You are browsing the archives of 2006 January.

January 2006 is a month that will be long remembered in 10,000 Birds history. This is the month where we finally answered that burning question, “What is a Seahawk?” Welcome, football fans everywhere!
Another highlight of the month was the Core Team excursion to the Bahamas. From Lakeview Drive on Paradise Island to our […]

Choshi Port, Chiba Prefecture, Japan.
30 January 2006
 

 
Birding options in mid-winter in the Tokyo/Narita region are fairly limited if you’re on a short trip - like northern Europe and the northern parts of North America there are relatively few passerines around (most are struggling to find shelter in what’s left of the equatorial rainforests […]

Though we had observed most of Paradise Island’s avifauna the previous day, we got great follow-up views as our trip progressed. The predominant gull we saw was Laughing, mixed in with a handful of Herring and Ring-billed. The prevalent raptor was American Kestrel, the Bahamian race possessed of a pure white belly. Collared doves and, […]

Tony Juniper (4th Estate, 2002)
In 1817 Dr Johan Baptist Ritter von Spix set sail from Gibraltar on the start of what would be an arduous and debilitating journey to Brazil collecting birds. Two years later - in a vast peculiarly thorny area of woodland known locally as caatinga - he shot a long-tailed blue parrot. […]

Our first full day in the Bahamas was slated to be our big birding day. Having done a fair bit of research before setting out, I realized that we couldn’t possibly experience the best of New Providence birding on our own. We sought too many rarities with too small a window for success. So, I […]

The first bird Sara and I spotted in the Bahamas was the same species as our last in the United States, a House Sparrow as at home in the Nassau International Airport as its cousin was in JFK. The second bird we saw, a ubiquitous invasive that has overwhelmed this particular island, was a Eurasian […]

Black-faced Buntings Emberiza spodocehala personata
Narita, Chiba Prefecture, Japan29 January 2006
 

Male Black-faced Bunting E s personata
 

Male Black-faced Bunting E s personata
 

Immature Black-faced Bunting E s personata

 
All photographs copyright Charlie Moores.
 

When it’s a Spindalis species tanager, obviously!
Traveling these days is hardly the carefree, spontaneous, all-I-need-is-a-toothbrush-and-ten-bucks experience it used to be before I took up birding.  Now, every excursion is preceded by serious research into potential and target species, checklists, rare bird alerts, and trip reports.  But this intensive ornithological preparation is doubly beneficial: first, it […]

We’re just about at that point in the winter season where I start daydreaming about glorious, sun-drenched days of summers past. The source of some of my favorite tropical, or more accurately, Neotropical memories is the trip Sara and I took to Belize in July 2003. Though we embarked on a week’s worth of […]

Levaillant’s Cisticola Cisticola tinniens
Suikerbosrand Nature Reserve, Gauteng, South Africa. 11 January 2006
 
This Levaillant’s Cisticola - normally of species found in wet grassland and reedbeds - was photographed on the “Tourist Route” in Suikerbosrand NR in January 2006, in an area of rank grassland.

I was initially confused about its identity - primarily because I had never […]