December, 2018

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Scaup are the Worst Duck

10,000 Birds

Of all the ducks in the world scaup are the worst. They are unattractive, ubiquitous, and uninteresting. Whether they are Greater Scaup or Lesser Scaup , no one cares. The only way these birds could be less fun is if there were an Intermediate Scaup. And even if such a bird existed and were endangered no one would want to see it. Scaup are so worthless that when you input “I love scaup” into Google you only get four results and three of them are hunting related.

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Semper K9 fundraiser update

4 The Love Of Animals

The fundraiser we were helping with is now over, and we are so excited to report the number!

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Gulls Simplified: A Gull Book Review

10,000 Birds

I’m not a larophile*, but some of my favorite birders are. It’s hard to escape the mystic pull of wanting to excel at gull identification. Even more than warbler, shorebird, and sparrow identification, this is a field that tests our endurance (gull watching is too often done in bitter cold, windy conditions), patience (even getting one good photo can take hours as you try to separate the ‘interesting gull’ from the flock), observational skills (so many plumages!

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It’s Time to Clean Out Your Nest Boxes

10,000 Birds

Birds can be attracted to your home simply by offering food, water and shelter. Trees and shrubs that yield fruit, berries, seeds, nuts and cones will provide food. Birdbaths or pools can be built to supply water, and feeders strategically placed around the yard will furnish supplementary food for the birds when natural sources diminish. Tangles of wild plants and dense undergrowth left to thrive in chosen areas of your property will provide shelter, protection, and natural nesting and roosting

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Webinar & PDF Test

Speaker: Steve Romanco

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House Finches Feeding on Seaside Goldenrod

10,000 Birds

While birding out at the coast of Queens this year I have noticed on several occasions a variety of birds, mostly finches, feeding on the seeds of Seaside Goldenrod ( Solidago sempervirens ), the salt-tolerant, butterfly-sustaining, and absolutely gorgeous coastal aster. Though the flowers are long gone, along with the trademark, bright yellow coloration, they still sustain life through the many seeds still attached to the plant.

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What Was Your First Bird of 2019?

10,000 Birds

It’s 2019! Happy New Year! What was your first bird of the year? Share it, and the story, in the comment section. Hopefully, it was a good one and not a pigeon! The post What Was Your First Bird of 2019? appeared first on 10,000 Birds.

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Ten Highlights from Birding in Costa Rica, 2018

10,000 Birds

The end of another year is nigh. In Costa Rica, we know it by way of windy nights with clear skies, slightly cooler temperatures, and an abundance of festivities featuring carnie rides, prancing horses, and parades. Other reminders of December in Costa Rica are palm trees festooned with Christmas lights, an abundance of annual bird counts, and sightings of winter birds like gulls, ducks, and a scattering of Yellow-rumped Warblers.

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Shifting Baselines and Sneaky Jays

10,000 Birds

If there’s a thing that one might say about Blue Jays , it’s that they don’t do anything quietly. Flashy of look, brash of attitude, and strident of voice, they bomb around announcing every discovery – ripe acorns, sleeping owls, snakes in need of scolding – to the world. But it turns out that’d be wrong, because the range expansion of Blue Jays has been a relatively quiet affair except among those in the ornithological know.

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Serbia self-drive birding tour planning

10,000 Birds

This October, a previously unknown name shined in the eBird alerts in Serbia: Raphael Nussbaumer. He made a whirlwind tour of some of the best birding areas in the country, from the Karajukica Bunari peat bog in the extreme southwest (by the border with Montenegro) all the way to the Slano Kopovo Crane Sanctuary in the northeast. Quite a few rarely visited spots and rarely seen birds landed in our inboxes, which prompted me to ask Raphael more about his tour and how he prepared it without asking

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The Little Big Year – Week 43: Last minute trip to Texas

10,000 Birds

Things had just started to settle down a bit, now that we had parked the RV in Tucson. We were making some new birding friends, learning the local hotspots etc. Well, that’s just not really our style, so at the very last minute, we rented a high gas mileage car, thru a few things in a cooler, and our birding gear and headed for south Texas. I mean really, what 1200 miles (one way) if you might get another 30 birds or so?

