article thumbnail

Photo Essay: Green-rumped Parrotlets from Egg to Adult

10,000 Birds

Green-rumped Parrotlets: from egg to adult Text and photographs copyright Nick Sly (except Rae Okawa where indicated) and are used with his permission. Getting intimate with a species over the course of the breeding cycle is one of the more rewarding aspects of birding, and field research too.

Eggs 268
article thumbnail

The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird’s Egg

10,000 Birds

Tim Birkhead, a respected ornithologist with years of research under his belt, doesn’t quite achieve perfection with this book on the totality of that strange entity, the bird’s egg, but he makes a valiant effort of it and comes away with a very interesting book indeed.

Eggs 100
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

Bird Day: A Story of 24 Hours and 24 Avian Lives–A Book Review

10,000 Birds

Hauber Hauber’s mini-essays focus on specific behaviors, enhanced by references to recent research yet written in a relaxed, personal way. Hauber is really good at presenting scientific findings so they don’t seem scientific at all, simply reasonable answers to our questions. Mark Hauber is currently (just appointed!)

Chicago 181
article thumbnail

The Blood Pheasant

10,000 Birds

One paper identified the number of flocks in their research area “by tracing their tracks in the snow” Very Cowboys and Indians. So, researchers looked at the habitat use of Blood Pheasants as related to the presence of livestock. What are their criteria for selecting real estate?

article thumbnail

The Cry of the Curlew

10,000 Birds

Research by the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust has shown that predation by Foxes (of both eggs and chicks) is one of the most serious factors limiting the success of nesting Curlews. One of the reasons they do well here is predator control, for Foxes are quite strictly controlled by gamekeepers and landowners in the area.

Fox 198
article thumbnail

Birding Yibin, Sichuan

10,000 Birds

It seems some Chinese researchers had an interesting hypothesis – maybe cleaning up a nest (“nest sanitation” to the ornithologists) would also make it easier for the parasitized bird to eject an egg laid by a parasitizing cuckoo. In one group, they added a blue egg to their nests.

Italy 189
article thumbnail

Birding Yancheng, Jiangsu

10,000 Birds

In Daurian Redstarts , personality traits (specifically, whether a bird is shy or bold) partly determine how good an individual is in rejecting cuckoo eggs in its nest. Apparently, birds that are fast in exploring new things – bold birds – are better at rejecting parasitic eggs ( source ).

Birds 204