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Fur and Fangs rather than Feathers and Beaks

10,000 Birds

On my 21-day Kenyan safaris we reckoned to find around 600 species of birds and around 60 mammals, both impressive totals. In 2023 I attempted to keep a year list of mammal encounters: the list barely exceeded 20 species, while it became complicated by seeing bats and voles that I was unable to name specifically.

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Just had my lifer Cinereous Vulture this morning

10,000 Birds

Before I was born, it used to be a rare breeding species in mountainous areas south of Belgrade, but became extinct after the 1960s due to intensive poisoning of wolves. Stopping for a large cappuccino at a drive-in McDonalds en route, soon I entered a hamlet of a dozen family homes mixed with a dozen small apartment buildings.

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Falakhe’s Story

10,000 Birds

Early starts are the rule when monitoring endagered species in Mkuze Game Reserve, in South Africa, but there’s a particular urgency to this morning’s start. And the morning before the Mkuze pack of Painted Wolves, or African Wild Dogs, had been very close to one of the park’s few Lions, as far as tracking collars had told.

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Nyala, Southern Africa’s Stunning Antelope

10,000 Birds

By this I mean applying the term antelope to cover all of the family Bovidae, which would include the sheep, goats and ox. One of the spiral-horned antelope (the antelopes are a huge family and much sub-divided) it resembles an intermediate between a Lesser Kudu and a Bushbuck , albeit with much longer and more attractive hair on the males.

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Tembe Elephant Park, South Africa

10,000 Birds

It is a good place for South African birders, as several species are found here and nowhere else in South Africa, and it holds a small number of endemics that it shares with the Mozambique lowlands. It was pretty awesome to see so many tuskers, as well as families of elephants safe in their special park.

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From Today's New York Times

Animal Ethics

He says he hunts out of a need to take responsibility for his family, who evidently live where the supermarkets offer no meat. 26, 2011 To the Editor: Seamus McGraw mounts all the standard defenses: I am feeding my family; there are too many deer; I kill as mercifully as possible. Who wiped out the wolves and mountain lions?

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What the Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds: A Book Review

10,000 Birds

” Writing about owls means writing about roughly 250 species (I counted 245 on the 2022 Clements spreadsheet, but I might have missed a few, and we all know that each classification system is different). These are behaviors that are most likely to vary across species and topics that make for compelling stories.

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