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Birding Kadavu and Nadi in Fiji

10,000 Birds

As introductions to tropical Pacific birding go, you could do a lot worse than Fiji. It was just such a layover that landed me in Fiji a few years ago. As myself and some other stranded Kadavu-bound travellers sat watching the grey clouds over the sea with a beer or two I also managed to find a tiny Fiji Parrotfinch in the grasses.

Fiji 167
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Armchair Splits in the Pacific

10,000 Birds

I’ve written before about how the Collared Kingfisher is a million splits waiting to happen (not happened yet), and the golden whistlers of the Pacific have been split now (giving me on from Fiji, one in Australia and one in Vanuatu), but I hadn’t really expected the Wattled Honeyeater to be a split. Photo from ‘Eua, Tonga.

Tonga 174
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Clearing up the Collared Kingfishers

10,000 Birds

Subspecies vitiensis , Fiji. The Pacific Kingfisher ( Todiramphus sacer ) is one of three species identified in the South Pacific, the other two being from the Solomon Islands and I have no images of them (The Colonist Kingfisher and Melanesian Kingfisher ). Subspecies pealei , National Park of American Samoa. Bryan Harry, USNPS.

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Grey-headed Robins

10,000 Birds

It is, instead, a member of the Petroicidae, the Australasian robins, a family mostly found in New Guinea and Australia but also reaching here in New Zealand and as far across the Pacific as Fiji. The Grey-headed Robin showing off the grey head.

Guinea 154
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Some thoughts on scientific collecting

10,000 Birds

I remember looking at a single skin of a Long-legged warbler from Fiji, the only known specimen or record of its particular subspecies, the sum total of all knowledge about its kind. Unsurprisingly the ones that most stick in the mind were the lost species. And most haunting was the cupboard of mounted specimens of extinct species.

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Tongatapu and ‘Eua; Birding Southern Tonga

10,000 Birds

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. According to the guides it is a forest bird in Fiji (and an elusive one, I never saw one in my week there in 2005) but in Tonga I saw it in the towns and country gardens.

Tonga 160
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Bristle-thighed Curlew

10,000 Birds

You can encounter them from Hawaii across to French Polynesia and Fiji. Whereas the Whimbrel winters across the coasts of southern North America and is a very familiar sight there, Bristle-thighed Curlews migrate over vast distances across the Pacific Ocean to specifically winter on tropical islands.