10,000 Birds

DECEMBER 20, 2014

It confirms many of the once-radical notions put forward or refined by Shannon Hackett and her colleagues in 2008, and several since, and it proposes solutions to some of the most deeply unresolved questions about how major bird groups are related to each other. ( ’s bird family tree in a new tab and follow along as you read.

Family 279

Family Birds Parrots 2014 279

10,000 Birds

APRIL 4, 2018

This weeks posting finds me north of the Whananaki area, which is north of Auckland, New Zealand. We are spending some time here on my wife’s family property right on the water. Unfortunately, there have been no new birds that I can check off my “Wish List” but if you have to hang out in a place, this is pretty awesome.

New Zealand 100

New Zealand Groups Alaska Laws 100

10,000 Birds

APRIL 11, 2018

For any of you that read my posting last week, you know that I am hanging around here on the North Island of New Zealand, and all forward progress has stalled once we arrived here at Whananaki. If there was nothing more than the large group of Brown Teal here, it would be enough to keep me around for a while.

New Zealand 111

New Zealand Ducks 2018 Fish 111

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 9, 2011

In some instances the names old names were given to new birds of familiar types in error ( American Robins are actually thrushes, and New World sparrows are really buntings), but in many other instances these names were applied to entirely new families and genera. By Tom Tarrant.

New Zealand 160

New Zealand Australia Penguins Family 160

10,000 Birds

APRIL 24, 2013

Anzac Day started as a commemoration day for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps’ disastrous Gallipoli Campaign during the First World War. This provides me a roundabout way to discuss one of the quirks of New Zealand, the name of her people. Royal New Zealand Air Force roundel.

New Zealand 164

New Zealand Campaign Mammals Suffering 164

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 23, 2013

While I have previously praised the efforts of the Department of Conservation and other large conservation organisations, so today let me sing the praises of smaller groups, specifically the Rotokare Scenic Reserve Trust. New Zealand fantails were very common. Birding New Zealand New Zealand endemics'

New Zealand 161

New Zealand Sanctuary Mammals Wildlife 161

10,000 Birds

SEPTEMBER 7, 2021

Seabirds: The New Identification Guide is an identification guide to seabirds of the world, all of them. It covers 434 species across 9 orders and 18 families of birds. All species in every one of these groups is described even if not every single species lives on the ocean, a guideline continued from the earlier volume.

Albatross 279

Albatross Penguins Family Groups 279

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

There are a couple of species that demand more description, Crimson Rosella for example, with its three highly variable morphological groups, and Australian Masked Owl, with its variability in size and plumage, and that space is allocated. (I There are three to four species on each page, for the most part.

Australia 253

Australia Birds 2017 Groups 253

10,000 Birds

JULY 13, 2014

The proposal above is one of many that will emerge from a major new paper by Klicka et al., For one thing, as other studies have recently found, New World sparrows belong in their own family, Passerellidae; they are not closely related to Old World Emberiza buntings (see John Boyd’s treatment of the groups ).

New Zealand 205

New Zealand Elephants Sparrows Ostriches 205

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 21, 2012

While New Zealand is famous for its endemic oddities, once upon a time New Zealand also had many birds from groups and families that are no longer found here. The mysterious piopio were recently recognized for what they were, New Zealand’s representatives from the oriole family.

Eagles 102

Eagles New Zealand Bald Eagle Collecting 102

10,000 Birds

JULY 31, 2013

But it wasn’t birding that brought me on this trip, but the family bach owned by the family of a friend of mine. Even better, at the end of the dock a large New Zealand Eagle-ray was feeding under the clear still water, and stayed there long enough for those who wanted to see it to come down. New Zealand Fantail.

New Zealand 165

New Zealand Charlotte Hunting Family 165

10,000 Birds

MAY 18, 2011

The Fernbird , now in the family Megaluridae, is everything you’d expect from an Old World Warbler, brown, nondescript, and very skulky. The Grey Warbler is a representative of the mostly Australian family Acanthizidae. It may represent a family of their own. Living up high brings wind but also views like this.

