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Birding Shanghai in November 2022

10,000 Birds

Fortunately for the buntings, they seem to detect most cuckoo eggs smuggled in (75% in one study). A study found that for Plain Prinia , egg characteristics in a mainland China location with many cuckoos make it much easier to spot cuckoo eggs than in a Taiwan location with few cuckoos ( source ). Better safe than sorry.

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Birding the Kruger Park (2): Bateleur area

10,000 Birds

Blog readers sharing their house with a noisy teenager may consider replacing him or her with a Brown-headed Parrot , given this statement on a pet website : “Brown-Headed Parrot boasts another very desirable trait – these are very quiet parrots! The benefit for the wasps is that they get to keep a beautiful pet.

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Hornbills of Sabah

10,000 Birds

Another paper reviews information on Oriental Pied Hornbills raiding the nests of various bird species in Singapore and even pet bird cages. The latter is even captured in a somewhat gruesome video , in which the hornbill plucks a caged bird out of its cage and kills and eats it. Then she tried to feed it to the remaining chicks.

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Resurrection

10,000 Birds

Setting aside the feasibility of extracting DNA from specimens and fossils, and finding a suitable similar species to donate an egg, there is much debate on whether we should bring back those species we’ve lost. Tibbles did contribute, but it was a population of feral cats that did the bulk of the killing. Should it be?

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Feral Cats Are An Invasive Species in North America (and elsewhere)

10,000 Birds

This is approximated by the size of the animal, but really, this has to be adjusted for depending on modality of killing. An abstract from a recent paper in Nature : Anthropogenic threats, such as collisions with man-made structures, vehicles, poisoning and predation by domestic pets, combine to kill billions of wildlife annually.

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Birding Hongbenghe, Yunnan

10,000 Birds

Like a bad boyfriend not changing into nicer clothes for an evening out, the Brown-cheeked Fulvetta gets chided on eBird for not making any efforts: “an unapologetically drab and unmarked fulvetta” The Chestnut-headed Bee-eater apparently digs nest-burrows in which to lay its eggs. “It is not deep enough yet!

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Birding Kangding, Sichuan

10,000 Birds

The most likely explanation – as judged by the authors – is something called the farming hypothesis, which states that brood parasites such as the koel may deliberately destroy nests as it gives them a good chance to deposit an egg in the replacement clutch. Maybe the species has shrunk in the past few decades.

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