet? If not, get to work. Migration may not begin this very weekend, but, before long, birds will be on the wing once more… I’m working way too much this weekend to chase the winter species still missing from my year list, but if something special pops up, I may f

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2016 Birds Species 100

Speaker: Steve Romanco

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 21, 2016

I mentioned last week that we had set off on a journey north to check on the Tawny Frogmouth nest and then we continued north. We actually travelled as far north as Timber Creek in the Northern Territory through some very varied weather due to it being our Wet Season. We passed through Kununurra in both directions, because there is no alternative route when you are sticking to the bitumen due to a flooded landscape.

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2016 Shelters Fish Australia 100

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 17, 2016

The noddies form their own little subgroup within the terns, a small tropical group (how related they are to each other I am unsure) that will be familiar to anyone birding on tropical islands, especially those far from continents. The name of these terns comes from their utter fearlessness on their breeding grounds, which was sadly taken for foolhardiness.

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10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 16, 2016

There is no doubt in my mind that the annual Great Backyard Bird Coun t (GBBC) is the most impressive citizen science endeavor in the world. Run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Audubon, and Canada’s Bird Studies, the GBBC rallies global birders to go out and bird, submitting checklists of their sightings. This year the event was even preceded by an article in the New York Times.

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Florida Pelicans New York Times Birds 100

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 14, 2016

A few weeks ago I told you about our discovery of a Tawny Frogmouth nest near Ellendale Rest Area and we were wondering what became of it. It made sense to go and have a look! It is only 309 kilometres (192 miles) away and it is still another 87 kilometres (54 miles) before we reach our next town going north, which is Fitzroy Crossing. This is a remote part of Australia and distances can soon be covered, though on this journey north on 29th January we did encounter eleven sections of the main h

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Family Australia Shelters Owls 100

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4 The Love Of Animals

FEBRUARY 12, 2016

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4 The Love Of Animals

FEBRUARY 12, 2016

‘Picture Me @ Home’ provides animal shelters with turnkey marketing campaigns to help increase adoptions, community support and donations in February! And just look at how cute these pets are! Who wouldn’t fall in love with them?! Animal shelters need … Continue reading → The post Smooches for Pooches campaigns help shelter pets find true love!

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4 The Love Of Animals

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

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Pets Animal 122

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

One of my favourite walks when I visit my parents in England is the walk out to Hilbre in the Dee Estuary. The island is something of a sometimes island, a collection of rocks with a smattering of houses that is sometimes an island among the sandy expanses of the silted up estuary and sometimes actually an island in the Irish Sea. It sits on the edge of the Wirrall, a peninsula bounded by the Dee Estuary on the south and the Mersey Estuary to the north (of Liverpool fame).

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Geese Seals Shelters Collecting 100

Speaker: cha cha dwyer

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