article thumbnail

Finding Dippers in Berlin

10,000 Birds

However, dippers here in Germany aren’t too fussy about their habitats and will readily utilize human-made secondary rapids and rocks. To us humans, those “rapids and rocks” are weirs, concrete bank reinforcements, small bridges and other comparable structures often within villages. Luckily they aren’t.

Germany 100
article thumbnail

Solid Air: Invisible Killer Saving Billions of Birds From Windows–A Book Review

10,000 Birds

Over the next few days, I found increasing numbers, goldfinches, juncos, white-throated sparrows. I was shocked when I found the first body, a female Towhee. I hoped it was an anomaly. Were they always there and I just never noticed? Did the model work?

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Trending Sources

article thumbnail

Feral Cats in American Cities

10,000 Birds

. … The ordinance would allow Minneapolis residents to establish cat “colonies” where abandoned and wild cats can be fed but also vaccinated, neutered and identified in an effort to humanely cut their population and control disease. And she has a North American bird book that has so far taught her how to recognize a sparrow.

article thumbnail

The Joy of Bird Feeding: A Book Review by a Birder who Loves Her Feeder Birds

10,000 Birds

Places for the birds to perch near the feeders? Do you change your feed according to the seasons?

Birds 179
article thumbnail

Licking Clay: the Macaws of Tambopata, Peru

10,000 Birds

Geophagy, the intentional consumption of soil by vertebrates, has long been documented in a number of bird and mammal species – including wide-spread use by humans – which consume soil to increase absorption of certain minerals not naturally occurring in the local diet. That’s right – birds eating clay.

Peru 255
article thumbnail

Bird Song and Parallel Evolution: learning from our feathered friends

10,000 Birds

The modal bird song is a song, but not all ‘songs’ are song-like, in the sense that we expect song to come out of the ‘mouth’ (bill) and to consist of modulated air currents (like human voice). Drawing of bower birds from Darwin’s 1871 volume on sexual selection.

Zebras 259
article thumbnail

Birding Shanghai in June 2022

10,000 Birds

As with Chinese male humans, having your own building is still vital to raising young. One of the established ways to evaluate self-cognition in animals (including humans) is the mirror test. What could be plainer than the Eurasian Tree Sparrow ? Humanity is not very human. You should try it too.

Birds 192