10,000 Birds
AUGUST 28, 2012
Birds have captivated us for time eternal, not only because of their ability to fly, but also because of the color they add to our lives. Ok, let me be clear that I’m not suggesting that ALL birds are colorful. Birds like Plain Chachalacas and Grey Catbirds hardly evoke images of stunning beauty. But a vast number of species DO exhibit dazzling displays of color.
Critter News
AUGUST 31, 2012
From the Telegraph. State-financed broadcaster RTVE said it would screen a bullfight from the city of Valladolid on September 5, overturning a ban imposed under the previous socialist government. In 2006, guidelines prohibited the showing of live bullfights because the "violent images" were unsuitable to be broadcast between 6 and 8 pm, during hours when children were most likely to be watching.
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4 The Love Of Animals
AUGUST 30, 2012
While at BlogPaws we saw an adorable company that offered custom dog breed art prints in a variety of styles and colors. We knew that we wanted to get our hands on one of our sweet Maltese, so we were thrilled when they offered to send us one for a review feature here! We could not be happier! We went with the 11×14 size, but you can also get prints in 8×10.
Animal Ethics
AUGUST 24, 2012
With regard to wild animals, the general policy recommended by the rights view is: let them be! Since this will require increased human intervention in human practices that threaten rare or endangered species (e.g., halting the destruction of natural habitat and closer surveillance of poaching, with much stiffer fines and longer prison sentences), the rights view sanctions this intervention, assuming that those humans involved are treated with the respect they are due.
Speaker: Steve Romanco
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10,000 Birds
AUGUST 25, 2012
The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago may share equal billing in the dichotomous nation’s name, but Trinidad boasts the lion’s share of the land mass, population, and hummingbirds. My focus during my June 2012 visit was obviously on the hummingbirds. Visitors to Trinidad can scarcely help encountering stunning hummers just about everywhere.
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 23, 2012
Some of us around here ( some more than others) wear our love for Green Herons on our proverbial sleeves. But how could you not love these birds with their distinctive chestnut and pine plumage, their ribald nickname , their groovy necks ? But you shouldn’t just admire Butorides virescens for its beauty: this bird is smart! Researchers have documented Green Herons employing a variety of baits to lure prey within reach of that serpentine neck.
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10,000 Birds
AUGUST 27, 2012
In southern Berlin there is a massive old decommissioned airport that has been turned into a park. Templehofer Feld, now generally called Templehof Park or just plain Templehof, has pretty decent habitat for open country birds, considering that it is huge, flat, and gradually returning to nature. Sure, the old runways and service roads are still there but the areas between them are not mowed very often, some of the paved areas have been allowed to go completely wild, and nature, as always, finds
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 28, 2012
1. Report the rare birds you see, including known “continuing” rarities. This is a no-brainer. 2. Sometimes, report the rare birds you DON’T see. This could be very helpful to those debating a chase trip. 3.Quit being so anal retentive. Birders have the capacity to be bafflingly anal (its all part of the nerd persona I guess), but this is evident online more than anyplace else.
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 18, 2012
If your diet usually consists of dry seeds, imagine how luscious and shlurpy a long strand of algae must feel. These little Lonchura finches were sucking it up like spaghetti after plucking it from a small puddle in a Hong Kong wood recently. I had never noticed them do this before and until now, had assumed that they were exclusively granivorous. To find out if this was normal behaviour, I made a search on the internet.
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 6, 2012
“Peek!” Plunk. “Peek!” Plop. “Peek!” Plip. These were the sounds I heard as I walked around a small pond in Amherst, Massachusetts last week, looking for dragonflies, listening for birds. The “peeks” were loud and high-pitched. I knew the plunks, plops and plips were the sounds of frogs, green and black, jumping into the water, so camouflaged, it looked as if the grass and mud were in action.
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 9, 2012
John Mark Simmons, the co-founder of Two Birders and Binoculars , has enjoyed birding all his life and has won various birding competitions. John Mark also has an interest in the intersection of ornithology and aberration, as we learn in his first guest post on 10,000 Birds… Beak deformities have baffled scientists for a number of years. They come in many forms: nuthatches with extremely long bills, thrashers with oddly curved bills, and chickadees with many different shapes and sizes of
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 11, 2012
This elusive, night-feeding, endemic bird of the Galapagos Islands is not easy to see. I have only seen it a couple of times; once flying above the city lights of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, and once flying early morning past La Loberia Beach going away from Puerto Baquerizo Moreno. This all changed on my last trip when, upon request of my clients, I organized a half day boat trip to Punta Pitt.
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 14, 2012
When I read somewhere that Pygmy Geese were not actually geese at all I started doing some research. I discovered that there are actually a fair number of ducks and other waterfowl that are wrongly called geese. True geese belong to the tribe or sub-family Anserini within the larger family Anatidae that encompasses ducks, geese and swans. Members of the Anserini tribe include the genera Anser (Grey Geese), Chen (White Geese) and Branta (Black Geese).
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 29, 2012
Rufous Hummingbirds ( Selasphorus rufus ) breed farther North than any other North American hummingbird and have the longest migration route of all U.S. hummers. Their spring migration brings the majority of them through Northern California in April when these photos of the male Rufous Hummingbird were taken. Click on photos for full sized images. They appear again in my yard in August, on their way back to Mexico where most of them spend their winters.
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10,000 Birds
AUGUST 31, 2012
Tonight’s full moon is something special. It is a blue moon! No, don’t go rushing to outer space in the hope of getting bleu cheese – not only is the moon not made of cheese but it isn’t actually going to turn blue either. The term “blue moon” refers to the second full moon of a month, something that happens only every two or three years (to be exact, seven out of every nineteen years).