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PDF 9.21.23

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The Littel Big Year – Week 45: Wrapping up the Bahamas

10,000 Birds

We have escaped the clutches of the Bahamas, and are finally back “home” in Tucson, Texas. The return home included a total of 5 ½ hours of flight delays, one missed flight, and we subsequently missed the entire town of Charlotte, North Carolina. We did however gain an extra night, at our expense in Miami, Florida, all of which was in the dark, so I could not even run out and put a couple of birds on a Florida State List.

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The Little Big Year – Week 42: Tucson’s Sweetwater Wetlands.

10,000 Birds

Just a few miles northwest of downtown Tucson, the Sweetwater Wetlands is truly a birding gem. This is a water reclamation plant, so the water is not quite as sweet as the name might suggest, but it certainly is a magnet for a lot of bird species. The city of Tucson sends treated water through sediments beneath the recharged basins which then replenishes the local aquifer.

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The Splendor of Birds and National Geographic: a Book Review

10,000 Birds

In the e-era now, print magazines are going the way of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Take a moment, then, to give thanks for the remaining good ones, the primary example being National Geographic. This year, the one now coming to a close, has been “The Year of the Bird,” as declared by National Geographic (as well as the National Audubon Society, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and BirdLife International).

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The Six Good Birds of Christmas

10,000 Birds

2018 is about to end. Checking my annual list, I am where I usually am at this time of year: several species short of 200. And although half of them are within reach, I don’t really have the time to pursue them. Still, this way or another, the year is ending with some glorious species, e.g. a rare Greater Spotted Eagle. Usually only several birds overwinter in Serbia – the biggest count ever was less than 10.

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Birding Kununurra late in the year

10,000 Birds

We have rarely visited Kununurra in November for a camping holiday due to the very hot weather that can also include some severe tropical storms. The last time we spent a significant time there in November was in 1999 on our way to Broome. On that visit we paddled from Lake Argyle back to Kununurra over three days and that was a magnificent experience.

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Marlgu Billabong at the end of the dry season

10,000 Birds

Last month we decided to head north to go camping and birding and top up the 2018 Year List. It is now very hot and dry inland and the temperature does not drop much at night, so you go to bed early and get up early like the animals and birds. We were woken by birds at 4am every day, so we were inside our tent early each night! Whenever we go north we visit Parry’s Lagoon Nature Reserve , but we had never gone there so late in the year before.

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Best Bird of the Weekend (Last of 2018)

10,000 Birds

This past year may have felt like it lasted a grueling decade or more, but 2018 only spanned 52 weeks. As usual, we each had the same 52 weekends to make birding magic happen. Now that the last of our allotted weekends has passed, take stock of your birding year. Did you strive, learn, and enjoy in 2018? How will next year’s birding compare to this one?

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A Partridge Pigeon after too many years!

10,000 Birds

It is always very hard to choose a “best bird of the year” and often I have resorted to several “best birds” We have had a very good year as far as observing Australian birds and have managed to get 456 bird species onto the 2018 year list. Realistically we don’t expect to add any more bird species in the last couple of days of 2018, but never say never!!

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Gabriel PDF Webinar

Speaker: Gabriel Wagner Presenter

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BBOTY – Red-legged Thrush

10,000 Birds

It was around 08.30 on New Year’s morning. Still slightly groggy, I was determined not to miss my first daylight in The Bahamas. With a handful of target birds to choose from, one species was placed clearly at the top of my “wanted” list. A movement between the palm stalks caught my attention and there he was. A Red-legged Thrush. It turned out to be my first bird of the year and when asked to contemplate my Best Bird of the Year , it was the first to spring to mind.

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Champagne and Birds

10,000 Birds

A year ago, we presented a barleywine, a very strong beer, as a stand-in for the traditional Champagne in our New Year’s Eve edition of Birds and Booze. It was a rich and complex beer, perfectly enjoyable as a sipper on a cold December evening, and with a lovely Northern Cardinal on the label – but it wasn’t the customary bubbly I’d hoped to find for the occasion.

