September, 2014

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The complete guide to Dodo relatives, living and dead

10,000 Birds

'The Dodo ( Raphus cucullatus ) — that towering icon of modern anthropogenic extinctions — was a pigeon. Not, as Linneaus thought, an ostrich, nor even, as later scientists concluded, a distant cousin of pigeons deserving of family rank, it was an honest-to-goodness pigeon, deeply embedded within the family Columbidae. In fact, the Dodo belonged to a clade (sometimes called Raphini) of 15 remarkable, bizarre, intriguing island-adapted pigeons, some of which are still alive today, but

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Simple tips for happy pets. #GetHappyHealthy

4 The Love Of Animals

'While regular vet visits and proper nutrition are the foundation, your pet’s mental well being is just as important! Luckily keeping your pet happy can be a lot of fun for both of you. Today we are talking about the special extras. You know, the little things that can really make a difference. It doesn’t take much to pamper your pet ! Here are our top 3 ways to give your pet the little extras that make a big impact!

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Statistics

Animal Ethics

'This blog had 660 visits during August, which is an average of 21.2 visits per day. A year ago, the average was 27.9.

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How many birds are killed by windmills and other green energy projects?

10,000 Birds

'Nobody knows and I’m not going to pretend to tell you. However, in this post, I’d like to lay out the basic numbers as we pretend to know them about overall bird mortality, human related causes of mortality, and somewhere in there I’ll note that the number of birds that are killed by windmills is so small that it says “zero” on my pie chart.

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Webinar & PDF Test

Speaker: Steve Romanco

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Thought To Be Extinct For 100 Years

10,000 Birds

'The W hite-winged guan ( Penelope albipennis ) was thought to be extinct for 100 years. The Guan had never been seen in the wild after Polish Naturalist Wladyslaw Taczanowski collected one individual in 1876. The story of the White-winged Guan , in some ways resembles the re-discovery of some species thought to be extinct. Nineteenth and early twentieth century naturalists collected birds on long and arduous exploratory expeditions in the New World.

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Frank Gilbert’s Awesome Hospital Cage

10,000 Birds

'One summer my father came to visit from his home in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. He is the handiest of handy guys; he has fixed my lighting, the plumbing, wired my entire house so the flip of a switch would make it come alive with music, and, one Christmas, showed my son how to install a major stereo system in his 1996 Jeep Cherokee (which elevated them both to hero status at the local high school).

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End of the Road Birding in Costa Rica at Luna Lodge

10,000 Birds

'For the birder, roads are an ironic boon. Whether made of asphalt, gravel, or dirt, they help us reach more birding sites in less time. In many places, roads bring us to ever distant nature but the downside is that roads also give access to people who would rather replace forests, wetlands, and grasslands with unsustainable housing and agriculture.

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2014-2015 Winter Finch Forecast

10,000 Birds

'Ron Pittaway has published his winter finch forecast for the winter of 2014-2015. Though Ron is based in Ontario his reports are eagerly anticipated by birders across the northeastern United States and eastern Canada because it takes into account a vast array of data to figure out which irruptive species might show up where. Below is a slightly elided version which removes some of the Ontario-specific information and leaves just the meat of the forecast.

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Bald Eagle Catching and Eating a Blue-winged Teal

10,000 Birds

'Back in January, when I was enjoying my attendance at the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival down in Florida, I had an enchanting encounter with our national bird , the Bald Eagle. The setting was the Viera Wetlands, a marvelous location that uses the ultimate waste product, sewage, and turns its processing into an incredibly rich wetland environment chock full of a variety of birds, an environment that is also greatly appreciated by a host of birders, photographers, and general nature l

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The Parrots of Howard Beach

10,000 Birds

'North of Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Queens is a middle class neighborhood, predominantly Italian-American, known as Howard Beach. Named for William J. Howard, a Brooklynite who owned a goat farm in the area in the 1890s, the neighborhood was essentially founded by Howard’s creation of the Howard Estates Development Company, which dredged and filled enough land on which to build a neighborhood.

