January, 2019

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Puerto Rico’s Birds after Hurricane Maria

10,000 Birds

In September of 2017, Puerto Rico was hit by two powerful hurricanes: it was grazed by Irma and then clobbered by Maria, a Category 4 storm that cut a devastating swath across the island. The human and economic consequences were dramatic, and continue to be felt. These hurricanes prompted a personal interest in the impact of hurricanes on birds, so I did some research, which ultimately led to an article in the April 2018 issue of Birding magazine.

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Love Can Be: A Literary Collection About Our Animals

4 The Love Of Animals

When we were offered a chance to read the new book “Love Can Be: A Literary Collection About Our Animals” we couldn’t wait to dive into it.

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The New “Birds of Thailand”

10,000 Birds

Perhaps you don’t know it yet, but with more than 1000 bird species, palm-fringed sandy beaches, developed tourism infrastructure, moderate prices and political stability, Thailand is a country you definitively want to visit. Add to that picture the fact that it offers possibly the best cross-section of Asian habitats and birds available and it becomes a country you need to visit.

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Resolutions for Birding in Costa Rica, 2019

10,000 Birds

Up north, January is that coldest month. I remember it as the one in Niagara where the Arctic would come on down to bring ice for the roads, cold blue for the sky, and, with luck, birds from the north. Looking for Northern Shrikes and redpolls was a test for winter gear and wind chill factors but the birds weren’t going to be there in the hot days of summer.

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Webinar & PDF Test

Speaker: Steve Romanco

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Can I keep it?

10,000 Birds

This week, I have been pondering the value of bird rehabilitators. Let me assure you that I have no doubts about how much they contribute to individual birds and to the ravaged conscience of modern man. A world without bird and/or mammal, fish and reptile rehabilitators would be a very sad one. My pause for thought came when I found a Stygian Owl in a city park in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

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The Little Big Year 2018: Best Birds of the Year!

10,000 Birds

For nearly 10 days now, I have been sorting thru all of the images from 2018. This is a daunting task in any normal year, but this one is a real exception. Over-all there were almost 80,000 photos taken, nearly 50 story’s posted on this website, and 10 countries, all with some amazing birds. In the end, I truly did set out to reduce the number of birds that I feature here from 1302, my years total species, down to 10-12.

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The European Christmas Bird Count

10,000 Birds

I remember studying the map of countries participating in the i nternational mid-winter w aterbird c ensus, where the USA wasn’t marked. How can it be, I asked someone from the Wetlands International, the IWC umbrella organization, only to learn that USA has its own scheme. Oh, and what is that? The Christmas Bird Count was the answer. The IWC census starts from mid-January following the logic that it is the period when the birds have reached their wintering grounds and are rather static, so the

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The Little Big Year-week 46: All this fun comes to an end

10,000 Birds

We have arrived at the end of our little adventure, which has come to be known as “The Little Big Year”. It ended with little fan fare; in fact I did not even go chasing birds on the last two days of 2018, as I am just plain tired. Not of the birds, but the seemingly endless early mornings, rarely sleeping in my own bed, and the pressure, mostly self imposed, to find yet one more bird.

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Endangered and Disappearing Birds of the Midwest by Matt Williams

10,000 Birds

I’m hardly the first person to observe that it’s all too easy to get overwhelmed by bad environmental news, and the title Endangered and Disappearing Birds of the Midwest sounds like a pretty major downer. Yet that is not the overall impression that I came away with while reading this solid and attractive new title from Indiana University Press.

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Maine’s Great Black Hawk – Rescued!

10,000 Birds

A few days before Christmas, I vibrated in the passenger seat of my mother’s car as she turned towards Deering Oaks Park in Portland. The Great Black Hawk – a species with a native range in Mexico to South America – had been spotted in this park for weeks, but not every day. Though I had arrived in Maine nearly a week ago, something kept me from trying for the rare species so far from home.

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PDF 9.21.23

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Amazing Alcids at Shinnecock Inlet

10,000 Birds

When reports of an extremely cooperative Thick-billed Murre at Shinnecock Inlet starting coming in early last week I resigned myself to living vicariously through the photos taken by others. Though I love birding at Shinnecock Inlet , an inlet from the Atlantic Ocean to Shinnecock Bay out in eastern Long Island, I didn’t see how I would find the time to get out there.

