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An Aberrant Laughing Gull with Orange Legs and Bill

10,000 Birds

While at the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival I could not resist making the drive north to Daytona Beach one day to witness the awesome gull fly-in from the dump to the beach. In winter, Laughing Gulls should have black legs and bill and in alternate, or breeding plumage, those parts, while staying dark, get a nice deep red color.

Florida 202
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Peterson Field Guide to Birds of Northern Central America: A Book Review

10,000 Birds

The map template shows the political boundaries of each country, and are color and shape coded to show permanent residents, nonbreeding visitors, breeding visitors, transients, vagrants, breeding colonies, local wintering sites, locally resident year-round sites, and suspected sites.

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Birds of Central America: A Field Guide Review

10,000 Birds

Birds of Central America: Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rican, and Panama , just published in October, is a field guide that was ten years in the making. Of the native breeding species, 112 are endemic or “very nearly endemic.” (Can It’s unique in two major ways. Skutch (Cornell Univ. by Robert S.

America 214
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Best Bird of the Year 2014

10,000 Birds

I got to see a beautiful female and owlet on a trip to a secret nest location near Howard Prairie Lake (human-made nest structures have enhanced local breeding for these huge owls whose nest success is boosted to 83% on artificial platforms vs. 66% at natural sites). My heart was beating so fast and I was giddy with laughter.

2014 197
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Best Bird of the Year 2012

10,000 Birds

This bird spent the 2011-2012 winter at Colusa National Wildlife Refuge in northern California, migrated someplace exotic and distant in February, and returned to the same pond at the beginning of this month. Secretive, silent and undetectable outside of its breeding season, found only in the U.S.

2012 155