article thumbnail

Birding Sepilok, Borneo (Part 1)

10,000 Birds

The Ashy Tailorbird is a good example of the different perspectives of describing a bird – while the English name focuses on the body of the bird, the Latin species name ruficeps refers to the rufous head. The split makes the bird one of the six species endemic to Sabah, Borneo ( source ), four of which I saw during my week at Sepilok.

article thumbnail

Birding the Kruger Park (2): Bateleur area

10,000 Birds

The one bird I did not see here, however, was the Bateleur Eagle … One highlight in the area is the Saddle-billed Stork , likely to be the tallest species in the stork family. The African Spoonbill is one of the six global spoonbill species, and the main African one (there are also some Eurasian Spoonbills in Africa).

Ostriches 147
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Trending Sources

article thumbnail

Come@Me: If Birds are Dinosaurs I’m a Monkey’s Uncle

10,000 Birds

There are important details within that dictum that we will ignore here, but this has to do with knowing when a characteristic doesn’t really tell you about the relative position of species on a “tree of life” vs when the characteristic works for that purpose. Rather, cladistics is a way of looking at the process of evolution of species.

Monkeys 140
article thumbnail

Are Birds Really Dinosaurs?

10,000 Birds

But that is because we often have the relationship between dinosaurs and birds reversed in our little primate minds; Much of what is bird-like is not exclusive to birds, but rather, to a larger group of dinosaurs. Among mammals, bipedalism is found in several rodents, a number of marsupials, and one primate.

Birds 270
article thumbnail

A Strategic Arms Race Among Birds

10,000 Birds

The vast majority of the 10,000+ living species of birds are passerines, and the vast majority of those have a similar system of breeding: Mom and dad bird make a nest and share parental responsibilities roughly equally, if not identically. There are variations on that theme, of course. Even the non-passerines often follow this pattern.

Breeders 204
article thumbnail

Questionable Practices at the Calgary Zoo

Critter News

The Calgary Zoo is again under scrutiny as details emerged Friday about how a capybara, a species of giant South American rodent, died after becoming caught in a hydraulic door last weekend as it was being moved from one area to another. In April 2009, unseasonably cold weather froze two whopping crane eggs.

Zoos 100
article thumbnail

Are there so many birds that cats don’t matter?

10,000 Birds

which was a comparative look at apparent, visible, often in your face biomass we observe when we as diurnal primates look around us. 1) The total percentage of a species that is killed by some force may have a very large evolutionary or adaptive effect even if the percentage is very small, like in the 0.5 Is this a problem?

Cats 185