Experience Experiments Science Woodpeckers 
10,000 Birds
FEBRUARY 26, 2024
’ The Beautiful Sibia is beautiful even in Mandarin Chinese (Li se qi mei, “Beautiful babbler”) … … and of course in science (scientific name pulchella , “little beautiful”). This Great Spotted Woodpecker isn’t even trying to hide its spots. A bad one, admittedly. But why should it.
10,000 Birds
JULY 5, 2022
This was where I set up my bird feeders, just one at first, then expanding as everyone expressed delight in seeing the Carolina Chickadees, Dark-eyed Juncos, and Downy Woodpeckers. I picked up a Downy Woodpecker, an every-day visitor. Dead birds are a part of the life of a birder, a feeder of birds, and of bird science.
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10,000 Birds
JUNE 6, 2023
It is also about Chris’s personal history: his boyhood in suburban Long Island, college years at Harvard and the struggle to come out, ‘nerdy’ passions beyond birding–namely science fiction books and films, career highs at Marvel Comics, travels to foreign countries, and his complicated relationships with his parents.
10,000 Birds
JULY 20, 2023
I’ll still probably try again next June, as this June has been the driest and hottest in memory, and in my experience, summer rains make it much more likely that one will see the Sinaloa Martin. Two weeks later, it was a young math and science teacher from Oregon named Brent who asked me to take him with me.
10,000 Birds
JUNE 27, 2012
Another challenge to bird research is that it is woefully underfunded and relies heavily on citizen science. Remember the whole Cornell Ivory-billed Woodpecker search and how you literally had to apply for a volunteer position to pay your own way down to Arkansas for 2 weeks to try and look for that bird?
10,000 Birds
NOVEMBER 28, 2022
I imagine the female bosses the male around, but maybe I am anthropomorphizing there based on my experience in recently working on an apartment with my wife. This Grey-capped Pygmy Woodpecker in particular is a species I would like to get much better photos of. While the female is less hidden, sadly, it is also less attractive.
10,000 Birds
MAY 15, 2023
Fortunately, in science, there is often a way to turn a defeat into a victory – in this case via the author just coming up with a new hypothesis, “if black eagles use the frequency or intensity of mobbing as a clue to locate nests, a lack of seasonal difference in mobbing behavior by drongos may be an evolutionary adaptive strategy.”
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