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The Pelican is not a New Zealand Bird

10,000 Birds

As 10,000 Birds’ New Zealand beat writer, I sometimes should write about New Zealand birds, but today I thought I’d talk about a bird that people thought was one but almost certainly wasn’t. This is the story of the pelicans of New Zealand. So what were these Australian birds doing in New Zealand?

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Famous Flamingos

10,000 Birds

Back in 2016 one very unexpected bird appeared in the Mexican highlands: an American Flamingo. Ever since then, the two birds would show up during the winter months in the Metropolitan Park, always together. So both birds are assumed by many to be escapees from a zoo or a private collection somewhere. Flamingos !”

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Playing with the Pros

10,000 Birds

Since I go birding every Monday, I decided that perhaps it was a sign, and asked if I could participate. This is more than clear from the data they wish to collect, which emphasizes waterfowl over shorebirds, and seems to completely ignore the other birds that occur around bodies of water. (It

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All Is Not Lost

10,000 Birds

And after visiting these birds regularly for the past ten years, I take their situation very personally. And would those birds still be there, or had they been forced to move on? This lake is often choked with Water Hyacinth, and rarely offers more than American Coots , Pied-billed Grebes , and a collection of Grebes and Herons.

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When Birds Are Near: Dispatches From Contemporary Writers

10,000 Birds

The NYC owls have little to do with the book in front of me except that it too is about birds and people. The 26 essays in When Birds Are Near are all about the real-life and emotional spaces where people overlap with birds. The essays range widely in place, bird, and voice, though the emphasis is on the North American.

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Saving the Drowning Cormorant, or the Kerkini Lake, Greece

10,000 Birds

Common Nightingales were singing, a squadron of Dalmatian Pelicans was in the air and everything was exactly where it should be, including myself. At mid-day, we took a boat tour of the heronries and the pelican islands with Nikos. Dalmatian Pelican © Dusanka Stokovic-Simic. In that count, my wife and I passed for locals.

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What is killing birds at Karla Lake (Greece)?

10,000 Birds

There should be thousands of birds at this time of the year, Dimitris Michalakis from the Karla Lake management authority told me. In the northern section, the water was deep, interspersed by reed-islets, but the only birds were a few Little Egrets and Black-headed Gulls. This year, we had about 65 dead pelicans. Lesser Kestrel.

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