You are browsing the archives of 2007 June.

Wow, what a historic month for 10,000 Birds. The big news is that 10,000 Birds is now a group blog! Charlie Moores and Corey Finger are in the house which guarantees that you will always find something exciting, insightful, artistic, or amusing at this site. Are you as psyched as I am?
What else happened this [...]

“Gulls of the Americas”,
Steve Howell and Jon Dunn (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)
Identifying gulls - particularly 1st and 2nd year birds - is one of birding’s most difficult skills to master, as anyone who’s ever stepped onto a beach in eg California, Kuwait, or Korea will know all too well. The variation in plumage seems endless. The [...]

Nature versus nurture? Not so much. In this NPR interview, Sarah Woolley, a professor of behavioral neuroscience, discusses how her studies of finch songs indicate that the two are inextricably linked.

As a person who is still relatively new to the world of birding I feel that I have made some pretty big strides in figuring out the wide variety of birds that I see and hear. I might not identify them all but I definitely manage to put a name to the vast majority that [...]

Passion for anything, even an activity as innocuous as bird watching, has the tendency to inspire ugly feelings. Jealousy seems to be a hazard of this avocation, or perhaps that’s just me. Reading about birding excursions in Cameroon or Tasmania or Britain or even Wisconsin can turn my brown eyes green. Basically, any account of [...]

Hybrids. Scary chimera between unrelated species, or slightly odd-looking crosses of what are in effect close relatives? Well, in biology there are two distinct meanings of the word ‘hybrid’: the first is “the result of interbreeding between two animals or plants of different species”, and the second is “crosses between populations, breeds or cultivars within [...]

I spend a fair bit of time surfing and flicking through various Bird Fora/Forums, and it’s striking how many queries there are from birders all over the world who’ve been completely stumped by finding an odd duck on their local pond or marsh that doesn’t seem to resemble anything in their bird books.

We’ve all been [...]

Birdchick does a great job of exploring the National Birmingham Roller Club’s tension with real nature.

A story in pictures…roll over the images for pop-up captions.

Once the female House Sparrow was driven off the males turned to fighting each other:

Too bad for the House Sparrows that a European Starling was waiting in the wings:

All of the pictures were taken in Kissena Park in Queens last weekend. And, no, I [...]

Yesterday Mike wrote a great post explaining the thinking behind opening up 10,000 Birds into a collaborative blog. In that post he said some extremely flattering things about me, including that “I’m sure most of my readers know Charlie Moores”…Well, I’m not so sure about that, so before I start ‘normal’ blogging how’s about a [...]