10,000 Birds

MARCH 10, 2017

The nature memoir – a blend of place-based writing with life story – has been having a “moment” that’s lasted two decades and counting. From Terry Tempest William’s 1992 bombshell Refuge to Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 blockbuster Wild (now a major-ish motion picture!) the hits keep coming. You might think that this success would eventually make the sub-genre crowded, prone to self-indulgence and increasingly outré angles.

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South Carolina Stray Cows 2012 127

10,000 Birds

MARCH 8, 2017

Jason A. Crotty is a birder and lawyer living in Portland, Oregon who loves to share thoughtful , in-depth conservation pieces with 10,000 Birds readers. This is Jason’s fifth contribution to the blog. Birders are familiar with the National Wildlife Refuge System, which consists of more than 550 units distributed through all fifty states. National Wildlife Refuges (NWRs), which are managed by the U.S.

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Factory Ducks North Dakota Nebraska 117

10,000 Birds

MARCH 8, 2017

The jack pines of Michigan are well-known as the breeding grounds of the Kirkland’s Warbler —and thus, the best place to catch a glimpse of this exceedingly rare songbird. But how do these tiny birds get there? And where do they spend the winter? For the first time, scientists have some solid answers. Through the use of minute, light-sensitive geolocators, the birds’ migration habits have been revealed, from the Caribbean, along the U.S.

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Michigan United States Breeding Research 113

10,000 Birds

MARCH 8, 2017

Spring is in the air, and all around the Baja desert I am seeing a plethora of species, all looking for love, in what appears to the right places. Last Sunday, it was never as obvious as it was with the small group of Phainopepla , Phainopepla nitens. I thoroughly enjoyed watching them swoop erratically from tree to tree to cactus. Males chasing males, males chasing females, much like a complicated, erratic dance routine.

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Costa Rica Panama Nevada Guatemala 105

Speaker: Steve Romanco

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10,000 Birds

MARCH 9, 2017

If your part of the world is dealing with the levels of meteorological turmoil my part is, you’ll remember the wild weather of March 2017 for a long, long time. But even if your local breezes are balmy, let’s hope they’re blowing beautiful birds in. I can’t see myself braving this weekend’s predicted blistering cold just to admire the birds of late winter, so I’ll be watching my feeder.

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2017 Seals Birds 104

10,000 Birds

MARCH 7, 2017

Aisholpan Nurgaiv is a graceful, rosy-cheeked 13-year old girl with a magic smile who makes living on the edge of nowhere and forever look like the easiest experience in the world. Even when hunting in sub-freezing temperatures on the edge of the Mongolian border or doing her chores around the family ger (yurt) in the isolated Altai Mountains, Aisholpan beams.

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Eagles Mongolia Hunters Hunting 102

10,000 Birds

MARCH 5, 2017

The observation that March comes in like a lion (yes, I’m still talking about this old chestnut) generally refers to the complexion of the weather this time of year. But everything feels a little wild these days, right? Maybe it’s just me… I’m already over winter weather, which means I couldn’t be bothered to chase birds this weekend.

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Bald Eagle 2017 Lions Birds 100

10,000 Birds

MARCH 5, 2017

I guess we can universally agree that the colonial times were a rather selfish period of European history. There is indeed little good that can be ascribed in retrospective to this period, and the little good there is pales in comparison to the bad things. However, one of the little sweet candies Germany still enjoys today from its own disastrous colonial past is the Common Guillemot, or Common Murre.

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Germany Denmark Namibia Breeding 100

10,000 Birds

MARCH 5, 2017

It has been a few years since we had a good Wet Season to really bring a decent amount of rain to Broome and surrounds. In early 2014 the rainfall was good and flooded the main highway south from Broome and made for some excellent birding from your car. The area remained flooded for several months in 2014 and there was significant road damage, but over the months the birding improved as more and more birds arrived in the area.

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Geese Breeding 2014 Eggs 100

10,000 Birds

MARCH 4, 2017

The beats have been mostly sedentary during February with only Corey venturing beyond his normal range. Tom has made an altitudinal migration, but stayed within his accepted beat. Redgannet has been wandering aimlessly as is his brief. Last year beats were being spotted way beyond their usual habitat with checklists shared from India, Puerto Rico and Israel.

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2017 Australia Sanctuary Woodpeckers 100

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10,000 Birds

MARCH 6, 2017

From 20 February through 25 February I was on a family-and-friends vacation on New Providence in the Bahamas. More specifically, I was on Paradise Island, the small, resort-laden and heavily developed island on the north end of New Providence, adjacent to Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas. This was not a birding vacation but a beach-and-water-park vacation.

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Bahamas Puerto Rico Birds Louisiana 102

10,000 Birds

MARCH 9, 2017

For those of you who may have forgotten, or some who never knew, we once had rivers in the United States that would catch fire because they were so polluted. The image above is the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland Ohio. The Cuyahoga River caught fire thirteen times between 1868 and 1969. The citizens of Cleveland, and indeed the nation, decided something needed to be done about the pollution of our waterways.

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Cleveland United States Alabama Oklahoma 130