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Birding Mount Kinabalu, Sabah, Borneo

10,000 Birds

When not climbing, he collected species, and thus a number of birds are named after him. So, like a football stadium named after an insurance company, the broadbill ended up bearing a name celebrating a sponsor. Interestingly, the first description of a nest of Whitehead’s Spiderhunter was only published in 2015.

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What’s in a Name?

10,000 Birds

Collecting birds was clearly a dangerous pastime. Johann Georg Wagner has seven birds named after him, from a chachalaca to a woodpecker, but would he have found more if hadn’t accidentally shot himself while out collecting? Eleonora’s Falcons still breed on Sardinia today. However, most of us still call it a Bewick’s.

Falcons 212
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Foreign Languages on a Birding Trip

10,000 Birds

While tracking brown bears in Greece some time ago, B. stood in a heraldic bear pose, on his hind legs, clawing the air and rrrroaring in his best Bearish. With hand signs, the Greek villager showed one large and two small bears nearby, that much I understood. After a drink, they went to see the bears. And I didn’t see B.

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Birding Shanghai in March 2022

10,000 Birds

A juvenile, if I am correct – and a rather rare bird in Shanghai, this being rather at the southern end of the wintering breeding range. While they will spend the summer here, the Rustic Bunting (listed as Vulnerable) will leave for its breeding grounds in Siberia soon. Not sure about his/her sexual orientation.

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Rarer than Tigers: the Indian Wild Dog

10,000 Birds

Nitin hopes to enlarge his collection of photos of Tigers. These days, the species shares habitats with Tigers, Snow Leopard, Bears, etc. “Deep in the forest, there is a temple of ‘Nag’ or Snake, hence the name of the reserve – Nagzira.” Anyway, it is winter and the snakes should be hibernating.

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The Ross Sea – the Last Intact Marine Ecosystem on Earth – and I

10,000 Birds

You know the captain’s name already: the Ross’s Gull was named after Ross who collected the type specimen in 1823 on Melville Peninsula in the Canadian Arctic. Curiously, in 1831, McCormick was appointed a surgeon on HMS Beagle under the command of Captain FitzRoy and he expected to put together a sizeable natural history collection.

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Review: Saving the Spoon-billed Sandpiper

10,000 Birds

With populations plunging dramatically over the last decade, researchers from the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, Birds Russia, and a number of other conservation organizations made the always-controversial call to pluck eggs from the imperiled wild population and establish a captive breeding program as a final hedge against extinction.

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