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The top-5 birds of 2018

10,000 Birds

What qualifies a bird to be included in the top-5? My first criterion was that I observed it only once during the year 2018. eBird doesn’t offer such an option, so I used the second best: the species was observed in one month only. This version extended the list a bit and it turned out that almost every fourth bird was an one-monther. Somewhat unfairly, the second criterion was that I described the observation at 10,000 Birds.

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Old Crow Distillery Company: Old Crow

10,000 Birds

Well, it’s happened again – my first bird of the year was a crow. This year it was an American Crow ( Corvus brachyrhyncus ), though at home in Albany, New York, it’s just as likely to be – and has been in the past – a Fish Crow ( Corvus ossifragus ). It’s all very inevitable, really. All winter long, large mixed flocks of crows stream over my home on their way from their downtown roosts out to feed in the farm fields outside of the city.

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Best Bird of the Weekend (Last of January 2019)

10,000 Birds

Wait, is January almost over? I’m still saying Happy New Year to people… Corey had an easy choice for his Best Bird of the Weekend. A Snowy Owl will almost always qualify as the best bird someone sees in a weekend and when the owl is nearly entirely white, like the one Corey saw at an undisclosed location in New York on Saturday morning, it easily is the Best Bird of the Weekend.

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CST Sample_VideoTour

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Best Bird of the Weekend (Third of January 2019)

10,000 Birds

No matter where you live, you probably endure extreme weather of some sort or another. But no matter what infernal heat, abyssal chill, or thunderous precipitation blasts a place, birds still endure and often thrive. The wicked cold in my area may have been too much for me, but my local birds seem to be doing just fine. I’ve been chasing a family of Trumpeter Swans from one patch of open water to the next.

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Waterfowl at Baisley Pond Park

10,000 Birds

There are few places in Queens that I like birding in winter more than Baisley Pond Park. When I go to Baisley, which is located in the neighborhood of South Jamaica, I know that I am, at the least, going to see at least ten species of waterfowl, a variety of gulls, some sparrows and other songbirds, and perhaps a raptor or two. When the pond is mostly frozen I can count on the waterfowl being concentrated and if the sun is out I almost always have excellent opportunities for some digiscoping.

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Tufted Duck in Australia

10,000 Birds

The above photo of a Tufted Duck was not taken here in Australia, but in Europe by myself. However, there have been a lot of photos taken of the Tufted Duck that is currently in Australia. It is very disappointing that this Tufted Duck overshot the north of Australia and ended up at the Western Treatment Plant at Werribee, which is 30 kilometres/19 miles west of Melbourne.

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Fat Orange Cat Brew Company: The Raven

10,000 Birds

It’s impossible to pick up a can of The Raven – a chocolate raspberry porter by the Fat Orange Cat Brew Company of East Hampton, Connecticut – and not think of that most famous supernatural poem by Edgar Allan Poe. Perhaps this isn’t the allusion that the brewery had in mind and – truth be told – there’s nothing else about the beer or its packaging to suggest that it is.

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Gabriel PDF Webinar

Speaker: Gabriel Wagner Presenter

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Best Bird of the Weekend (First of 2019)

10,000 Birds

One down, fifty-one more to go in 2019! If your entire birding year depended on the commitment you put forth this past weekend, how excited or appalled would you be? My commitment cannot be questioned after making FOUR separate trips to comb through hundreds of Canada Geese until I finally teased out some smaller Cackling Geese. Things can only get better from here!

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Looking for Waterfowl in Gulf Islands National Seashore

10,000 Birds

After being “officially” closed during the government shutdown, Florida’s Gulf Islands National Seashore didn’t look too worse for wear when my husband and I visited over the weekend. Some sand had drifted over the road, and visitors were climbing the dunes (DON’T DO THAT), but otherwise both the beach and the shoreline along the sound looked relatively calm.