New Zealand 159

New Zealand North America Family Farming 159

10,000 Birds

SEPTEMBER 5, 2012

As I sat waiting for the bus home there was a wind, hardly a rarity here in New Zealand, but it was a warm wind, and that certainly is. The spring the birds I’ll show you today is far from the seat of New Zealand’s government where I now work. Sparrows are from the family Passeridae. Long may it last.

United Arab Emirates 161

United Arab Emirates Saudi Arabia Oman Yemen 161

10,000 Birds

APRIL 13, 2016

The English language, or at least the adherents thereof with more time on their hands than sense, has bestowed us a great number of names to collective nouns for groups of birds. The site also seemed to suggest a few that seemed flat out wrong; parrotlets aren’t baby parrots, they are a type of small parrot, same with owlets and peeps.

New Zealand 106

New Zealand Parrots Rats Bats 106

10,000 Birds

AUGUST 31, 2011

When it comes down to it New Zealand is all about islands. Somes, less interestingly, was a rich backer of the New Zealand Company called Joseph Somes (who never went near the place). The island represents one of only three places in North Island that has this New Zealand endemic. I’ll work on that.

Penguins 165

Penguins Parrots New Zealand Seals 165

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 26, 2011

They are rock stars in their family (or group of families, depending on what taxonomists have been smoking lately), a family that includes Scarlet Macaws , Crimson Shining-parrots , Golden Parakeets and Rainbow Lorikeets , and that is no mean feat. I guess New Zealanders really like flightless birds.)

New Zealand 189

New Zealand Parrots Sanctuary Family 189

10,000 Birds

APRIL 7, 2015

She’s produced seven photographic books about the Galapagos Islands and books on the Andes, Antarctica, and New Zealand (her current home). Its title in the Great Britain and New Zealand editions is Penguins: Their World, Their Ways, a better title in my opinion.). I like it, but I also feel frustrated by it.

Penguins 209

Penguins New Zealand South Africa Albatross 209

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 10, 2011

But genetic and morphological data both point to this conclusion, and additional evidence places tubenoses and penguins within a group recently dubbed Aequornithes, or “higher waterbirds.” Within Procellariformes, the arrangement of major groups of tubenoses is not entirely settled.

Albatross 187

Albatross Penguins Groups New Zealand 187

10,000 Birds

SEPTEMBER 14, 2011

Long before I moved in New Zealand, or visited or even knew much about the wildlife here, way back then I knew about the Poor Knights. In New Zealand I’d even dived the astonishing Milford Sound in Fiordlands National Park, but I didn’t make it to New Zealand’s most famous dive site until January of 2009.

New Zealand 186

New Zealand Belize Vanuatu Fish 186

10,000 Birds

JANUARY 18, 2012

The lake was filled with families of Dusky Moorhens and Purple Swamphens (or Pukeko as we call them in New Zealand), all tending small groups of black chicks. Magpie-larks are neither magpies nor larks but are the largest of the monarch-flycatchers, and the most terrestrial of the family.

New Zealand 173

New Zealand Ducks Australia Japan 173

10,000 Birds

AUGUST 22, 2013

And now we enter into a family of birds more or less unknown to non-birders. And truth told, over the years they’ve been something of a square peg for ornithologists too, not fitting precisely into any of the known families of birds. But that’s a group for a different time. Horned Grebe , photo by Julie Gidwitz.

Jordan 200

Jordan Guatemala Birds South America 200

10,000 Birds

JUNE 27, 2019

They give short shrift to New Zealand’s birds, lumping them with odd names no one here uses because the names are shared elsewhere and God knows America isn’t going to take a hit for us. I’m not blind to the list’s faults, though. But if the list has one real problem, it’s a tendency towards verbosity.

Iran 134

Iran Barn Owls New Zealand Europe 134

10,000 Birds

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

Indeed it was part of that family. Until then the fantails were a family of rather personable flycatcher-like birds ranging from India to New Zealand. The family had a single genus and was very conservative in body shape, basically a short dumpy bird with a long fan-able tail and a bucketload of energy.

Horses 166

Horses France North America Fiji 166

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 3, 2017

Scientific names have been reviewed by the Working Group on Avian Nomenclature of the International Ornithologists’ Union. Within each group, birds in the same family are grouped together and birds in the same genus “usually occur consecutively.” or birders who live there (but, how can you bird it all?).

