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Tiny Asian bird discovered as sole member of ancient family. Who’s next?

10,000 Birds

Big news about a small bird broke earlier this month when bird researchers from several nations announced that the species formerly known as Spotted Wren-Babbler ( Spelaeornis formosus ) — a tiny, secretive bird of montane forests from the eastern Himalayas to southeast China — is not a Spelaeornis wren-babbler at all.

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Our Favorite Bird Books (and one pair of Binoculars) of 2022

10,000 Birds

Here are ten titles (it could have been more) selected for their uniqueness, excellence in writing and research, and giftability. Lees and Gilroy delineate vagrancy status and trends for every bird family worldwide, highlighting examples, synthesizing research, and framing it all with their own thoughts and conclusions.

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How Birds Evolve: What Science Reveals about Their Origin, Lives, and Diversity: A Book Review by a Non-Science Person

10,000 Birds

He also believes that we are living in an era of incredible scientific research, one in which new genetic technology and findings from diverse scientific disciplines have turned assumptions upside down, opened up new lines of thought, and provided answers, or at least probable answers, to many of our questions about why birds do the things they do.

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The origins of tanagers, warblers, and sparrows are coming into focus

10,000 Birds

The distribution of Old World buntings (and the presence of longspurs and Snow Buntings in the Palearctic) is explained by colonization back across Beringia into Asia. If these four groups are in fact shown to form a monophyletic clade, one option would be to treat them as one family, instead of four, as Don Roberson shows.

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Not enough Woodpeckers

10,000 Birds

The HBW entry for the Downy Woodpecker (Reno, USA) illustrates a common phenomenon – apparently, the more a species is known, the more subjects for further research pop up. T he European Green Woodpecker (Visselhoevede, Germany) is closely related to the Grey-headed Woodpecker, but less demanding in terms of its habitat ( source ).

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The Hidden Qualities of House Sparrows

10,000 Birds

To us on the traditional side of the Atlantic, they’ll always belong to the family Iznogoudae , the birds who want to become warblers instead of the warblers. These subspecies can be divided into two major clades, the domesticus group and the indicus group, with the indicus group occupying south and parts of central Asia.

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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. With all due respect to Maria von Trapp, combating the greatest infestation that U.S.