Charlie works for an airline and has birded all over the world for twenty years. He wants to be a writer, and thinks no-one would believe his life could be so charmed if he didn't take photos of as many of the birds he sees as possible. Blogging with 10,000 Birds fits his aims, needs, and insecurities perfectly. Really - do birders get much more fortunate than this?

The Common Buzzard Buteo buteo and the Red-tailed Hawk Buteo jamaicensis are both their respective regions’ commonest ‘buteos’ and are obviously closely-related, but - in theory - they should never meet: B. buteo breeds (in various forms) right across Eurasia while B. jamaicensis is equally widespread but is found across the other side of the [...]

Yes, you got it, these protected birds were targeted illegally by hunters and one was killed - despite the presence of three police units and BirdLife Malta members! The arrogance of Malta’s ‘hunters’ is breathtaking and described by Birdlife’s Dr Andre Raine thus: “In my career, I have never seen poachers being so blunt in [...]

Thanks to the fantastic efforts of a coalition of international conservation groups (and in particular Birds Korea) the decline of Asia’s rare shorebirds due to the ill-thought out reclamation scheme at Saemangeum is still making headline news - as this report on Reuters today proves. Congratulations to all involved…

It’s pouring with rain again here in the UK (and I’ve been feeling absolutely exhausted after a bout of ‘instant weight loss the viral way’ which has seen me tied to our bathroom for the last few days), so in the absence of any birding here today I thought I’d post a few photos instead [...]

You know, if someone had asked me last year whether bloggers can actually make a difference I might have been a little equivocal - after all, despite the mushrooming growth in nature/bird-related blogs the number of animals and plants in danger of extinction rises every time the data are recalculated. However, after our first foray [...]

In a welcome moveEBay Inc will ban trading in ivory products from next year after IFAW found over 4,000 elephant ivory listings by sellers. Elephants are protected under CITES and EBay had (unwittingly) become a major market-place for illegal trades.

In just five years two Santa Cruz-based researchers found 3000 dead Loggerhead Turtles (an Endangered species) along a 43km stretch of Mexican beach - and they blame (and no surprises here whatsoever) poor fishing practices. We’re heading for the “Silent Seas” folks…

Yesterday I posted a photo (reproduced below) taken at the RSPB’s Radipole Lake Reserve (Dorset, UK) and asked whether you could find any Mediterranean Gulls Larus melanocephalus in amongst the Black-headed Gulls. Our great friend Jochen - whom we’ve seen virtually nothing of in the last few months - popped up within seconds and (correctly) [...]

Up to a million Tree Swallows have been roosting in a cornfield in California, and the local news station has a video report. It’s not quite Planet Earth but definitely worth watching.

Yesterday I posted some photos of an adult non-breeding Mediterranean Gull Larus melanocephalus I took at Radipole Lake in Dorset (right here in fact). Now that we’re all experts at Med Gull ID (yes, that was irony as I still find them pretty tough sometimes), how about a quick quiz?

I took this photo on the [...]

The genetically distinct (and rapidly declining) population of Alaska’s Cook Inlet Beluga has finally been listed as “endangered” under the Endangered Species Act. It’s only taken eleven years incidentally - delays caused not only by the stonewalling Bush administration, but the governor of Alaska …

A bird that (on 10,000 Birds anyway) often gets mentioned as a potential vagrant to North America is the Mediterranean Gull Larus melanocephalus*, a species which has undertaken a westerly expansion from its core breeding range (which is still almost entirely in Europe) since the 1950s. From Hungary, where it was breeding regularly by 1953, [...]

The BirdLife International website has details of the banding of a young male Golden-cheeked Warbler caught at a banding station in Montecristo National Park, northern El Salvador. The article includes a rather mouthwatering in-hand photo of the bird…

As I wrote on my first post about my amazing day-trip to Nairobi last weekend (see Life Changing Moments in the Kenyan Highlands) one of the highlights was a visit to the Njabini wool-spinning workshop run by the Friends of the Kinangop Plateau* with Nature Kenya (the Birdlife International partner in Kenya).

The Njabini Wool-spinning [...]

Enjoy your filet-o-fish (TM) while you can because numbers of Alaska Pollock, a staple of the U.S. fast food industry, have shrunk 50 percent from last year to a record low and unsustainable levels of capture is putting the world’s largest food fishery on the brink of collapse, Greenpeace has reported.

I’m just back from Nairobi, Kenya after one of the most motivating and inspiring days I’ve had for many years. It’s going to take me a week or so to fully write-up everything that happened - which included speaking at a village school in the grasslands below the Aberdare Mountains, being made an honorary Kikuyu [...]

If you’ve ever fancied seeing the world’s wildlife you might want to hurry. On October 6th, the IUCN released the 2008 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species which lists a whopping 16,928 species threatened with extinction. Of these, 3,246 are Critically Endangered, 4,770 are Endangered and 8,912 are Vulnerable to extinction. 1,226 (or 12.4%) of [...]

Overfishing in the Mediterranean is driving the bluefin tuna rapidly towards extinction, with - it seems - the Italians especially landing far more than their quotas allow. Italy’s overfishing is blamed on a “lack of control, clandestine fishing boats…(and) a presence of organised crime”. The future looks bleak indeed for one of the ocean’s most [...]

I’m off to Kenya at the weekend for a very short trip, and I’m really looking forward to it. Why? Because despite the fact that I’ll only be spending about thirty hours in Kenya in total, this is the weekend I’m scheduled to meet up with Luca Borgesio and Dominic Kamau Kimani (and hopefully [...]

The beautiful Ortolan Bunting Emberiza hortulana is a fairly scarce summer visitor to southern Europe (parts of the Iberian Peninsula, southern France, and the Balkans), north into Scandinavia and Germany, and east as far as Mongolia. As much as 50% of the global population is found in Europe, and the entire population apparently winters south [...]