10,000 Birds

MARCH 3, 2016

Today is the United Nations World Wildlife Day, a time to celebrate and raise awareness of the living world around us. Africa: Two more shadows in the spotlight, two of the most endangered carnivores of the sub-Saharan Africa are coming along the road, toward us: African Painted Dogs (Wild Dogs). Humbly, we approach on foot.

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Wildlife Tigers Asia Europe 178

10,000 Birds

APRIL 16, 2013

Mark Kirk and Alisha Belo are doing a southern Africa big year, trying to see 800 species. You can follow along at their blog, The ’800 Challenge’ – Southern Africa. As of the end of March they had already reached a whopping 652 species ! He has reached 462 species so far and is off to the Amazon!

2013 184

2013 New Jersey North Carolina Canada 184

10,000 Birds

SEPTEMBER 6, 2022

This is “the deep cradle of Western ornithology: the birthplace of bird study,” he tells us as he writes about gazing at the 8,000-year old depictions of “flamingos, herons, raptors, avocets and many other species” (p.

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Dissection Birds Research Europe 218

10,000 Birds

JANUARY 10, 2012

The family Picathartidae consists of two very unusual birds; White-necked or Yellow-headed Picathartes , endemic to the Upper Guinea forests of West Africa; and Gray-necked or Red-headed , restricted to Lower Guinea forests of Central Africa. I have only seen this species in the massive and beautiful Korup National Park in Cameroon.

Sierra Leone 267

Sierra Leone Ghana Cameroon Equatorial Guinea 267

10,000 Birds

MARCH 13, 2012

Even in the tropics there are few birds that excel some of our own in elegance and beauty of plumage and we have an unusually large number of species considering the smallness of the area they inhabit. ” (Woodward brothers, “Natal Birds”, 1899) The mighty Drakensberg Mountains run along the western boundary of KwaZulu-Natal province.

Mozambique 186

Mozambique South Africa Africa Collecting 186

10,000 Birds

MAY 8, 2016

We have several of the cuckoo species around the Broome area and all cuckoos are more likely to be heard than seen, but every now and again you get lucky! Pheasant Coucals are also a member of the cuckoo family, but are unique because they do actually raise their own young. At 28-33cm they are one of the larger cuckoos. Pallid Cuckoo.

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United Kingdom Raised 2013 Africa 100

10,000 Birds

JUNE 26, 2013

It all seems like such a charmed life … until you have to fly down to Africa for the winter. There aren’t many solutions proferred—the article is really about consciousness-raising—but it’s well worth a read. You’re in your summer territory, getting frisky and anticipating the pitter-patter of little beaks.

Cambodia 143

Cambodia Slaughter Slaughtered Cyprus 143

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 8, 2011

Paging through a fieldguide, it’s always with a sense of dismay and sadness that I come across reference to an extinct species. Islands, for various reasons, experience more extinctions than continents (with Africa being the only continent not suffering a bird extinction!). This bird was kept in captivity until it died a year later.

Madagascar 237

Madagascar Lemurs 2006 Owls 237

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 24, 2012

Primarily, Lapwings are an Old World family with over 20 species including Australasia’s Masked Lapwing , Asia’s Yellow-wattled Lapwing and the Red-wattled Lapwing of the Middle East. Masked Lapwing Africa is the spiritual home of the Vanellus family, boasting as many as 14 species including the abundant Crowned Lapwing.

Brazil 130

Brazil Protection Family Africa 130

4 The Love Of Animals

MARCH 17, 2011

When zoo keepers saw that the baby was not eating and having trouble gaining weight, they made the decision to hand-raise him. Cheetahs are included on both the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) list of vulnerable species as well as on the US Endangered Species Act list of threatened species.

Jacksonville 100

Jacksonville White Rhinos Zoos Rhinos 100

10,000 Birds

JULY 18, 2013

The group has a worldwide distribution; 28 species living and two additional extinct. Both extinct species were island-dwelling and flightless, suggesting a propensity of the group to disperse over long distances , a characteristic that any birder in late summer is familiar with. Scarlet Ibis , photo by Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela.

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Birds North America Charlotte New Jersey 211

10,000 Birds

APRIL 4, 2013

In the end, it was birding that has taken him from his native Serbia, across the Balkans and Turkey, to the very borders of the Old World: East Anglia and Spain, southern Africa and, in the instance of this epic report, India. The Forest Owlet is an endemic species of this mountain range. Raising and lowering its head, like stretching.

