June, 2011

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Falconry – Bloodsport or Alternative Form of Birding?

10,000 Birds

I’ve recently returned from a filming trip in Arizona where I have been working on a production for National Geographic on Harris’s (Harris) Hawks. During the filming of this production, I got to experience “dirt hawking&#. Dirt hawking is a form of falconry that involves hunting rabbits and other small game with Harris Hawks (other hawk species also qualify).

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Critter News

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“I Touched a…”

4 The Love Of Animals

“I Touched a…&# is a fun way to make memories with children! As they meet new animals you can easily record the experience, including a place for a photo, and more importantly, how the animal felt to the child. Coming in contact with animals can foster a love for them that will last a lifetime. On the New Animal Friends website there are tips on how to approach animals safely (very important, especially for kids), in addition to information on how you can order this special scrapbook

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Roger Scruton on the Duty to Eat Meat

Animal Ethics

A great number of animals owe their lives to our intention to eat them. And their lives are (or can easily be made to be) comfortable and satisfying in the way that few lives led in the wild could possibly be. If we value animal life and animal comfort, therefore, we should endorse our carnivorous habits, provided it really is life , and not living death, on which those habits feed.

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Webinar & PDF Test

Speaker: Steve Romanco

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Are Birds Really Dinosaurs?

10,000 Birds

Most of the time when we think of birds, we think of the things that make them birds, and not the things that make them dinosaurs. But that is because we often have the relationship between dinosaurs and birds reversed in our little primate minds; Much of what is bird-like is not exclusive to birds, but rather, to a larger group of dinosaurs. Birds have taken these particular traits in novel directions, but these traits existed independently of all the birdiness we usually attribute to our feath

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How To Help A Baby Bird

10,000 Birds

It’s a common call/email/text that most bird watchers get this time of year: “HELP! I just saved a baby bird! What do I do? What do I feed it?&# My typical answer is, “Put it back where you found it because you most likely found a fledgling learning to fly and it needs to be back in the wild to finish flight school,&# which I find to be a very unpopular answer.

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What Do Nesting Birds Do With All That Poop?

10,000 Birds

I don’t know how many of you ever raised chickens but the old joke went something like this. Question: “Hey, do you know what that white stuff is on the top of the chicken shit?&# Answer: “Nope.&# Reply: “That’s chicken shit too!&# Well, as it turns out, it’s really uric acid (the white part of the poop). The dark part is undigested feces.

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What is Bird Poop?

10,000 Birds

In this post, I shall elaborate on what bird poop is. I’ll stick to the basics and keep it simple, because all I know are the simple basics. However, I will still include typical scientific poop slang, words like excretion, defecation, feces and the like. So here’s a fair warning: if this isn’t your thing … heck, this is poop week.

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The Wearing of the Bins

10,000 Birds

I’ve been to a lot of birding festivals—sometimes as a speaker, sometimes as a trip leader, and sometimes just because I love going to birding festivals. Last weekend I was in North Dakota attending The Potholes & Prairie Birding Festival in Carrington, ND. If you’ve never been to the potholes region of the Great Plains, you need to get it on your birding bucket list now.

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Finicky Finches

10,000 Birds

Have you had trouble keeping finches at your feeder? If so, you’re not alone, it’s a common bird feeding question. American Goldfinches are one of the prettiest reasons to keep your feeders full in the summer. It seems that goldfinches are so pretty they know they can afford to be a bit more finicky than other birds. But by following a few of rules of thumb, you can keep finches around and keep them satisfied: 1.

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PDF 9.21.23

this is a test

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How Do You Spell “Shitepoke?”

10,000 Birds

This is all you usually see of a shitepoke. They’re shy. My father had stories he’d tell, time and time again, and one of them was from his one-room schoolhouse when he was a farm boy in Iowa. The teacher asked the kids to make a list of all the birds they knew, and they were busy scratching away with their pencils when one boy raised his hand and asked, “Ma’am, how do you spell “shitepoke?