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Graduation Birds

10,000 Birds

Graduation ceremonies are quite long, and one weekend in December I attended my 5th such ceremony celebrating my husband’s bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida. Graduation is a time to reflect, celebrate achievement, look towards the future… But there’s also a lot of empty wait time. So, on the morning of his Gainesville commencement ceremony, I amused myself the way any birder would: how many species could I see from the stadium?

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The 2018 Queens County Christmas Bird Count

10,000 Birds

Eight days ago, on Sunday, 16 December, a whole big bunch of intrepid birders headed out across my fine home borough into abysmal conditions to conduct the 2018 Queens County Christmas Bird Count. In the predawn darkness as the wind and rain shook my car, I started getting text messages and emails from individual birders cancelling their participation and sector leaders letting me know about still more cancellations.

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Webinar 5.9.22

Speaker: Steve Romanco

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Best Bird of the Weekend (Fourth of December 2018)

10,000 Birds

The priorities of serious birders stand in stark contrast to those of our less avian-enamored neighbors at most times of year, but never more so than around late December. Others may be rushing around to finish up holiday shopping or to indulge in a little Yuletide cheer. We do that stuff too, but typically in-between participating in Christmas counts and chasing down year list stragglers.

2018 113
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Where Are You Birding This Fourth Weekend of December 2018?

10,000 Birds

While most of the world’s avian interest turns to colly birds, French hens, and partridges in pear trees , some enlightened souls appreciate birds for more than strictly utilitarian reasons. During this season and every other, being a birder is awesome because our gifts keep on giving! Weather permitting, I’ll be rambling out in search of winter ducks or to see if I can fill in any last holes on a terrific 2018 year list.

2018 113
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Bellwoods Brewery: Barn Owl No. 14

10,000 Birds

It’s a sometimes-painful fact of life that some fruits are easier to cope with as food than others. This condition applies to making fermented beverages from fruit as well, no matter whether the fruit in question is to become wine, beer, cider, or mead. Grapes are perhaps the easiest of all: thin-skinned and easily trampled, and harboring only a single, negligible seed within, they offer little resistance to the winemaker in their journey to posterity through fermentation.

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The Little Big Year-Week 44: Off to the islands ‘Mon

10,000 Birds

The crunch is on, and with less than two weeks left in the year, we are trying to squeeze out as many more species as possible. Last week, we quite impulsively jumped in a rental car and drove 2600 miles round trip to south Texas to pick up 34 new species. That was the best possible spot we could find from our Tucson base, and given our badly stressed budget.

Bahamas 113
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Test

Testing

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Peregrine Falcon in Broome

10,000 Birds

On December 7th an odd looking Peregrine Falcon was observed in Broome at the Sports Ova l. In Australia we often observe Peregrine Falcons and they are the subspecies Falco peregrinus macropus. The Australian Peregrine Falcons have a distinct grey hood around their head and neck area, but this new arrival to Broome had quite a different facial pattern.

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All of a quiver

10,000 Birds

www.eBird.org has been my “go to” birding software ever since Corey slapped me for getting hysterical over a Blue-winged Warbler at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston. Having found what I took to be a noteworthy bird, I wanted to publicise it, but was not sure how that might best be accomplished. I contacted Corey, who checked it out on the barchart for the eBird Hotspot and was able to tell me that a Blue-winged Warbler was not as special as I had imagined.

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Where Are You Birding This Third Weekend of December 2018?

10,000 Birds

While this time of year brings different temperatures and conditions across the world, we still all observe mid-December the same way: Christmas Bird Counts. Wherever you engage in this time-honored celebration of citizen science and avian diversity, dress for the weather and have a blast! Corey will be looking to break more records with this year’s Queens Christmas Bird Count.

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A Birder Reads a Scientific Paper

10,000 Birds

In addition to my monthly posts here, I have also written short pieces and feature articles that rely on bird-related scientific literature. My impression is that few birders dive into ornithological and ecological papers, but there’s much to be learned, even if the reading can be tough sledding. This post provides a quick overview of how a birder might approach that task.

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New Production Test

Speaker: cha cha dwyer

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