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Horrible Hybrids

10,000 Birds

Looks like a scaup of some sort, but it’s not quite right My bird certainly had the peaked crown characteristic of a Lesser Scaup; the feathers on its head looked black at a distance, while closer inspection revealed a purple sheen. Lesser Scaup has only a slight black tip to the beak, while this bird had a clear black band.

Geese 179
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Flights of Passage: a book review

10,000 Birds

A simple, useful world map in outline shows approximate breeding ranges in yellow and wintering ranges in blue, and for some birds, permanent resident ranges in green. Some birds with populations on different breeding grounds move not to the same winter quarter but to far-distant ones – such as the Red-necked Phalarope.

Alaska 197
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How to find the Ural Owl in Serbia

10,000 Birds

The Ural Owl inhabits old and undisturbed boreal forests, in an unbroken belt from Sweden and Finland across Russia to Japan, and is rarely seen to the south, only here and there, in the Carpathians (Slovakia/Ukraine/Romania/eastern Serbia) and Dinaric Alps (Croatia/Bosnia/western Serbia). Two years ago I screamed “UralOwlUralOwlUralOwl!!!”,

Serbia 243
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The Ross Sea – the Last Intact Marine Ecosystem on Earth – and I

10,000 Birds

Right: Robert McCormick, by Stephen Pearce. Unlike Darwin, who was a self-funded gentleman naturalist on board, McCormick was bound to the Beagle by his duties and was furious that a civilian passenger on board had usurped his rightful position as ship’s naturalist. There are 11 species of birds that breed in the Ross Sea region.

Russia 165
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Review: Saving the Spoon-billed Sandpiper

10,000 Birds

With populations plunging dramatically over the last decade, researchers from the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, Birds Russia, and a number of other conservation organizations made the always-controversial call to pluck eggs from the imperiled wild population and establish a captive breeding program as a final hedge against extinction.

Eggs 163
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Godwits are bad ambassadors of conservation

10,000 Birds

Therefore I have decided to right my wrong by providing first and foremost some avian eye candy, and not talk. It breeds in a broad and not quite coherent band from Iceland in the west through central Europe and southern Scandinavia all the way to eastern Russia, wintering in Africa, parts of India, and Southeast Asia to Australia.

Germany 173
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Time and the Tilting Earth*

10,000 Birds

That’s about 400 hundred people in Canada, 2600 in Greenland, 2500 in Svalbrad (Norway), and 700 or so in Russia. It is often quiet and still, but filled with the hustle and bustle of birds trying to cram a breeding season into an abbreviated summer. Those lucky few can lay claim to even more rays than us here.

Norway 146