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India Owls Tigers Endangered Species 256

10,000 Birds

JANUARY 15, 2013

Raise global awareness of Peru’s potential as a top-notch birding destination whilst highlighting the need to conserve bird habitat across the country. International teams compete for 6 days and 5 nights with the express purpose of recording the most bird species, by sight or by call, while the clock ticks down.

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Peru 2012 Birds Falcons 224

10,000 Birds

AUGUST 26, 2021

I did that with Peacocks & Picathartes – Reflections on Africa’s birdlife (published by Penguin Random House South Africa ). In case you didn’t know, yes, there is an indigenous peacock living in Africa, the Congo Peafowl. He has authored several other books and many articles, largely on natural history.

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Congo Africa South Africa Kenya 264

4 The Love Of Animals

SEPTEMBER 13, 2011

Nat Geo WILD takes viewers around the world to follow dedicated people working to save Nature’s Miracle Babies – often the last hope for critically vulnerable species. Each animal they raise to adulthood is a step away from extinction, with the ultimate challenge to return them to the wild. Miracle Babies: Baby Pandas.

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Pandas Leopards Gorillas Zoos 100

Critter News

DECEMBER 23, 2008

In some cases, notably in Africa, biodiversity is threatened by military conflict, or by well-armed gangs of poachers. In response to both kinds of scenarios, some have begun to raise the possibility of an "eco-intervention," analogous to humanitarian interventions. Already, some conservation campaigns have taken on martial aspects.

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Central African Republic Protection Sea Turtles Rhinos 100

10,000 Birds

MARCH 19, 2013

They are a commensal species, meaning that they are a wild animal that lives in close association with humans, not as a pet or as a farm animal but more like a parasite, to the extent that it is hard to find them in truely wild settings, and it is hard to find human settlements without them. As you know, a lot of birds are killed in the U.S.

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Killing South Africa Nebraska Collecting 194

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 20, 2011

But still, there is variation in variation and how rapid climate change occurs can matter, as demonstrated in a paper just published in Science: The Influence of Late Quaternary Climate-Change Velocity on Species Endemism. Species diversity drops and the systems become very simple and uninteresting, and probably not very stable.

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Penguins Birds Cooking Fish 198

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 28, 2013

They belong to the same species like those found back in Europe, Sus scrofa – which inhabits a belt stretching from northern Africa and Europe all the way to Indonesia, but a different subspecies, S.s. The next two species are the Southern Grey Shrike and the Tawny Pipit , also characteristic for this habitat type.

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India Birds Eagles Boars 222

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 20, 2012

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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Turkey Columbus Spain Fowl 201

10,000 Birds

JULY 11, 2013

A dusty-red road leads me through Marico bushveld deeper into the 750 square kilometers large wilderness of the Madikwe Game Reserve – the 4th largest reserve in South Africa, home to 350 bird and 66 mammal species, some 4 hours’ drive from Johannesburg. They raise their trunks, sniffing the air. Sniffing us.

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Africa South Africa Elephants Rhinos 190

Animal Ethics

JUNE 7, 2016

This horrible incident has raised some tough questions indeed. It is estimated that due to conflicts with humans, the bushmeat and body parts trade, disease and habitat destruction, large mammals in Africa may be extinct by the end of this century. In my opinion, neither Harambe nor the child should ever have been at the zoo.

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Los Angeles Gorillas Zoos Non Human 40

10,000 Birds

AUGUST 9, 2011

Wood Storks are an exceptionally old species, and its existence predates the last Ice Age, around 15,000 years ago, by tens of thousands of years more. That’s only based on the physical evidence, taking into account more circumstantial stuff, the species is probably even older still.

North America 170

North America Pedigree South Carolina Brazil 170

10,000 Birds

JULY 22, 2014

The majority of wildcats live today in Africa, and virtually none of them have provided the DNA from which supposed histories of domestication have been constructed by researchers. I once knew a guy who kept and raised cats. And I think he was speaking only of our American Kitties not the Wildcat of Africa.

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Feral Cats North America Feral Cats 254

10,000 Birds

JUNE 11, 2013

Geladas are the sole survivors of a once abundant branch of primates that historically foraged across the grasslands of Africa, the Mediterranean and India. A harem system would indicate that the males gather and forcibly retain the affections of their females, as is the case with the savanna baboon species, but not with Geladas.

