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Birding Tongbiguan, Yunnan (part 1)

10,000 Birds

.” Blue-bearded Bee-eaters seem to have a pretty clever hunting strategy. Of course, the same applies to pizza services for humans. The species name athertoni is derived from Lt. Unfortunately, there is not much literature on the species except for the inevitable analysis of the mitochondrial genome.

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Birding Tengchong, Yunnan, China in 2017

10,000 Birds

I visited Tengchong in late 2020 and wrote about it – but I also went there earlier, in 2017, and this post shows some photos I took during that trip, along with the usual comments that seem to be much more about ridiculing my fellow humans (especially ornithologists and the like) than providing useful information on birds.

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Birding Shanghai in May 2023 – Part 2

10,000 Birds

The Fairy Pitta is listed as Vulnerable, with the HBW that the species is “rare; global population probably no more than a few thousand individuals” While the sexes are alike, my guess is that the Fairy Pitta in the photo is a male given its early arrival date in Shanghai. And how do Fairy Pittas get injured and possibly die?

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Birding Balangshan (peak area) in June 2023

10,000 Birds

The best female strategy seems to be to mate with as many of the males as possible, as this means more help in feeding the chicks by all the potential fathers (I guess the fathers do not have easy access to paternity tests). They found that the species is diurnal (well, using cameras, would they even have seen nightly activities?),

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Birding Shanghai in June 2022

10,000 Birds

As with Chinese male humans, having your own building is still vital to raising young. While the species favors forested hills at moderate elevations ( source ), there are no hills at all here at Nanhui, so maybe these individuals are outcasts or just eccentrics. Chestnut-winged Cuckoo: This could be your host species!

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Birding Nonggang, Guangxi, China – part 2

10,000 Birds

In China, wherever there is one real tourist attraction (like the Great Wall), the local strategy seems to be to add some fake attractions – replicas of palaces or tombs, amusement parks, shopping centers – in order to maximize the income from tourists. But the starting point has to be a real attraction, not a fake one.

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15 Australian Birds (Episode 4)

10,000 Birds

Gisela Kaplan has written a book about the species, and how they seem unperturbed by humans: “It’s one of their most successful defense strategies. ” The Australasian Swamphen used to think of itself as a subspecies of the Purple Swamphen but then started a self-improvement program and ended up as a full species.

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