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 16, 2012
We humans often understand things by exploring their relationships. Ourselves, for instance; just consider how many sweet or gritty stories you’ve seen about Olympic athletes’ family backgrounds over the last few weeks. Well, the American Birding Association’s Bird of the Year — the Evening Grosbeak – deserves no less. We’re going to look at its family tree today, at where it fits in the grand avian assemblage, at what makes it at once unique yet not so alone
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 12, 2012
After 28 days of sharing the duty of sitting on three eggs we finally had the arrival of our first Pied Oystercatcher chicks for 2012 on Friday August 3rd. It is unusual for three eggs to be laid here in Broome and many eggs do not even hatch due to predation each season. It is at the same time of year that the migratory shorebirds that spend part of each year in Broome are also breeding, but in the Arctic.
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 8, 2012
A new study conducted in Athens, Georgia, by National Geographic and the University of Georgia put cameras on house cats allowed outdoors. Thirty percent of the cats killed wild animals, an average of two kills per week. Even though only 12% of the kills were birds, if you extrapolate the data it leads to huge estimates of the numeber of birds killed by free-roaming cats each year.
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 17, 2012
I cannot get the Hoary Bat out of my head. I never knew, until my ill-fated encounter , that these are among the most birdie of the North American flying mammals. Hoary Bats roost in trees, not caves. They are solitary, and their roosting habits may be the reason for their frosted fur and (relatively, for a bat) high-contrast patterns of coloration – in the open, with no safety to be had in numbers, they need to blend with lichen and break up their outlines to avoid predation during the da
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 21, 2012
Photo of Common Cuckoo by Flickr user jamalhaider There is some interesting new research you will want to know about concerning Reed Warblers and Cuckoos. In the common European Cuckoo, Cuculus canorus , females come in two morphs: Gray or rufus. It is thought that the gray morph mimics a bird eating hawk. In this way, the cuckolding Cuckoo can convince its cuckoldee, the Reed Warbler, to back off when the Cuckoo comes around, allowing the Cuckoo to toss out one of the Warbler’s eggs and replace
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 29, 2012
Once upon a time the average bird on Earth was a rail. Before humans spread across the oceans of the world, wiping out huge numbers of endemic insular species , pretty much every decent sized island far from the continents had its own species of rail. There is something about the group that predisposes them to end up on far flung islands and having done so lose their ability to fly and thrive.
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 17, 2012
Swainson’s Hawks are special. As special as any bird that is abundant… just not abundant in your neck of the woods. OK sure, it is only an hour drive before I reach Swainson’s paradise in the Central Valley of California… but where I live, any large brown Buteo has a higher probability of Red-tailed Hawkishness. It takes a special trip to see these special birds, and as such, the pointy-winged migrants are particularly cool to me.
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 5, 2012
Hot enough for you? If you’re suffering through a sweltering patch of record summer heat, you may feel much as Ralph Waldo Emerson did when he penned this line: “When summer opens, I see how fast it matures, and fear it will be short; but after the heats of July and August, I am reconciled, like one who has had his swing, to the cool of autumn.” But is it ever too hot or too cold to get out and look at some birds?
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 15, 2012
Evening Grosbeak Male ( Coccothraustes vespertinus ) photos by Larry Jordan The Evening Grosbeak ( Coccothraustes vespertinus ) is a striking bird. With his dark head accented by a bright yellow forehead and supercillium, the male really stands out in a crowd. His black wings and tail contrast with his yellow scapulars and flanks, and large white wing patches.
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 24, 2012
I picked up a Red-tailed hawk two days ago. He was on the ground, and the finder thought he might have been hit by a car. He was not a fledgling, but not an adult. His eyes were in the process of changing from yellow to brown, and his tail was not yet red. Although his wing drooped, I couldn’t feel anything broken. He was thin, but not emaciated. He was strong enough to grab my glove with his foot and hang on.
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 12, 2012
You’ve probably heard me observe once or twice how hot this summer has been in the U.S. But like so many things, evaluations of temperature can be relative. I just spent some time experiencing real heat, the kind of 100+ degree blast that hits like a blowtorch no matter how dry it is. I found the experience of authentically aggressive heat rather refreshing, but much prefer my moderate New York summers!
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 4, 2012
Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, Queens, NY, 3 August 2008 It was while watching flocks of shorebirds on Friday on Cape Cod (an adventure I will soon describe) that I first heard of a Red-necked Stint being found at Jamaica Bay. I got back-to-back calls that I let go to voicemail from Jory and Will , my upstate birding buddies, and when I checked my voicemail I found out the news.
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 24, 2012
There are no swifts in Missoula. Except when there are. When there are is migration, and it is happening now. As an East Coaster swifts were easy. There are Chimney Swifts , and they nest in chimneys. They are swift-shaped and move swiftly, and are different from all the other birds in both looks and call (although I guess you could mistake them for swallows if you were in a hurry, or drunk,) and that is that.
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 7, 2012
While those to the north are busy wallowing in shorebirds of impressive diversity and numbers , we to the south sit and wait for the scraps to trickle down into our own scopeviews. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have a bona fide shorebird hotspot minutes from one’s home, the mind boggles at the implications. The mud. The stink.
10,000 Birds
AUGUST 26, 2012
One of the truly incredible things about Nature is how it can continually surprise you. There are patterns, to be sure, a certain predictability in pathways, behaviours, timing. But often, when you are out looking, exploring, and expecting things to unfold a particular way Nature throws a surprise party in your lap. Recently a friend led me to the vicinity of a Rough-legged Hawk nest.
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