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Emerald Ash Borers vs. Woodpeckers (and Nuthatches)

10,000 Birds

These bark-burrowing beetles, which apparently hitched a ride in cargo shipments from their native Asia, have been starving the ash trees of eastern and midwestern North America to death for a dozen years now. And with no natural predators or resistant trees in their adopted territory, things have been looking pretty grim.

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The Cattle Egret Expansion

10,000 Birds

Other species have certainly expanded their ranges, but never in such a rapid and global scale. For reasons that are not quite clear, this species underwent a massive range expansion. In the east, this species can be found along the east coast of Africa, the Nile Valley,and into parts of the middle east and India and southeast Asia.

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Africa’s Big Five and Little Five

10,000 Birds

Thankfully the days of visiting Africa purely for slaughtering its wildlife have mostly come to a merciful end, and safari operators have adopted the Big Five term to market tours that offer sightings of the fortunate remanants of Africa’s once teeming great herds.

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I and the Bird: What is a Vulture?

10,000 Birds

The smellier the better, particularly as, unusually for birds, many species can boast a robust sense of smell. In any case, our hang-ups with vultures clearly stem from our own issues rather than any inherently bizarre trait of the species themselves. Vultures famously feed on carrion. Dead things. New World Vultures.

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Birding Chongming Island in summer

10,000 Birds

I do not get too many comments on my blog posts, but it seems that whenever I write about jacanas – whether in Africa, Australia, or Asia – there is an unusually high number of reactions (well, maybe one or two rather than the usual zero) from female readers. This is ok as birds do not have teeth anyway).

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Feral Cats Are An Invasive Species in North America (and elsewhere)

10,000 Birds

That was a wild cat, a wild Wildcat, the cat that lives in the wild because that is where it is from and where it belongs, at the southern end of its pan-African range that extended at one time well into Europe and Asia. Also, feral Cats on islands seem to be a serious problem, causing the extirpation of some indigenous species.

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The Domestic Turkey and the First Thanksgiving

10,000 Birds

The very first thing we notice about this large member of the Galliformes is that there is a wild version and a domestic version, and although the two are rather different, they are both given the same species name, Meleagris gallopavo. This is not entirely unknown among domestic animals, but many domesticates have no living wild version.

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