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Hooded Crow in Staten Island, New York

10,000 Birds

When I first saw the post on the New York State listserv about the Hooded Crow on Staten Island I wasn’t going to twitch it. Why? It had to be an escaped bird or at least one that didn’t make it to the southernmost borough in New York City under its own power but by riding a boat.* After all, Hooded Crows are a bird of eastern and northern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East and are not known as long distance migrants.

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Hunting the Mountain Witch

10,000 Birds

Besides my 3rd grade teacher, I had never encountered a witch before. That is until a recent Nikon’s BATV film trip to Jamaica revealed a unique avian femme fatale, the Crested Quail-dove -- also known colloquially as the mountain witch. Widely regarded as the toughest of the 28 Jamaican endemic birds to find, this charismatic dove is somewhat of an enigma.

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Buller’s Albatrosses

10,000 Birds

It’s winter down here for sure now, and winter in Kaikoura , on the coast of South Island north of Christchurch, means one thing, albatrosses! This time a few years ago I attended an ornithological conference in Kaikoura, and the day afterwards we went out to see the many seabirds that come in close to the shore there. I took a lot of photos but today I’ll just be sharing the ones of the Buller’s Albatross , Thalassarche bulleri , known here as the Buller’s Mollymawk.

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CST Sample_VideoTour

Navigated 360° tours, like YourVRTours, advance pipelines by engaging clients further along the sales funnel. These immersive experiences provide comprehensive property insights, increasing buyer intent and readiness. By embracing navigated tours, agents can optimize property exposure, better qualify leads, and streamline the sales process. Stay ahead in the ever-evolving real estate landscape with innovative technology that elevates buyer journeys and progresses pipelines more effectively.

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Poop From The Front End Of The Bird

10,000 Birds

Birds evacuate waste in many ways. It doesn’t all go out the rear end, some of it comes through the front end and these are known as pellets. It’s not fecal material, but parts that are not digestible like fur, bones and the exoskeletons of insects. Birds will barf them back up out of their mouths. They’ve got it coming and going!

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How to Start Bird Watching So That You Keep Bird Watching

10,000 Birds

Back in 2006, Problogger Darren Rowse proposed a fun Group Writing Project challenging bloggers to put together a good “How To&# post. Up to that point, I’d offered Great Reasons to Become A Bird Watcher in an effort to encourage the uninitiated to try bird watching. The next logical step was to explain the right way to get started. So I did… When you’re offering reasons to pursue a particular course of action, more is often better.

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My Loo List

10,000 Birds

Mark Carter is an independent professional birding guide and wildlife surveyor living in Alice Springs, Central Australia. Originally from Scotland, Mark has lived and worked in continental Europe and North Africa before settling in Australia’s “Red Centre&# to work for the Northern Territory Parks Service. In 2008 Mark founded the annual Red Centre Bird Week and Twitchathon which occurs each September/October in Alice Springs.

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POOP WARS

10,000 Birds

The next time a bird poops on your car, think carefully before you act. Consider who the rightful owner of this rich resource might be and weigh the consequences of hasty action. Now a car manufacturer might suggest that you remove the caustic substance immediately with a soft cloth, but are they really the right people to be giving advice on such a sensitive issue?

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Gabriel PDF Webinar

Speaker: Gabriel Wagner Presenter

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Protecting the Hyacinth Macaw and the Cerrado

10,000 Birds

Who doesn’t love a macaw? Big, bold, beautiful parrots full of character and charm, macaws make us long for some of the world’s wildest places and assure us that, as long as they fly free, those magical wild places are still intact. One of the most majestic macaws is the Hyacinth Macaw ( Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus ), a brilliant blue South American bird that weighs in as the largest flying parrot in the world.

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Enlightenment through bird poop

10,000 Birds

or, How bird poop can get you a degree in Homeopathy. As a teenager, my uncle bought me a t-shirt with a bird poop ID system printed on the front. 20 bird poop splats and their respective names. Essentially a quick-guide to bird poop identification. Amazing what you find at flea markets. Anyhow, whenever I wore the shirt, I was always greeted with people pointing and laughing.

