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Fur and Fangs rather than Feathers and Beaks

10,000 Birds

On my 21-day Kenyan safaris we reckoned to find around 600 species of birds and around 60 mammals, both impressive totals. In 2023 I attempted to keep a year list of mammal encounters: the list barely exceeded 20 species, while it became complicated by seeing bats and voles that I was unable to name specifically.

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Birding Sukau, Sabah, Borneo

10,000 Birds

This is how it looks like: Or at sunset: A species I did not come for from Shanghai is the Black-crowned Night Heron. Its species name graydoni is in honor of Philip Newenham Graydon (1864-1940), a British planter in Sabah. Why that makes Mr. Graydon worthy of having a bird species named after him is a mystery to me.

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Yet Another New Backyard

10,000 Birds

Swifts are aplenty, one is likely to see Gray-rumped , Band-rumped , or Short-tailed Swift hunting insects each morning. One step away from swifts are hummingbirds, and at least 13 species of these winged jewels flutter about from sunrise to sunset. Interesting.

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Grassy Green Space in the Central Valley- Trash Habitat or Prime Real Estate for Oddball Birds?

10,000 Birds

Some call them trash, tours might not visit, but they can host more than the expected and common species. Some such vegetated spots can also attract oddball birds, species that wander to find a home in urban circumstances. Three species of seedeaters sing from the tall grass, one of them being the Yellow-bellied Seedeater.

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Bird Day: A Story of 24 Hours and 24 Avian Lives–A Book Review

10,000 Birds

He has written and co-written over 400 scientific papers on brood parasitism, Common Cuckoos, egg rejection and other nesting behaviors, and fairy wren learning in addition to T he Book of Eggs: A Life-Size Guide to the Eggs of Six Hundred of the World’s Bird Species (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2014).

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Birding in a Hellmouth

10,000 Birds

There were opportunities to go to far flung places like the islands of the Pacific or the coast of Canada or the Yorkshire Dales… Anyway, as I was obsessed by Africa at the time, I leapt at the opportunity to go to Namibia to collect samples of bat DNA for a biogeography project. I think we caught perhaps three bats.

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Just in Time: Kenn Kaufman’s “A Season on the Wind” — a review

10,000 Birds

More than 5,000 bird species in the world make some kind of seasonal movement. As Kaufman shows, however, to birds and bats, they can be death machines. On our North American continent, tens of millions of birds are flying northward on peak spring nights. Example A, perfectly up to date, is the wind turbine.

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