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The Medicine Bird

10,000 Birds

The white redtail couldn’t fly because she’d spent somewhere between 14 and 24 hours on the ground in freezing rain, encased in mud, and was suffering from capture myopathy, a sometimes-fatal condition induced by stress. If all her other toes eventually function perfectly, she could still hunt without that one non-essential talon.

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Birding Tabin, Sabah, Borneo

10,000 Birds

In a review of Gorman’s book on woodpeckers, the reviewer (Koenig) suggests a woodpecker big year, as he reasons that the chance to encounter a wave of Buff-rumped Woodpeckers in his (presumably North American) backyard is very slim … Not only humans suffer from Harry Potter books.