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Whooper Swans at Lake Kussharo, Hokkaido

10,000 Birds

On the one hand, they are very easy to see in Germany, swimming in public parks or teaching pensioners how to eat bread. To be honest, I never cared too much for swans. On the other hand, their white color and their considerable size made me see them as somewhat arrogant birds – the white Golf convertible of the bird world.

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Leaping Foxes

10,000 Birds

Germany is currently experiencing something for which the English have no nice expression. In German, if you are a rodent and you are smaller than – say – a human hand, you’re a mouse. But of course the mammalian meat eaters will be happy too and reproducing like there’s no tomorrow.

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The Domestic Turkey and the First Thanksgiving

10,000 Birds

Thus, the cattle we raise for meat and dairy are sometimes called Bos taurus while the extinct wild form is always called Bos primigenius. Dates of first arrival listed by Schorger (1966) are: Italy 1520, Germany 1530, France 1538, England 1541, Denmark and Norway 1550, Sweden 1556.

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Saving the Drowning Cormorant, or the Kerkini Lake, Greece

10,000 Birds

Below legal size for humans is still legal for pelicans. When one thinks of ecotourism here and how it changed lives, it should be known that the locals were leaving the region, in 1960s to the USA, but in the last ten years, after the World Economic Crisis, mostly to Germany.

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Birding Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

10,000 Birds

Resource partitioning is basically the term for liking different things, which makes it easier to live together (think you eating most of the meat and your wife eating most of the vegetables of a shared dinner). The first bird I saw in Saigon was less exotic though – a Eurasian Tree Sparrow.

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