4 The Love Of Animals
FEBRUARY 26, 2018
We were provided with a Heat Storm heater in exchange for our honest review. All opinions are our own. You may be wondering why we would be reviewing a space heater on a pet blog, but we have a very.
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 31, 2018
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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4 The Love Of Animals
FEBRUARY 12, 2018
If you have decided to give a dog a second chance by rescuing them from a dog shelter or rescue group, good for you! Not only can you feel great about the choice you made to save a life, your.
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 30, 2018
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?
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 29, 2018
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.
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 28, 2018
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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10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 26, 2018
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?
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 24, 2018
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.
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 22, 2018
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).
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 21, 2018
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.
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 20, 2018
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.
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 19, 2018
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.
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 14, 2018
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.
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 14, 2018
This just might be a birding joke as old as the hills, but it’s one I hear without fail every year come Christmas Bird Count season in upstate New York. Not long after the compilation gets underway starting with the order Anseriformes , we come to Aix sponsa and the compiler asks – hopefully – “Any Wood Ducks?” Now, Wood Ducks are somewhat uncommon in eastern New York in winter and after an inevitable few seconds of silence, some smirking wisecracker pipes up with “Do wooden duck counts?
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 13, 2018
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
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 12, 2018
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?
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 8, 2018
December is a busy time in Costa Rica. The end of the scholastic year coincides with the commencement of the “summer”dry season and a host of festivities to celebrate Christmas and the New Year. The end results are steady lines of traffic marching to crowded beaches, more visitors to the country’s famed national parks, and a parade or two where drunken wannabe cowboys on prancing horses add local spice to the festive mayhem.
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 6, 2018
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
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 5, 2018
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.
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 4, 2018
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!
10,000 Birds
DECEMBER 3, 2018
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.
10,000 Birds
NOVEMBER 28, 2018
We are finally getting settled this week, now that we are back from Costa Rica, and in what we refer to as our temporarily-permanent new home. Tucson Arizona is turning out to be a very birdy area. I have to admit I stole some parts of that phrase from the director of the Tucson Audubon Society, Jonathan E. Lutz. In a Thanksgiving note to all the members, he used that phrase, and I agree, the birding options here are pretty numerous.
10,000 Birds
NOVEMBER 28, 2018
Zamorano University may be regarded as one of the crown jewels of Latin American higher education, particularly in the areas of agriculture, environmental management, and food science, but this idyllic campus excels for more reasons than simply academics. Zamorano happens to be incredibly birdy. Not only that, but the university retains on faculty a bona fide authority on the region’s avifauna: Professor Oliver Komar is the co-author of the Peterson Field Guide to Birds of Northern Central Ameri
10,000 Birds
NOVEMBER 25, 2018
Some Mondays hit harder than others. Most Americans celebrated a long weekend filled with a lot (maybe too much) food, family, and shopping. Crawling back to work can be tough, but at least you can celebrate Cyber Monday at the office… While Bald Eagles have become nearly as common as Red-tailed Hawks in Upstate New York in winter, I still thrill to every sighting on the long drive from Rochester to NYC and back.
10,000 Birds
NOVEMBER 24, 2018
Birds can be enjoyed in a wide variety of ways. Those of us who chase rare birds for our counties, states, or other human-made geographical distinctions watch birds for more reasons than the twitch. For example, we might just enjoy the calls and antics of those White-throated Sparrows while searching for a Harris’s. Most folks who live for a twitch also marvel over a flock of Evening Grosbeaks bounding through winter skies, and love the goldfinches that frequent a backyard feeder.
10,000 Birds
NOVEMBER 22, 2018
Have you heard of a small town in Serbia graced by the presence of its 700 communally roosting Long-eared Owls ? You may have read about them in the Wall Street Journal , the BBC Wildlife Magazine , or perhaps watched them on BBC, who filmed them here twice, for the Planet Earth II in 2015 and for the One Planet in 2018. Actually, the numbers are even higher.
10,000 Birds
NOVEMBER 21, 2018
Our trip to Costa Rica has come to an end, and sadly, it ended with one of the best weeks of birding in the entire year. We spent to bulk of the week in the San Isidro El General area, staying there as well as up in the Quizarra area. We had three nights in The Birders Retreat Air BnB, two nights in San Isidro proper, and then back to Quizarra to stay at the Valle de Luna BNB for our last night.
10,000 Birds
NOVEMBER 13, 2018
Yesterday morning I was out and about on the coast of Queens looking for migrating birds. At Jacob Riis Park I stopped to scan a large flock of Brant because you never know what might end up mixed in to a large flock of anything. And while I didn’t find anything rare hiding amid the hordes of Branta bernicla I did manage to find one that was banded and color tagged.
10,000 Birds
NOVEMBER 13, 2018
Since 2016, writers at 10,000 Birds have been contributing checklists to a joint eBird account called the “10,000 Birds Collaborative.” Every month, Redgannet summarizes the checklists, providing an updated life list, year list, and country list. For the United States, there is also a state list. Note that the collaborative list only includes checklists during the writer’s tenure as a contributor, so checklists before or after that time do not count.
10,000 Birds
NOVEMBER 10, 2018
Voters across the country support environmentally conscious ballot initiatives. Voters in several states had the opportunity to express their support (or condemnation) of various environmental (or anti-environmental) issues respectively in the recent election cycle. Results from November 2018 ballots indicate a large and dedicated block of voters who are concerned about the health of ecosystems, as well as the preservation of complex wilderness areas.
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