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15 Australian Birds (Episode 6)

10,000 Birds

According to Tim Low (in “Where Song began”), “so easy were they to breed that by 1859 they cost less to buy in London than in Sydney.” ” Funny how the difficulty of breeding a species can be illustrated in simple monetary terms. Is it offensive to say that Australian Zebra Finches breed like rabbits?

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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). How efficient.

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Birding the Kruger Park (4): Letaba area

10,000 Birds

However, it is kind of sophisticated in that the females lay very individualized eggs in order to be able to detect the added eggs of parasite cuckoo finches. Let’s hope it can find some relatively unfragmented habitat for breeding – studies show that the failure rate of nests is much higher in fragmented habitats.

Zimbabwe 147
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What the Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds: A Book Review

10,000 Birds

Jennifer Ackerman points out in the introduction to What the Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds , that we don’t know much, but that very soon we may know a lot more. What the Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds is a joyous, fascinating read.

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15 Australian Birds (Episode 4)

10,000 Birds

When going to Australia, one of the two birds I wanted to see most was the Tawny Frogmouth. When these birds breed, this can lead to highly cringeworthy announcements, for example from Adelaide Zoo : “We have egg-citing news!” It seems that quite a few zoos keep Tawny Frogmouths. ” ( source ).

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The man who saved species

10,000 Birds

Earlier attempts to spread the risk around had failed, so Don and his team applied science to the problem, spending several months studying the birds in the wild in order to work out how to care for them and to decide what type of habitat to release them into. It worked, and the translocated birds were soon breeding.

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Birding Shanghai in July 2022

10,000 Birds

I have written about the interesting sex life of these jacanas a few times already (short version: female mates with male, lays a bunch of eggs for him to incubate and raise the chicks, leaves him, finds another male, repeat). Apparently, after a male first mates with a female, he throws out the first one or two eggs she lays in their nest.

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