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Birding the Ndumo area, South Africa

10,000 Birds

In three cases of adoption the common factor was that the adopting individual was sexually attracted to one of the real parents of the young. If that isn’t a great basic plot for a soap opera, then what is?

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Birding Tongbiguan, Yunnan (part 2)

10,000 Birds

” But of course, with this slight adaptation, it also works for blog posts and their writers, and allows me to plug another nice song by this underrated artist, before switching to birds. And yes, of course you missed my reference to somebody determining the mitochondrial genome of the species. How many times was it played?”

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Emerald Ash Borers vs. Woodpeckers (and Nuthatches)

10,000 Birds

And with no natural predators or resistant trees in their adopted territory, things have been looking pretty grim. If the course of the invasion runs as predicted, according to Flower and Whelan, then “ash is likely to go the way of elm trees that were largely eradicated from the landscape by Dutch elm disease.” Enter the woodpecker.

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Birding Shanghai in June 2023

10,000 Birds

In the slightly frighteningly named journal “Science of The Total Environment”, there is a paper on organochlorine compounds in Purple Heron eggs nesting in sites located around a chloralkali plant (Ebro River). Summary result: relevant chemicals emitted by the plant can be found in the eggs.

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Birding Chongming Island in summer

10,000 Birds

Of course, on Chongming, the Chinese Pond Heron is very common. Unfortunately, in the science of language, this does not sound particularly raunchy but rather like a rational decision: “A rare species such as the Chinese Pond Heron might choose heterospecific mates rather than abandoning all chances of reproduction.”

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That Awkward Moment With Feral Cats and Family

10,000 Birds

“Why can’t the kittens be adopted,” I asked in her comments section. There times when nature takes its course, but honestly it is the true cycle of life in nature. Against my husband’s warnings that talking about this on Facebook was a bad idea, I forged ahead. “They don’t want to be inside.

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Audubon: America’s Greatest Naturalist and His Voyage of Discovery to Labrador

10,000 Birds

It was also in some ways an emotional quest for Audubon, who was freshly driven to complete his great work in the face of his first intimations, not only of his own mortality, but also of the idea that his beloved adopted continent was not inexhaustible and that its natural riches could be destroyed by constant exploitation.

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