Magnificent Frigatebird Blog reports that Mark Obmascik’s The Big Year is being turned into a movie starring Owen Wilson, Dustin Hoffman, and Jack Black.  Now this could be interesting…

The international petition against illegal hunting in Malta which we highlighted last week has received over 22,000 signatures in just one week. “Although the BirdLife partnership is primarily targeting its members with this petition and it has been only a week since we launched it, support is pouring in from all corners of the [...]

Conservation Measures for Falco eleonorae in Greece is a concise and very interesting website which includes a Google Earth map overlaid with the surprisingly different routes taken by four migrating Eleonora’s Falcons flying from Greece to Madagascar. The site is in English which makes everything a lot easier to follow for most of us I’m [...]

Does the fact that we just lived through the second-hottest year on record and the hottest decade on record mean anything to you?  Or will you keep sticking your head in the increasingly-hot sand?  Granted, a single year’s or a single decade’s numbers aren’t solid evidence of anthropogenic global warming but please shut up about [...]

A message from Tim Cleeves of Slender-billed Curlew fame: “The first of Ann Cleeves’ Shetland books, RAVEN BLACK, will be BBC Radio 4’s afternoon play on January 23rd (14.30-15.30). Dramatised by Iain Finlay MacLeod, it also has music by Chris Stout. If you miss the broadcast you can get it from the BBC website [...]

…but there is a new claim of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker sighting, this one with a picture.  Unfortunately, all that has been released so far is a press release.  I guess we’ll have to wait to see what it is a picture of…

…no, we haven’t forgotten you. We’re close to launching a whole stack of interesting give-aways, including a wonderful children’s bird book that Mike reviewed last December, B is for Bufflehead, Laura Erickson’s new fact-packed “The Bird Watching Answer Book“, and many, many more. The best 25USD value on the internet? It could well be, yes…

We here at 10,000 Birds are unsure how today became Penguin Awareness Day (though some jingoists think it’s National Penguin Awareness Day) but here we are, being aware of penguins.  Enjoy Charlie’s marvelous photos of Motherly Love Penguin-Style and remember the sad day when Silo and Scrappy broke up.

A total of 15 Spoon-billed Sandpipers Eurynorhynchus pygmeus were sighted between Jan 14 -18 wintering along the south-east coast of Bangladesh. Thirteen were found in three different sites of Sonadia, Cox’s Bazar and two were seen in Bodormokam, Teknaf. The search for this Critically Endangered shorebird will be continued throughout this winter in Bangladesh. (With [...]

No, we haven’t either, but it sounds really intriguing. 21 exclusive tracks that are “a showcase for the finest in contemporary post-classical composition, idiosyncratic folksong and pastoral soundscaping” - all on an album made to create awareness of BirdLife International and the problems facing migratory birds! Check out the brilliant design of this release at [...]

Which offer would that be? The one the wonderful Wren announced on her blog when she said she’d GIVE AWAY at her own expense four memberships to the equally wonderful 10,000 Birds Conservation Club, that’s which one. You’ve a mere 12 hours or so to get on over there and perhaps win FREE entry to [...]

Apparently alligators and birds share a breathing mechanism which may have helped their ancestors dominate Earth more than 200 million years ago. Research published in the journal Science found that like birds, in alligators air flows in one direction: the same research suggests that all dinosaurs, herbivores like Triceratops and carnivores like Tyrannosaurus, had bird-like [...]

One of the world’s ‘least known birds’, the Large-billed Reed Warbler Acrocephalus orinus, has been found breeding in Afghanistan. The first specimen was discovered in India in 1867, with more than a century elapsing before Phil Round identified a single bird in Thailand in 2006. “This is great news from a little-known species from a [...]

Could, in 2010, a new bird species be spotted from a walkway though a rainforest? Well, it’s happened in Borneo where Leeds University biologist Richard Webster saw the first ‘Spectacled Flowerpecker’ from a canopy walkway 35m above ground. The bird was ‘identified’ as new from the photographs he took. My first reaction was “jammy s*d”, [...]

…has gotten a bit easier to find.  The archives of The Kingbird, the quarterly journal of the New York State Ornithological Association, are now online and searchable.  So go explore the archives today even though some wonder how much we should believe.

In case you were among the hordes of fans who, like me, were left adrift when Jeff Bouton last stopped blogging, your grim gulag has ended. The hardest working digiscoper in the business is back with a new Leica Birding Blog. Check it out!

Birders have known for a while that the Arctic Tern Sterna paradisaea travels further and sees more hours of daylight per year than other bird, but researchers using tiny tracking devices have discovered that far from going in a straight line from one end of the planet to the other Arctic Terns make huge ‘S’ [...]

Jochen, the quirky soul behind ‘Bell Tower Birding, recently wrote, “Sometimes I wonder why I even bother picking up a camera” and linked to a blog which probably makes all of us wonder why we bother. Awesomely beautiful photos abound. Why on earth is Fraser’s Birding Blog so low in the FatBirders toplist with posts [...]

After Mike’s spectacular visit to Jamaica last year we’re focussing more on this somewhat (from a world birder’s perspective) overlooked region. The Society for the Conservation and Study of Caribbean Birds (SCSCB) is holding a wetland workshop in Negril, Jamaica next month. One of the birds participants will be getting good views of is the [...]

The West Australian is reporting the sudden deaths of about 150 Carnaby’s Black-cockatoos Calyptorhynchus latirostris, an Endangered parrot endemic to south-western Australia. A severe heatwave is being blamed. Between the 1970s and 1990s, the species disappeared from over one third of its range and became split into small populations: the loss of so many birds [...]