December, 2020

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Laguna del Lagarto: Bird Photography in Costa Rica at its Best

10,000 Birds

Thanks to steadfast advances in optics and digital cameras, bird photography has become quite the popular way to appreciate birds. Unlike the old days of slide film and carefully managed shots, today, with the right equipment, just about anyone can take some pretty fine pictures of the avian kind. The new style doesn’t erase the challenges of bird photography, nor does it delete the importance of learning tricks of the bird photo trade.

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Devastating skin disease covering up to 70% of a dolphin's body tied to climate change

Reddit Animals

submitted by /u/finphil [link] [comments].

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Birding Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, China

10,000 Birds

Menglun in Xishuangbanna is less than 50 km away from the Chinese border to Laos and Myanmar, and it has a big botanical garden. That means it also has many tropical birds that a foreigner living in China can see without risking to leave the country (which would mean 2 weeks of quarantine on reentry at best and complete exclusion at worst, depending on the ever-changing regulations).

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The Birds are All Right

10,000 Birds

It was the month of March, 2017, when I went to Lake Cuitzeo to check up on our migratory waterfowl and shorebirds one last time before they travelled north to breed. But that time, I was shocked to find that about half the birds I had expected were missing — along with half the lake. Lake Cuitzeo is Mexico’s second largest lake, and its uniformly shallow waters make it a powerful magnet for dabbling ducks and shorebirds.

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Webinar & PDF Test

Speaker: Steve Romanco

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Birding without a phone

10,000 Birds

If you are old enough, you will remember birding without a phone? Not too long ago, it was the norm. Then I started to carry a phone just in case my car stopped or something. Later I carried it because of a stash of bird songs I compiled in it. And now I carry it for the same reason, only now they are a part of the bird ID app. Yesterday, I carefully packed my scope and binoculars and left home, only to realise, still in a car park, that I had forgotten the bloody phone and my notebook.

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Birding Carska Bara Reserve in December Fog

10,000 Birds

I don’t know what those so-called meteorologists are doing: they all claim a moderately cold morning, but do not say a word about the fog! Yet, tree branches are covered in hoar frost and the fog is so thick one could cut it with a machete! Of course, I was going – birding, so the view of the fog (certainly not through the fog) has drawn several comments which I will not share here with you… While the Lada 4×4 is bumping along the dirt track (road??

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Best Bird of the Weekend (Third of December 2020)

10,000 Birds

We’ve entered that most wonderful time of the year… that’s right, it’s Christmas Bird Count season! Whether you celebrate with others or observe in spiritual solitude, we hope you have a plan to enjoy holiday cheer the way only birders can. After dipping twice on the errant Black-legged Kittiwake that’s been this week’s bird de jour in Rochester, I’ll designate Red-throated Loon my best of a beautiful but unsurprising bunch of birds.

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Mistletoebird

10,000 Birds

In a year with so much uncertainty around the world we are all lucky that we can still enjoy nature. Maybe you can’t go far from home, but nature will come to you. As Christmas fast approaches I wondered what bird would be appropriate to share with you this year. A few years ago I shared a Little-Bronze-Cuckoo. I have decided to go with Mistletoebird for obvious reasons.

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Best Bird of the Weekend (First of December 2020)

10,000 Birds

The winds of December blow in a dramatic shakeup of birding conditions in most parts of the world, especially the ones with fair odds of a white Christmas. The excitement of those not-likely birds of November has died down, but the new regime of real winter birds in the Northern Hemisphere hasn’t fully asserted itself yet. Which is all to say that not much was going on around here this weekend!

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Nanhui, Shanghai in late autumn

10,000 Birds

November and early December can be a frustrating time here at Nanhui – on the one hand, there are fewer and fewer birds as migration slows down. On the other hand, it seems there is a better chance of getting some strays and really rare birds, such as the Ryukyu Minivet described in my last post. Similarly, the light is either brilliant (when it is sunny), making photography a delight, or it is almost absent.