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Ethiopia Primates Mammals Fur 160

10,000 Birds

MARCH 4, 2011

That is why it is such amazingly awesome news that the British Birdwatching Fair raised £242,000 to help conserve a species that could become the first recorded bird extinction in mainland Africa. Here’s hoping the Liben Lark defies the odds and long graces the grassy plains of Ethiopia!

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Ethiopia 2011 Deer New York 145

4 The Love Of Animals

NOVEMBER 24, 2011

Shark Attack Experiment: LIVE will feature a team of free-divers and conservationists putting their safety on the line to separate myth from reality and dispel negative myths about sharks while raising public awareness about shark species which are being driven to extinction.

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Sharks Experience Experiments South Africa 100

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 4, 2016

The book is produced by WILDGuides, Ltd, the excellent book company responsible for over a dozen photographic guides on Britain’s natural life ranging from dragonflies to plant galls as well as books on Africa, Australia and other areas we all want to visit, and was published this summer by Princeton University Press.

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Ireland Birds Groups Falcons 143

10,000 Birds

JULY 21, 2022

The one bird I did not see here, however, was the Bateleur Eagle … One highlight in the area is the Saddle-billed Stork , likely to be the tallest species in the stork family. The African Spoonbill is one of the six global spoonbill species, and the main African one (there are also some Eurasian Spoonbills in Africa).

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Ostriches Parrots Birds Eggs 147

10,000 Birds

APRIL 5, 2011

By age 2 she could identify over 10 species of birds in our Johannesburg, South Africa, yard by call alone. This book explains how we are all at risk of raising kids with nature deficit disorder. My 8-year old daughter got interested in birds from a VERY early stage. And perhaps 20 others by sight.

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Birds Game Wildlife Family 278

10,000 Birds

JULY 4, 2023

” Writing about owls means writing about roughly 250 species (I counted 245 on the 2022 Clements spreadsheet, but I might have missed a few, and we all know that each classification system is different). These are behaviors that are most likely to vary across species and topics that make for compelling stories.

Owls 209

Owls Science Barn Owls Penguins 209

10,000 Birds

MARCH 18, 2015

They are typically easy places to reach, easy to get about in, safe, and serve as a natural primer for many of the species you’re going to be seeing on a trip. Two of them will be familiar to anyone that has birded in Africa (and possibly further afield), the Egyptian Goose and Helmeted Guineafowl. I don’t know.

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Africa Birds South Africa Mongoose 185

10,000 Birds

SEPTEMBER 6, 2019

If they can spare a glance upward, the busy grape-pickers might also be treated to another portent of the changing seasons in the Iberian skies overhead: the sight of flocks of White Storks ( Ciconia ciconia ) heading south from their summer breeding grounds in Europe to Africa, where they spend the winter on the warm savannas.

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2017 Spain California Condor California 114

4 The Love Of Animals

APRIL 14, 2011

Although this is Busch Gardens’ first cub-and-puppy combo, it is not uncommon in the zoological community for a single cheetah to be raised with a canine companion. Male cheetahs are social and often live together in coalitions,” said Tim Smith, one of Busch Gardens’ animal curators. Only approximately 12,400 cheetahs remain in the wild.

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Puppies White Rhinos Rhinos Endangered Species 100

4 The Love Of Animals

APRIL 20, 2012

Especially it is associated with dogs, which may raise kids of other species and even of scary and dangerous representatives of wildlife! Although, it is not for the first time when inter-species adoption occurs, but every single case is getting more and more exciting – animals can not only be friends, but parents and brothers as well.

Badgers 100

Badgers Tigers Zoos Porcupines 100

10,000 Birds

DECEMBER 20, 2014

processed the entire genomes of 48 bird species and compared nearly 42 million base pairs of DNA (Hackett et al. Now we move on to the Neognathae , which also has two very deep branches that lead to all the other living species of birds. Erich Jarvis discuss key findings. ). were revolutionary for using 32,000 base pairs!) This is why.

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Family Birds Parrots 2014 279

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 6, 2011

Adam will be leading 10,000 Birds readers on an amazing odyssey into Africa starting… now! To the uninitiated, Africa conjures up images of underdevelopment, poverty and hardship. I was fortunate to have been born and raised in Africa, and although I have traveled extensively around the world, it remains my home and in my blood.

Papua New Guinea 218

Papua New Guinea Madagascar Africa Equatorial Guinea 218