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All about alcids: Extravagant divers of northern oceans

10,000 Birds

Across the world’s northern oceans, 24 species of auklets, murres, puffins, guillemots, and related seabirds make a living catching food beneath the waves and breeding, often in large colonies, on coastlines and islands. Unlike the southern hemisphere’s penguins, however, alcids can also use those flipper wings to fly.

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Around the World For Penguins: A Penguin Fan’s Book Review

10,000 Birds

Penguins here! <pause> There are few bird names that will elicit great big smiles and Penguin is one of them. I’ve been fortunate to see two Penguin species in the wild (African and Galapagos) and have dreamed of seeing more–maybe even all! <pause> Do I have your attention now?

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How Birds Evolve: What Science Reveals about Their Origin, Lives, and Diversity: A Book Review by a Non-Science Person

10,000 Birds

The text goes far beyond just those two birds, however, as Doug works his way through the puzzles presented by the incredibly wide diversity of bird behavior, even within species, citing current research and new and old theories, reasoning out the most likely and unlikely answers. Why are all the real tanagers in tropical America?

Science 204
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Here’s the new bird family tree. It’s amazing.

10,000 Birds

processed the entire genomes of 48 bird species and compared nearly 42 million base pairs of DNA (Hackett et al. ’s bird family tree in a new tab and follow along as you read. Now we move on to the Neognathae , which also has two very deep branches that lead to all the other living species of birds. Open Jarvis et al.’s

Family 279
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“Peacocks and Picathartes: Reflections on Africa’s Birdlife”

10,000 Birds

I did that with Peacocks & Picathartes – Reflections on Africa’s birdlife (published by Penguin Random House South Africa ). And apart from local people, primate researchers sometimes spot it, but it is a species seen by fewer than ten living birders. Some are incredibly rare and hard to find.

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Pieces of the New Zealand Puzzle

10,000 Birds

First off, it seems that New Zealand’s two iconic families of ratites, large flightless southern birds that includes emus, rhea, ostriches, cassowaries and the extinct elephant birds, are not particularly closely related. With the arrival of the Maori the secret penguin was, unfortunately, wiped out.

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The complete guide to Dodo relatives, living and dead

10,000 Birds

Not, as Linneaus thought, an ostrich, nor even, as later scientists concluded, a distant cousin of pigeons deserving of family rank, it was an honest-to-goodness pigeon, deeply embedded within the family Columbidae. One species alive today offers a glimpse of such behavior: the Nicobar Pigeon ( Caloenas nicobarica ). .’s