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PDF 9.21.23

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Our Best Birds of 2020

10,000 Birds

2020 will be remembered as a year that we’d like to forget. COVID-19 was the worst of it but we also endured horrific wildfires, tremendously damaging hurricanes, another year of the worst President of the United States in history, and the list could go on ad infinitum. But despite all of the negatives there were still some positives. In this post, we’ll share the most positive of the positives, at least for those who write for 10,000 Birds who decided to share.

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Thanksgiving at Rancho Naturalista, Costa Rica

10,000 Birds

Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays. In the cold north of November Niagara, needing to spend the day indoors coincided nicely with weather that invariably involved snow. It might not have been the profuse snow of the main winter event but it was enough to grasp with bone-chilling fingers, to freeze the general surroundings. There wasn’t much in the way of birds in the yard, maybe a Cooper’s Hawk winging through from the north, crows calling and House Sparrows chi

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Birding Serbia in the 2020

10,000 Birds

As the year is closing, I am looking back to realise, despite it being such an awful year, it’s far from the worst I had, it doesn’t even come close (it’s the mileage that’s killing me, I guess). Yet, I feel depressive and so tired – and I haven’t even caught Covid yet (but did something else, a friend of mine asked: Are you sure it’s not malaria?).

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One Blustery Morning on a Desert Island

10,000 Birds

As birders, we’re all well aware of our brain whipping our body awake at some ungodly hour, no matter how tightly wrapped in the sheets we may be. Last year, I was on transit via Curaçao – twice on a single round trip. The first time, we booked our flights with a five hour daylight window (during which I had planned to do some serious birding before catching my next flight).

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CST Sample_VideoTour

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Companhia das Lezírias ‘Tyto alba’ Vinhas Protegidas Tinto (2013)

10,000 Birds

I originally reserved this week’s featured wine for a Hallowe’en review that I never got around to writing. The 2013 ‘Tyto alba’ from Companhia das Lezírias is a red wine from Portugal’s Tejo region, and – as you may have guessed from its name – there is in fact a Barn Owl ( Tyto alba ) on the label. To be honest, I was in a last-minute bind trying to find something appropriately spooky for Hallowe’en, some bottle along the lines of the wines or beers with creepy ravens or blackbird s we’ve enjo

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‘Tis the Season: Notable Bird Books (and Booze and Binoculars) of 2020

10,000 Birds

This has been a great year! For bird books, we mean – reference works and field guides, books of essays and reminiscences, novels, and works on birdsong and other specialties. What did you think we were talking about? They make excellent gifts for adult birders and young ones, too. Here are some of our favorites published during 2020, with links to our full reviews (or bookseller site), and the name of the reviewer.

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When Birds Are Near: Dispatches From Contemporary Writers

10,000 Birds

There are owls in New York City. Big owls: Barred Owls on Riverside Drive and down the path from Harlem Meer, a Great Horned Owl in Central Park’s Ramble. They are the city’s latest, maybe only, celebrity media sensation, and photographs show crowds of New Yorkers craning their necks up as far as their masks allow, holding phones at arm’s length, using opera glasses and huge binoculars that remind me of the ones my dad used at the racetrack.

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Of Tree I Sing

10,000 Birds

As anyone who knows quality photography can tell, I am not the sort of birder who tends to stay in one place for long. There are no photographic hides or tripods for me. I am always off to see what the next spot might have to offer, rather than taking the whole day searching for that one perfect shot from a single location. Still, even hyperactive birders occasionally stumble on that one spot that is so birdy you just can’t move on.

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Gabriel PDF Webinar

Speaker: Gabriel Wagner Presenter

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Splitsville

10,000 Birds

I suspect that most non-birders don’t particularly like the word “split”, since the first thing that it brings to mind is perhaps a bad end to a romance, or in the worst case, a divorce. For birders, however, a split can be a decidedly positive thing, producing that serendipitous wonder, the armchair lifer. For, in birder lingo, a split occurs when subspecies are determined to be, in fact, entirely separate species.

