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Big Ticks; What Was Your Last New Family?

10,000 Birds

Here in New Zealand te only potential big tick would be a lost vagrant painted snipe, and we’ve already established that I don’t enjoy that kind of vagrant hunting. The year before I only got one, the shrike-tits (Falcunculidae), although if you include mammals also I finally got my lifer wombat (Vombatidae) too.

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Rails: The Once and Future Kings of the Pacific

10,000 Birds

Outside the truly ancient islands that are fragments of sunken continents; New Zealand, Fiji, New Caledonia and the like, the Islands of the Pacific are, geologically, ephemeral things. For the most part it seems that the species that were lost were not deep forks in the evolutionary tree.

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