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Stuck in the middle (of the AOU/COS meeting)

10,000 Birds

Other hardy souls signed up for an early morning “Ostrich Run” 5k, with the prizes beinging–you guessed it–actual ostrich eggs. Emptied of their contents, of course.). A few days later, I was the assistant (a glorified gofer , if you will) for a morning-long session on migration.

San Diego 178
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Some Ingenuity Can Go a Long Way

10,000 Birds

Among birds the Egyptian Vulture uses rocks to crack Ostrich eggs, the New Caledonian Crow and Woodpecker Finch (one of several Darwin Finches of the Galapagos Islands), uses sticks to extract grubs from inside a branch. In general, fish will swim to investigate anything that falls on the water hoping the object might be prey.

Fish 163
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My Top 12 Wildlife Watching Moments

10,000 Birds

I remember, several times while motionlessly surveying birds, I found myself being investigated by Striped Field Mice , who would dare to come to sniff me. Today is the United Nations World Wildlife Day, a time to celebrate and raise awareness of the living world around us. 10000birds.com/is-my-rhino-still-alive.htm.

Wildlife 182
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The Feather Thief: A Book Review

10,000 Birds

He roots the theft in the history of collecting bird skins, in the brief life history of Edwin Rist, in the secretive world of classic fly tying, and in his own efforts to follow up on a police investigation that got the man but not all of the loot. Here it is as typed out in The Feather Thief (p.

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Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple Feather–A Book Review

10,000 Birds

The purple feather of the title is an ostrich plume (now housed in the Museum of London), a symbol of Emmeline’s crusade and personal style (if you saw the 2015 film Suffragette , Meryl Streep, playing Pankhurst, is wearing a hat full purple feathers).

Industry 120
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The complete guide to Dodo relatives, living and dead

10,000 Birds

Not, as Linneaus thought, an ostrich, nor even, as later scientists concluded, a distant cousin of pigeons deserving of family rank, it was an honest-to-goodness pigeon, deeply embedded within the family Columbidae. The Dodo ( Raphus cucullatus ) — that towering icon of modern anthropogenic extinctions — was a pigeon.