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Collaborative list – November 2020

10,000 Birds

Who remembers birding parties? This virus just won’t give up. With some of the beats locked down still, or again, the birding has been patchy. However, 10 beats from 7 countries were able to submit some 127 checklists containing 597 birds from 7 countries (USA, UK, Serbia, China, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago and Costa Rica). Nice distancing. That’s better.

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CBC Shenanigans

10,000 Birds

As I gather the relevant documentation for our upcoming CBC this Sunday I caught myself daydreaming of CBCs past. The very first CBC I attended was eight whole years ago – but I remember it quite vividly. A fact to which my wife will begrudgingly attest, as my memory is excellent when it comes to anything bird-related yet exceptionally poor otherwise.

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De Grey River rest area

10,000 Birds

The De Grey River rest area is a good place to take a break if you are travelling the long journey between the two towns of Broome and Port Hedland in Western Australia. After over 500 kms most people need to at least stretch their legs before they get to Port Hedland. The highway is not the most exciting, but there is also very little traffic and no need to stop along the way.

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Webinar 5.9.22

Speaker: Steve Romanco

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Birding during a tropical low

10,000 Birds

Finally the weather has changed! For months and months we have had to wait patiently for rain. All of the ephemeral lakes have been drying out fast and the land was very dry. The wet season has now started and so far this week it has been perfect. A tropical low was heading towards the coast and it was not likely to turn into a cyclone. Torrential rain without strong winds is perfect.

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A day of clouds and colours

10,000 Birds

Whenever we are able we spend our Christmas Day birding together. If either of us is working then we still do a list each and combine it at the end of the day. It is almost a practice run for New Year’s day when we start a new bird list for the year. However, what we see one week can really vary by the following week depending on the weather and the tides.

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Best Bird of the Weekend (Second of December 2020)

10,000 Birds

The holidays that characterize the last few weeks of the calendar year may designate this time of year the season of giving, but nature usually withholds its avian gifts in December. Without a grand migration or even a deepening of whatever extremes of heat or cold your part of the world endures around now, a birder can usually take a breather in mid-December.

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Fairly Few Feathered Friends, Fairly Fun Photos

10,000 Birds

As I have commented on more than one occasion, I have used this pandemic season as motivation to try out a number of new, less populated birding sites. Several of these sites have turned out to be keepers, and have added significantly to my understanding of my region’s avian species and populations. A few have failed to live up to their promise.

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Test

Testing

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The Numbers Game

10,000 Birds

Should you ever come to bird in central Mexico, and you are only interested in our wonderful endemics, feel free to come in the summer. It’s green, and there are refreshing rains almost every afternoon. Food sources will be abundant, and the endemics will be taking advantage of a relative lack of competition. But if you really want to rack up the numbers on each and every outing, you should definitely come here in the winter.

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Best Bird of the Weekend (Last of 2020)

10,000 Birds

2020 is almost over… finally. Rather than belabor the obvious, I’ll just point out that the global pandemic may have spawned a new wave of birders, but collectively we’ve seen far fewer species of birds. Responsible social distancing has savaged the travel and tourism industries, which means that all of our favorite birding lodges, vendors, and guides have suffered and continue to struggle as we enter 2021.

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Mike Bergin on Nature’s Archive Podcast

10,000 Birds

Some of you know that I’m an active podcaster, churning out two episodes a week on testing, admissions, learning, and education on the Tests and the Rest podcast. But as much as I love hosting, I also enjoy being a podcast guest–especially when the topic is birding! No wonder I was so enthusiastic when Michael Hawk invited me as a guest on his own show, the Nature’s Archive Podcast.

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These ingenious decoys are called InvestEGGators. While they don’t disturb actual sea turtle eggs, a new paper published Monday in Current Biology shows, they’re very effective at frustrating poachers.

Reddit Animals

submitted by /u/microworlds [link] [comments].

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New Production Test

Speaker: cha cha dwyer

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