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“The (Big) Year that Flew By: Twelve Months, Six Continents, and the Ultimate Birding Record”

10,000 Birds

The (Big) Year that Flew By: Twelve Months, Six Continents, and the Ultimate Birding Record – which is the book’s full title, or Arjan Dwarshuis’s Big Year, as I prefer to call it shortly, is a highly anticipated and a long awaited travelogue of the author’s 2016 race against time across 40 countries in his attempt to break the world birding record.

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Georgian Raptor Protector Up for “Green Oscar”

10,000 Birds

This year’s awards will be handed out on April 27th, and one of the finalists has devoted himself to saving migrating birds of pray from illegal hunting. Alexander Rukhaia focuses his efforts on the “ Batumi Bottleneck ,” an Important Bird Area along the coast of the Black Sea in the Ajara region of Georgia.

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Pied Imperial Pigeon in the Bahamas

10,000 Birds

Way back in February when I was enjoying a family-and-friends vacation on New Providence in the Bahamas I wisely hired the best – and the only – bird guide on the island, Carolyn Wardle , for half a day to show me around some of the hotspots and help me find endemics and other species I wanted to see.

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COMMENTS ON COLLECTING BIRDS: A Reply

10,000 Birds

The previous set up made sure that you discounted 20 years of working in difficult jungle in remote countries to better understand and conserve rare and interesting species, and gets you ready to treat him like the truly arrogant monster he undoubtedly is. You see, the bird was collected for scientific study. Or how gracefully it flew?

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Purple Swamphen: Supertramp or superspecies?

10,000 Birds

It varies in appearance across its enormous range, and a new genetic study — Dispersal and speciation in purple swamphens (Rallidae: Porphyrio) — bolsters the case that this “supertramp” is actually a superspecies that could be split into six different species. Above: Swamphen in Australia by James Niland).

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Meet Suliformes, one of the newest orders of birds

10,000 Birds

Which, naturally, got me to thinking about the newly erected order Suliformes, a development I mentioned in my December column, 2010′s Top 10 Developments in Bird Taxonomy and Systematics , but which I thought deserved further examination, for it’s one of those stories that defines the era in which we are living and birding.

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Birding crème de la crème: Asia – Corbett to Taman Negara

10,000 Birds

Knowing that there are reserves with long lists of 600 or more species, I set my threshold at more than 600 birds… and found only a few such hotspots. Such places are clearly under-visited, under-birded or eBird isn’t that popular in those parts of the world. Other countries still have to reach the 300 birds threshold.

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