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PDF 9.21.23

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Carolina Parakeet: Mystery of the Incas

10,000 Birds

'The 19-teens were not a good time for North American birdlife. Not more than four years following the final breath of the last living Passenger Pigeon , and at the same facility – the Cincinnati Zoo, whose place in ornithological history is morbidly established – the last Carolina Parakeet died. It was called Incas. And with it the existence of the northernmost species of parrot in the world, the only native parrot in the United States whose provenance is not questioned, and a piece

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Birds Are Migrating South. It Must Be Fall!

10,000 Birds

'I spent both mornings this weekend visiting local birding spots in Queens from the coast to the forested parks. I love birding in the fall because of the sheer number of birds that come through after breeding season and because with molting birds and juvenile birds things can sometimes get a bit challenging. And this weekend was a gorgeous weekend to be out looking for birds.

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Which Bird Species Have Gone Extinct in Costa Rica?

10,000 Birds

'When Costa Rica becomes a topic of conversation, we don’t usually hear the word “extinction” being thrown around. You might hear talk about beaches, zip lines, lack of traffic signs (seriously), and volcano visits but extinction? Come on! Must be a joke, right? But how about when the Costa Rica conversation involves a birder? Instead of going on about zip lines and other modern, adventure tourism attractions, the birding crowd talks about taking photos of Resplendent Quetzals

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Birders Should Attend the People’s Climate March

10,000 Birds

'Last week here at 10,000 Birds we did a theme week called “ Extinction Week.” We covered a wide variety of topics but to me the most important was the one that David Ringer covered. His topic was the report recently issued by the Audubon Society where the organization claimed 314 species of birds in the United States and Canada are threatened by climate change. 314!

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CST Sample_VideoTour

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Rehabber Slang Part 2, etc.

10,000 Birds

'There is no excuse for putting a banner photo like this on a renowned birding site. It’s just that when summer is over and most wildlife rehabilitators are fried, this is the kind of thing that will make most of us fall to our knees, choking with laughter, tears spurting from our eyes. It’s sad but true: by September, we’re far beyond the reach of subtle humor.

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Gray Kingbird: An Awesome Parking Lot Bird

10,000 Birds

'Parking lots in Miami-Dade county offer a mostly standard assortment of birds compared to the rest of the United States. We have House Sparrow , Rock Pigeon , and European Starling like almost everyone else along with the usual Ring-billed Gulls that join them in winter. Sure, we also have Common Myna and Boat-tailed Grackle which would be pretty special to most who do not live in Florida.

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Another Great Shorebirding Day at Jamaica Bay

10,000 Birds

'Saturday morning, 30 August 2014, was a perfect time for shorebirding at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge’s East Pond. The high tide was set for late morning so I could take my time getting out there, the sun was going to be out providing enough light for some good digiscoping, and we had a three-day weekend so I could spend more time than usual without really shorting my family.

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A Remembrance of Birds Past: The Lost Bird Project

10,000 Birds

'It stood like a sentinel at the entrance, lonely, waiting. I was running late, and yet I slowed the car down, to catch as much of its cool beauty as I could. What was this solitary stranger greeting me at the edge of the John James Audubon Center in Mill Grove, Pa., the epicenter of U.S. birding? It turned out that I was gazing at a ghost. The smooth mass of bronze (photographed at right by Jordan Mann) was a stylized version of a Great Auk —a bird that no longer exists.

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Gabriel PDF Webinar

Speaker: Gabriel Wagner Presenter

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What makes a good bird guide – your saying

10,000 Birds

'My last blog has created quite a discussion among the readers, mostly from US, but also southern and eastern Africa and Europe (apologies if I forgot some region). They were commenting where they felt most at home – on their favourite FB pages (predominantly American Birding Association). I found those comments insightful and inspiring, valuable experiences and opinions worthy of sharing to a wider audience than the FB groups where they were initially posted.

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Comebackers

10,000 Birds

'If you ask this Great Ornithologist, extinction is an extremely depressing issue. For mankind to snatch away a species’ very existence is wrong on so many levels that I can’t begin to explain them. It is the ultimate expression of ignorance, greed, and rampant anthropocentrism that seemingly drives cultures around the world. However, despite our best efforts to wipe them off the face of the earth, some of the more vulnerable species have managed to hang on.

