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Fur and Fangs rather than Feathers and Beaks

10,000 Birds

I remember the guide on my first Kenyan birding safari remarking that “birding groups always see far more mammals than those who come just to see animals. On my 21-day Kenyan safaris we reckoned to find around 600 species of birds and around 60 mammals, both impressive totals.

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Birding Senegal: Costco ads and Scissor-tailed Kites

10,000 Birds

Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa are heavily eBirded because Americans regularly visit. Various species can be found in dry grassland habitats in Africa, Eurasia, and Australia, so it is fun for a North American to stumble upon this not frequently-seen-bird. Scissor-tailed Kites – while not threatened now – are a vulnerable species.

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Flights of Passage: a book review

10,000 Birds

You can’t say the same about migration: you can’t say that every book about birds is necessarily about migration, for the simple reason that only about 4,000 bird species migrate (with some 1,800 of those traveling long distances). (Well, purely physical attributes play a part, too: they’re pretty good looking.).

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A Brief Tour of Uganda, The Pearl of Africa

10,000 Birds

By the time this post publishes, I’ll be on an airplane heading back to the United States following a truly remarkable two week visit to Uganda as part of a group of western birders visiting there to promote the inaugural African Birding Expo. In the relatively brief period, my group had something on the order of 450 species.

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The mousebird mystery

10,000 Birds

They do not look or act much like any other birds (my photo above shows a Speckled Mousebird , Colius striatus , in Nairobi, Kenya). The six living species are all found in Sub-Saharan Africa. They were once a widespread and diverse group, however, with many fossils known from what are now North America and Europe.

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Dreaming of Africa

10,000 Birds

and dreaming of a place where the heat is moderate, beer snake-cold and birds innumerable… Let’s say, where the average annual maximum varies from 22 to 24 degrees Celsius / 72 to 75 Fahrenheit and where some 700+ bird species – 24 of them endemic – are waiting for an intrepid birder… Answer to the riddle?

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Pink in Africa

10,000 Birds

Of course Africa could not to be left out of the pink weekend so I have researched all African species whose official or alternative names include the word “pink”. This attractive (for a lark anyway) species is restricted to the dry savannah Somali-Maasai biome of north-east Africa (northern Tanzania, Kenya, southern Ethiopia and Somalia).

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