Australia 109

Australia Birds Penguins 2015 109

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 1, 2012

More than a few groups of birds around the world have been given names with wren in it, almost as if the sight of a very small and active bird automatically associates with the small Winter Wren of England where most of the namers originated. But there is one exceptionally brightly coloured exception to this, the fairy-wrens of Australia.

Australia 177

Australia New Zealand South America Asia 177

10,000 Birds

JUNE 15, 2011

A combination of extinctions and proximity to Fiji means that a trip to that island group would net you pretty much all the same birds plus a whole raft of others. Another native bird that quickly showed itself to me in the capital was the Polynesian Triller , a member of the cuckoo-shrike family.

Tonga 166

Tonga Fiji New Zealand Parrots 166

10,000 Birds

MAY 12, 2013

Its mostly found on the ground in thickets or the edges of dense vegetation and usually in small family parties. Puffbacks belong to the bush-shrike family Malaconotidae and this group are called puffbacks due to several of the species forming a habit of puffing out their fluffy white back feathers during display.

Africa 220

Africa Somalia Pelicans Mozambique 220

10,000 Birds

JULY 4, 2018

New Zealand had been good, Australia was incredible, and South Africa was almost life altering. We have been dragging him thru every bird spot possible, so he could go to Scotland to see where his family is from. Speaking of Bank Swallows , here is one of those family groups. Where do you go from there?

Qatar 120

Qatar Sparrows South Africa Africa 120

10,000 Birds

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

The tricky thing for me is that Royal NP is in the south of Sydney, and my family lives in the north of the city. Heading back to the cafe I cam across a bird I didn’t recognise, and experienced a thrill at having to actually work out what I was looking at, something that doesn’t happen often to me in New Zealand.

Australia 179

Australia Ducks Parrots New Zealand 179

10,000 Birds

APRIL 22, 2015

The small community it was in reminds one of a small New Zealand country town or village, and the manor was set back from the road along a long tree-lined driveway. Mousebirds are a uniquely African family and they really brought it home to me that I was back in Africa after a decade. The Gardens.

Africa 165

Africa South Africa Stud Birds 165

10,000 Birds

JUNE 27, 2014

Parrots captivate me more than any other bird family. Second, they occupy an astonishing variety of habitats from temperate Araucaria forests in Chile to alpine scree in New Zealand to seasonally flooded rainforests in Brazil to rocky sea cliffs in Australia. However, they do not occur evenly across their familial distribution.

Parrots 169

Parrots Brazil Mauritius Dominica 169

10,000 Birds

MARCH 15, 2011

Nice. ((** all names have been changed to protect identities and have been substituted with (almost) randomly chosen substitutes suitable for a family of Alpine Accentors.)) Dale Forbes Mar 16th, 2011 at 7:48 am @Corey, Is there also a Daisy involved in this Group Marriage? Dawn, you are looking coy in you profile photo. Any reason?

2011 221

2011 Breeders Breeding Deer 221

10,000 Birds

AUGUST 6, 2012

But, within the frog group there is a tremendous range of diversity. For example, I was going to add “no tail” to the list of features above, what all frogs share, when I remembered that there are indeed a small family of Tailed frogs, four species in New Zealand and two in North America (though, the tails are quite tiny).

Reptiles 190

Reptiles Madagascar Family New York City 190

10,000 Birds

JUNE 27, 2012

And reach it I did earlier this year, after I got back from my jaunt up north to Cairns but before I returned to New Zealand. A few paces into the forest there as a small pond that was home to a family of Australian Grebes. I watched the group flitting around, getting one good look at a female (I never saw the male).

New Zealand 183

New Zealand Cooking Species Collecting 183

4 The Love Of Animals

MARCH 17, 2011

Chimpanzees and elephants grieve the loss of family and friends, and gorillas hold wakes for the dead. Nonetheless, they adjusted their behavior to allow Babyl to remain with the group. Paul’s family noticed that whenever he was about to have an attack, Tinker would get agitated. Sometimes the matriarch would even feed Babyl.

Emotional 100

Emotional Animal Whales Whaling 100