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Review of Feathers

10,000 Birds

Feathers are the unique ingredient when it comes to birds. Platypus have bills, bats and bugs can fly, and reptiles lay eggs, but only birds have feathers. Despite feathers being such a large and essential aspect of birdness I did not know much about them, at least until I read Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle , the fascinating new book by Thor Hansen.

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Poop Week on 10,000 Birds

10,000 Birds

As the children’s book says, everyone poops. People poop. Birds poop. People who look at birds poop – sometimes from the excitement of looking at a bird, or so I have been told. Pooping is a simple fact of life and we here at 10,000 Birds are not going to let any topic – no matter how smelly – that touches upon the world of birding go uncovered.

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Webinar 5.9.22

Speaker: Steve Romanco

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Behold the Blue-footed Booby

10,000 Birds

The order Suliformes holds a lot of special birds from anhingas and darters to cormorants and shags as well as frigatebirds, pelicans, and tropicbirds. But the sleekest of the sulids may be found in the family Sulidae. Gannets and boobies are pulchritudinous plunge divers possessed of long wings, conical bills, and totipalmate (all four toes are webbed), sometimes garishly colored feet.

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Black-crowned Night-Heron Eating a Fish

10,000 Birds

It is not every day that one gets to explore Central Park with a friend, birder, and first-time visitor to the Big Apple. It is even more odd to be birding Central Park in June, when migration has essentially wrapped up and all that is left are breeders and stragglers. But that is what I did yesterday morning because Nate was in town, I had some time available, and we are birders!

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Black-headed Gull

10,000 Birds

The Black-headed Gull , Larus ridibunus, is similar in many ways to Bonaparte’s Gull , Larus philadelphia of North America. They are both small “black-headed&# gulls which take two years to reach maturity and retain their black, immature tail bar through their first winter and summer. The white wedge on the leading edge of the outer wing is another shared feature.

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Photos from the Auto Loop at Brigantine

10,000 Birds

Despite my manic work schedule of late my positioning in southern New Jersey does lend itself to an occasional, if brief, birding outing when the stars align properly and I am near a birdy spot when I suddenly find myself with a free hour or so. A couple of times I have had this happen near the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, universally known to birders as Brigantine or “The Brig&# and took advantage of the time I had to take a spin around the auto loop.

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Test

Testing

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Yellow-headed Blackbirds: Conspicuous Wetland Breeders

10,000 Birds

Yellow-headed Blackbirds ( Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus ) are robin-sized blackbirds found in prairie and mountain meadow wetlands of the western and central United States and Canada. They are conspicuous not only because of the male’s bright yellow head and breast and their highly social behavior, but they produce some pretty strange calls as well.

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What Is This Tern Doing?

10,000 Birds

On a recent all-too-brief visit to that Mecca of birding in my home borough I was doing my best to get some good flight shots of the Forster’s Terns , Common Terns , and Least Terns that were frequenting both the West Pond and the bay across the trail. I didn’t get much that was usable, but I did get one shot that really confuses me. Until I got home and uploaded my images to a computer I had no idea I had captured such an odd image and since then I have stared at it and pondered w

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Birds to be Removed from Florida Endangered Species List

10,000 Birds

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission will be meeting on Wednesday and will be voting on the removal of sixteen species from the state’s endangered species list , including four birds – Snowy Egret , Brown Pelican , Limpkin , and White Ibis. There is not much controversy around the delisting of the four birds, all of which have recovered substantially from their population nadirs.

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Surfing Geese

10,000 Birds

It is unclear how or why this happened and it might be a sign of the apocalypse, but mere days after Jochen’s post about surfing grebes a video of surfing geese has surfaced on the interwebs. Weird. And those geese are alright, right? I mean, it doesn’t seem like they would choose to be surfing… a.

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New Production Test

Speaker: cha cha dwyer

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