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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! They are great for apartment settings.

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Extinction Week Recap

10,000 Birds

We miss them all: the parrots, the pigeons, the moas and titan-hawks and stilt-owls and myriads of endlessly exotic avifauna we will never ever know again as they were when they graced this Earth. It’s when we lost the mammoths, the sabre-tooth cats, the giant ground sloths, the elephant birds, the marsupial lions, and other iconic giants.

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Here’s the new bird family tree. It’s amazing.

10,000 Birds

So do parrots, some songbirds, humans, and a few other mammals. shocked everyone with a suggestion that passerines were most closely related not to woodpeckers and kingfishers but to parrots, falcons, and seriemas. Importantly, parrots and many songbirds (the oscine passerines) are vocal learners, like us and like hummingbirds.

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