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Rails: The Once and Future Kings of the Pacific

10,000 Birds

'One of the less well remembered awful things that happened in the Second World War (a six year period of history filled with an uncountable number of awful things) is that war’s direct role in the extinction of two species of rail. On Midway Island, 1944, a damaged landing craft broke free of moorings and drifted to a small islet that held a translocated population of the Laysan Rail (the species had been lost on its native island due to habitat loss some years earlier).

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Whiskered Tern at Cape May

10,000 Birds

'The recent hubbub in the northeastern United States in terms of rare birds has been all about the Whiskered Tern at Cape May, the third record of this species for North America. All three of those records are from Cape May. You can read more about this awesome bird here. All I really need to say is that I got to Cape May, saw the bird, and was happy.

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Webinar 5.9.22

Speaker: Steve Romanco

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Mega Rarity Tour of New Zealand – Extinction Special

10,000 Birds

'I’ve decided to get into the bird tour business. I mean, how hard could it be? Get up early, point at lots of birds, go back to the hotel for celebratory wine. If any birds give trouble just make up an answer, then say it with confidence. It isn’t like the punters will know any better, or care, so long as it counts as a tick. I can’t lose.

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Hey, What About the Great Auk?

10,000 Birds

'So as some folks may have noticed, it seems that the centenniel of the Passenger Pigeon’s extinction is garnering a bit of press. Good, I say. A lot of folks, including this very blog, are using this as an occasion to memorialize not just the Passenger Pigeon but the extinct birds of the Holocene as a group. This got me wondering, what was the centennial of the last Great Auk like?

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Buff-breasted Sandpiper. Finally!

10,000 Birds

'I’ve lived in Queens since March of 2008. Over three hundred species of birds have crossed my field of view in Queens in that time including thirty-eight thirty-nine species of shorebird. Why is that thirty-eight crossed out? Because I finally saw a Buff-breasted Sandpiper in my home borough! Finally! Finally! Finally! Buffies are a very fine shorebird.

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The long and winding road

10,000 Birds

'Birds fascinate us for many reasons. Flight, beauty, the glimpse into the world of dinosaurs, to mention but a few of those reasons. The migration stories of many of those birds is another. Who doesn’t marvel at Arctic Terns flying from one polar region to another, twice, every single year. Or at stories of a bird like Red Knot B95, twenty-one years old and logging miles that could take it to the moon, and half way back.

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Test

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A Brown Booby in Queens

10,000 Birds

'On Friday morning, 29 August, I had the good fortune of being able to work from home. What that meant for me, birding wise, is that I could get out for a few hours in the morning and then get home and get to it on my laptop without having to worry about things like showering, getting dressing, or commuting. And seeing as there were good northwest winds overnight, weather radar had shown lots of birds taking off, and the winds were expected to continue from the north through the morning, I decid

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Where Are You Birding This First Weekend of September 2014?

10,000 Birds

'American fashion dictates that we retire our white shoes and frocks once the sun sets on Labor Day. Most blame snooty millionaires and sloppy September weather for the changes, but we birders know better. Fall migrants are on the wing, which brings the teeming multitudes of avian observers out in force. What’s the connection? Easy… good birders don’t wear white !

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Best Bird of the Weekend (Last of September 2014)

10,000 Birds

'Now that autumn has fallen, my part of the world feels like summer. Hopefully, October offers more of the same! My best birds this weekend were American Goldfinches on purple coneflowers, which is where I like them best. Corey’s Best Bird of the Weekend was a surprise Marsh Wren which popped up out of the reeds while Corey was busy counting Chimney Swifts feeding low over Willow Lake in Queens on Saturday morning.

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The Bank Swallow Is On the List of Common Birds in Steep Decline

10,000 Birds

'The Bank Swallow ( Riparia riparia ) is North America’s smallest swallow. It can be distinguish from the Northern Rough-winged Swallow by its dark breast band and the white of the throat curling up behind its ear. Click on photos for full sized images. The recently released 2014 State of the Birds Report lists the Bank Swallow as one of the common birds in steep decline.

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New Production Test

Speaker: cha cha dwyer

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