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How I dipped the Horned Grebe

10,000 Birds

In the Old World, Horned (Slavonian) Grebe breeds in a wide belt stretching from Scandinavia to Kamchatka and it spends winters along sea coasts, from Japan to China and from Norway to France, plus the Adriatic and the Black Sea (west and east of the Balkans, respectively). As a consequence, this species is only a rare vagrant in Serbia.

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The Domestic Turkey and the First Thanksgiving

10,000 Birds

The very first thing we notice about this large member of the Galliformes is that there is a wild version and a domestic version, and although the two are rather different, they are both given the same species name, Meleagris gallopavo. This is not entirely unknown among domestic animals, but many domesticates have no living wild version.

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The Mysterious Starling – “Killed Hopping About in a Tree”

10,000 Birds

Not only that, but another species of starling was already called Calornis inornata.). To confuse things even further a later voyage to the Cook Islands (Cook’s second voyage) resulted in a drawing of a starling by Georg Foster which some tried to say was the same species as Bloxam’s bird. Most species go extinct.

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