10,000 Birds
NOVEMBER 30, 2011
But there is one kind of tick that I genuinely do enjoy, and as I do more and more birding it becomes harder and harder to get; new families. Getting entirely new families is easy when you start birding. Sometimes you may even lose them, like the aforementioned woodswallows which are probably no longer a family.
10,000 Birds
JUNE 8, 2011
The two endemic species found in Tonga are not found in these islands, and the other species present are also found on more traditional destinations of Fiji and Samoa. The Buff-banded Rail (simply Banded Rail here in New Zealand) is something of a tramp, ranging from the Philippines through New Guinea and Australia to northern New Zealand.
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10,000 Birds
JUNE 12, 2013
The Grey-headed Robin of Australia is not a robin as Americans would know one (thinking, inexplicably, that a thrush is a robin), nor is it a robin as an European would understand it either. Whether the Grey-headed Robin of Australia represents a toehold of a mostly New Guinean species or an endemic, it is still a nice bird.
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 7, 2013
Fantails are a family that, apart from the aberrant Silktail and Pygmy Drongo, are extremely similar in appearance and behaviour. The New Zealand Fantail was once placed with the Grey Fantail of Australia, but are now treated as separate, because of science. The family also reaches into India and as far east as samoa and Fiji.
10,000 Birds
OCTOBER 1, 2014
Couas and koels are both cuckoos, saw-wings are swallows and logrunners are an odd unique thing from Australia who’s only relative is the charmingly named Chowchilla). I’d never heard of them until 2005 when I saw some in the Botanical Gardens of Canberra in Australia. What, exactly, is a pardalote? A Spotted Pardalote !
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 8, 2012
It’s a species that I was able to see and photograph while visiting Australia last Christmas, or at least it would have been, had it ever existed. It is one of the many species that went extinct in New Zealand, only for once it didn’t. But it seems the story wasn’t so clear cut. And, sometimes, New Zealand.
10,000 Birds
SEPTEMBER 7, 2014
Not, as Linneaus thought, an ostrich, nor even, as later scientists concluded, a distant cousin of pigeons deserving of family rank, it was an honest-to-goodness pigeon, deeply embedded within the family Columbidae. The Dodo ( Raphus cucullatus ) — that towering icon of modern anthropogenic extinctions — was a pigeon.
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