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Shifting Baselines and Sneaky Jays

10,000 Birds

They just crept west, bit by bit, in a patchwork that included expanded breeding range and wintering territory but not necessarily in the same places or involving the same populations. 1978, for reference, was the year of my birth. But shifting baseline syndrome doesn’t just apply to things that have become diminished.

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National Audubon Society Birds of North America: A Guide Review

10,000 Birds

Pough “with illustrations in color of every species” by Don Eckelberry, Doubleday, 1946. The new series was masterminded by Chanticleer founder Paul Steiner, who was lauded on his death 19 years later for his “brilliant idea of creating bird guides with photographs” and organizing them visually.

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From Today's New York Times

Animal Ethics

And bird watchers across the United States and Canada face the prospect of a quieter, less colorful spring as a combination of climate change, tropical deforestation, mountaintop mining in the Appalachians and other activities destroys key wintering, breeding and stopover habitats. The loss of migration is of more than aesthetic importance.

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What does the Keystone XL Pipeline have to do with Birds?

10,000 Birds

Clicking on the map will take you to an explanation of this important biome, including its climate and its plant and animal species. From the Boreal Forest Fact Sheet : 325 bird species – that’s almost half of all the bird species in North America! This is a map of of the world distribution of the Taiga or Boreal Forest biome.

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The Parakeet of City Streets, the Monk Parakeet

10,000 Birds

There is another area of the Queens County CBC where a team will also likely see Monk Parakeets , Myipsitta monachus , but I am seriously determined to count that bird for my area, Coastal Flushing, a section of northeast Queens, New York, that includes Whitestone, home of one of the loudest invasive bird species in the U.S.

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A Problem with Gulls

10,000 Birds

Among these white-headed/dark-winged gulls formerly lumped into the genus Larus , there were 18+ recognized species the last time I checked, sharing similarities that make telling them apart for the amateur birdwatcher very difficult. 1998), then the proper name for this species is L. fuscus – should be separated as species.

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Petrel Paradise

10,000 Birds

Birders who have been to California might be familiar with the latter two, indeed we would be close to the Poor Knights Islands later in the day, the site of the only breeding colony of Buller’s Shearwaters in the whole world. The final large petrel species is another gadfly petrel, albeit a much larger one than the Cook’s Petrel.