article thumbnail

Wonderful Wedgies

10,000 Birds

But it also occurs in the Indian Ocean, from Aldabra near Madagascar to Western Australia. Here a bunch of them are investigating one such burrow. The species ranges widely across the Pacific, as its scientific name suggests, from the Revillagigedo Islands off Mexico to the Japanese Bonin Islands to New South Wales in Australia.

Albatross 170
article thumbnail

Birding Greece: Black and white world

10,000 Birds

It really puzzles me, why they go all the way across the Sahara and Eastern Africa to overwinter as far as Madagascar, instead of staying somewhere closer, in continental Africa? Madagascar must have separated from Africa long before they evolved. Eleonora’s Falcons are migrants themselves. How old are they as a species?

Greece 224
article thumbnail

The complete guide to Dodo relatives, living and dead

10,000 Birds

One of these clades holds a diversity of Old World species in several distinct groups, including an Australasian clade, the green-pigeons, the emerald- and wood-doves, the imperial-pigeons and fruit-doves (favorites of mine), and the subjects of our investigation today, the 15 known members of the Raphini. It gave up flight long, long ago.