You are browsing the archives of 2007 April.

Patrick has a vicious one on New World birds over at The Hawk Owl’s Nest. I, of course, was stumped!

The brave, mature hunters of Malta (motto “No bird too small to blow apart, no bird too rare to kill” perhaps?) have reacted like spoilt little toddlers to BirdLife Malta’s campaign to get them to grow up and accept that illegally slaughtering migratory birds year after year is just not acceptable, ie by not growing [...]

It’s spring - at last - and migratory birds are returning from their winter quarters: and once again the thugs of the Maltese hunting community are out in force to meet the ones unfortunate enough to overfly the most notorious and shameful territory in Europe.

Unrestrained by legislation (the EU Birds Directive), public opinion, or any [...]

Some years ago I thought that birds were where “natural history” started and birds were where “natural history” finished. Yes, there were Tigers and Snow Leopards, I wanted to Save the Whale, those glossy-red mushrooms that could kill you from across the room were pretty cool in a morbid kind of way, hairy spiders and [...]

April 21 - 29 is National Wildlife Week. It’s also the span of the First Annual Blogger Bioblitz. If you are a blogger but haven’t yet made a commitment to partake in this communal census of flora and fauna, the time is now. Not only is citizen science essential to understanding ecological trends, but [...]

Great-tailed Grackle
I couldn’t decide what species to highlight this weekend so I decided to pick a day to highlight instead.  All three non-quiz pictures were taken the same day, January 1 of this year, at the Wild Animal Park in Escondido, California.  At the end of the post is a shorebird ID Quiz.  I’ll let you all guess [...]

Savannah Sparrow at Papscanee
Getting out of work a bit early today was perhaps the most wonderful thing to happen all week.  It finally felt like spring, with temperatures in the sixties and this wierd yellow-white object that gave off lots of light and warmth from the clear blue sky.  When I asked someone about it [...]

A birder’s travels and travails can be tricky, sometimes even hazardous, because we navigate according to two powerful, but opposing stars: ENDEMIC and EXTRALIMITAL. We set forth to enjoy beloved indigenous birds only to find ourselves dashed against the rocks yet again in pursuit of some misplaced mega-rarity. Endemic species, the ones native to a [...]

Bill of the Birds is running a very interesting poll.

This seems an optimal time to repost last year’s birdPod review for three important reasons: 1. They’ve renamed this wondrous device the birdJam; 2. Spring is the ideal season to invest in such a handy tool for birdsong identification; and 3. I’ve joined their affiliate program and thus will benefit from purchases made [...]