10,000 Birds

JANUARY 22, 2015

As our Gypsy comes to a halt, one Oriental Honey Buzzard is investigating the new arrivals. There’s a Sloth Bear in tall, dry grass, barely 50 metres from us, but all we can see is a dark, shape-shifting shadow that eventually becomes all but invisible. It is a success, despite the heavy burden of poaching and a human-tiger conflict.

Tigers 243

Tigers India Killing 2012 243

10,000 Birds

MARCH 18, 2011

Geophagy, the intentional consumption of soil by vertebrates, has long been documented in a number of bird and mammal species – including wide-spread use by humans – which consume soil to increase absorption of certain minerals not naturally occurring in the local diet. That’s right – birds eating clay.

Peru 255

Peru Parrots 2011 Research Center 255

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.

Solomon Islands 275

Solomon Islands Guinea Mauritius Humane 275