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Garganey in Australia

10,000 Birds

Last week I mentioned the Tufted Duck that had suddenly appeared in Australia and it is not the only vagrant duck to have chosen to reside in Australia at the moment. With so much of the environment in Australia that is inaccessible at any time of year it does beg the question as to how many different bird species do arrive and then leave and never get observed!

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A birder’s guide to surviving Brexit

10,000 Birds

So we had a referendum. It was a simple “Yes” or “No.” That’s were the trouble started. The electorate, unsure of what “Yes” actually meant, returned a non-commital, “Uh-huh.” The term, “Brexit” was coined and we are all now sick to the back teeth of it. This week the British Prime Minister, Mrs Theresa May, put her version of “Yes” to Parliament.

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Webinar 5.9.22

Speaker: Steve Romanco

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Where Are You Birding This Third Weekend of January 2019?

10,000 Birds

Every place on this planet has both its charms and its drawbacks. Some areas are prone to tornadoes, earthquakes, wildfire, or flooding. Some are too congested, while others reside at the very fringes of civilization. And when you live, say, in the Caribbean, you can revel in every day’s warm weather and sunshine as long as your memory for hurricanes is short.

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Pat’s Year List from Costa Rica, 2019

10,000 Birds

A new year begins and last year’s bird list gets archived. It’s a fresh start, a time when we can start counting once again to see how many birds we can find over the next 12 months. To surpass a challenging number of species, the planning, the conniving for major birding should have begun back in the past, in 2018. Forego strategies, do Big Year birding on the wing and you do a year list at your own peril.

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Where Are You Birding This Third Weekend of January 2019?

10,000 Birds

Great swathes of the United States will be buffeted by heavy snow and Arctic cold this weekend. Conditions may vary where you live, but around here, winter is in full effect. Weather and work alike conspire to keep me from birding this weekend. I’ll do my best to prevail! Corey never stops birding, so follow him if you want a clear path through the snow to alcids and other enticing NYC coastal birds.

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Best Bird of the Weekend (Second of January 2019)

10,000 Birds

We’re still driving towards the depths of winter here in New York, but I just noticed that our days are getting longer. Spring migration will be here before you know it, right? Frigid temps and icy conditions couldn’t keep me from chasing down at least one of the Red-Headed Woodpeckers hanging around Durand Eastman Park. Fortunately, I was able to spot one extremely quiet and still bird… I think it was frozen!

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Test

Testing

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Brown Quail in Australia

10,000 Birds

Brown Quail- Coturnix ypsilophera are a species of birds that we do often encounter around Broome, but rarely get a chance to photograph. Brown Quail sometimes just squat in the grass and you would not even know they are in the area. Our most common encounters of Brown Quail are when we accidentally flush them from long dry grass. In these situations the Brown Quail shoots off at high speed and then drops.

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Where Are You Birding This Second Weekend of January 2019?

10,000 Birds

By the second weekend of January, seasonal weather patterns begin to assert themselves. But even if you’re dealing with irregular warmth or frigidity, your birding year may depend on your efforts this weekend. We all tend to leap into the first week of a calendar year, celebrating even the most common species as additions to a fresh year list.

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Clare M’s 2019 Year List

10,000 Birds

Well, another New Year crept up on us once again and once again I will commit to listing on the website! This all started way back in 2012 and several of us continued on in 2013 , 2014 , 2015 , 2016, 2017 and 2018. Just looking at everyone’s lists over the years you can see how varied our birding lives can be. On Christmas Day we did a bird list around Broome and although we also found over one hundred species on both that day and on New Year’s Day the lists were quite differe

2019 113
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Collaborative list – December 2018

10,000 Birds

So what do you want first? The numbers? The accolades? The lifers? December’s collaborative results also summarises the year’s efforts, so this is December 2018 and the rest of 2018 all rolled into one sentence. 9 beats contributed 140 checklists from 8 countries (USA, UK, Australia, Brazil, Bahamas, Costa Rica, India and Serbia) through December which accounted for 829 species, bolstering the year list (comprising checklists from 27 countries), which finished at 2259 from 1861 sh

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New Production Test

Speaker: cha cha dwyer

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