Charlie has birded all over the world for twenty years. He has finally grown-up after years of having way too much fun and is now trying hard to be the writer/conservationist he's always said he wants to be. Blogging with 10,000 Birds is like chatting to hundreds of friends every day and suits him perfectly. Really - do birders get much more fortunate than this?

Just last month we posted a link to a report that highlighted how the trade in wild animals (including birds of course) is emptying Asia’s forests, creating what researchers are calling ‘empty forest syndrome’. Two news items today (one a post on Singapore’s excellent ‘Bird Ecology Study Group’ blog and one a report on Action [...]

The Cabo Rojo Salt Flats – a 500 ha National Wildlife Refuge within Puerto Rico’s Suroeste IBA – have been designated as the Caribbean’s first site of regional importance for shorebirds by the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network. The Salt Flats support over 5% of the Caribbean breeding population of ‘Snowy’ Plover Charadrius alexandrinus tenuirostris [...]

The Important Bird Areas (IBAs) of three of Brazil’s most diverse areas are now covered in a new publication Important Bird Areas in Brazil: Part II – Amazon, Cerrado and Pantanal. Of 237 Brazilian IBAs now identified, only 21% are protected, 39% are partially protected, and the remaining 40% have no official protection at all. [...]

So, there I am, writing a post about the coming Spring, when I realise that in an unplanned but happy example of coordination with New York, Corey has gone and written about exactly the same thing from his own perspective. And he’s banging on about the weather too! Discussing the weather is a human condition [...]

Rather splendidly a rare mining bee, Andrena marginata, could help thwart plans to build nearly 200 homes in part of Scotland’s magnificent Cairngorms National Park. There shouldn’t be plans to build homes in the ecologically-rich Cairngorms NP in the first place, but if a mining bee can halt Muir Homes in their clodhopping tracks maybe [...]

 
The World Parrot Refuge is an educational facility that provides a “Home for Life” for previously owned pet parrots, and is operated by the “For the Love Of Parrots Refuge Society” (FLOPRS).

The Refuge has over 700 parrots (all previously owned pets or ex-breeding stock, whose owners could no longer care for them), a dedicated [...]

One of the most inspirational stories I’ve ever written about concerns an Italian researcher named Pierfrancesco Micheloni, who has devoted a great part of his adult life protecting a massive wintering swallow roost at Ebbaken Boje, a region of eastern Nigeria’s Cross River State (at 06° 17? N; 8° 55? E) close to the Afi [...]

I reviewed the magnificent, splendid, wonderful (insert your own laudatory adjective) ‘Collins Bird Guide 2nd Edition’ last week, saying amongst other things that

The first edition changed our conception of how good a field-guide could be forever, and an updated, revised, and enlarged second edition that is an improvement on the first really should be considered [...]

I’ll declare my interest straight away: I volunteer for the Great Bustard Group and really, really want the species to breed commonly in England again. ‘Great’ news then (see what I did there?) that the first display of 2010 was filmed and posted on the GBG website yesterday. Shake those feathers, young man, and may [...]

The politics around whaling stinks like a rotting corpse. While the world knows (but is apparently unwilling to act on the information) that Japan is the ‘Vieux Bologne’ of the whaling world, it turns out that Denmark is its European equivalent, being to European whaling what Malta is to the illegal hunting of migrant birds. [...]

Lat year, as I have endlessly blathered on about (with plenty more to come), Jo, Evie, and I moved into a little cottage on the beautiful Great Chalfield estate in north-west Wiltshire. Possibly the best move of my life? As Homer Simpson might say, the best move of my life so far!

We’ve adapted quite easily [...]

Hopeful news for the future of the Critically Endangered Siberian Crane Grus leucogeranus. Supported by the Global Environment Facility and implemented by the International Crane Foundation through the UN Environment Programme, a joint project by China, Iran, Kazakhstan and Russia will use a ‘flyway’ approach to protect the remaining 3000 - 3500 birds.

Like to win a brand new hardback copy of Europe’s best field guide (see the review right here)? I thought so. If you’re a member of the 10,000 Birds Conservation Club you’ll have the chance next week. If you’re not, er - you won’t. So join already, or miss out on this and piles of [...]

About three years ago the announcement came that the Collins Bird Guide - universally recognised as the finest bird field-guide in Europe (and, apologies to David Sibley, in my opinion the best field-guide in the world full stop) - was to be updated and published as a second edition. No dates were given but it [...]

Incredibly a new study based on research by Professor Barbara Block, who tracked more than 150 Great Whites using satellite and acoustic tracking devices, shows that numbers had dropped below the 3,500
tigers that exist in the wild. Numbers have dropped by 90% in 20 years mainly from illegal fishing, but also from being hit by [...]

To quote from a report in the Observer newspaper, “More than 35 million animals were legally exported from the region over the past decade…and hundreds of millions more could have been taken illegally. Almost half of those traded were seahorses and more than 17 million were reptiles. About 1 million birds and 400,000 mammals [...]

Charleen Turner, a very regular 10,000 Birds reader, has mailed me a really striking photo she took in Heckscher Park in Huntington, Long Island NY USA on February 3, 2010.

Clearly it’s a goose, and I think I’m on fairly safe ground if I say that it’s a hybrid between a Canada Goose and a domestic/feral [...]

Tests show three California Condors found dead in Arizona last month died because they ingested lead pellets while feeding on carrion. Az has a voluntary lead-free hunting program in condor areas - which patently isn’t working. It’ll be made mandatory soon, right? Wrong. The NRA are planning to defend hunter’s rights to use lead “against [...]

As regular visitors to 10,000 Birds will know we champion BirdLife Malta whenever we possibly can. Some of those regular visitors may wonder why: after all Malta is a fairly small speck of land in the Mediterranean Sea and surely not much of a problem compared with, say, deforestation or the pet trade.

Malta is indeed [...]

It’s about time we had another give-away - it’s been, what, at least a fortnight since we launched the competition to win one of three sets of ALL FIVE of Kenn Kaufman’s ‘Field Guides’ (there’s still two days to get your answers in by the way). So how about I relinquish my personal review copy [...]