I am so excited about the announcement of Ted C. MacRae’s new beetle-based blog carnival,  An Inordinate Fondness that I delved into the vault for a special post for its inaugural issue on February 10. Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you… DUNG BEETLES!
Yes, only the best beetles know their way around a dollop of dung. Texas’ Rio [...]

Like much of the northern hemisphere the UK has been shivering during an unusually prolonged cold-snap, with temperatures falling well below freezing for days on end (no laughing now Clare, I know it gets waaay colder where you are but we’re not used to it here). However, I was driving back home at dusk on [...]

From BirdLife: “After a 3-year seabird risk assessment that found tuna and swordfish longline fishing has significant impacts on Atlantic seabird populations, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas failed to act at a recent meeting in Recife, Brazil”. No, I’m not at all surprised either…

I’ve raved about the birds (and beaches) of Jamaica, even highlighting the island’s lovely lizards, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how much I liked its leps. Jamaica offers predictably potent butterfly watching. For example, the island is swell for swallowtail butterflies, with a number of endemics including the largest swallowtail in the [...]

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the Common Marbled Carpet moth, a perplexingly varied little beast that though interesting because of its variability (and the effect that has on tyro mothers like myself) isn’t exactly what one might describe as ‘a looker’.

I said at the time that “many autumn moths here in [...]

Yes, I know we’re a bird blog (we are, we most certainly are) but the odd moth post can’t do any harm can it…?

Anyway, I thought the following series might be of interest for any birder in, eg, North America who thinks sparrows are tough, or European birder who thinks that sorting out autumn Chiffchaffs [...]

NMN banner - the Death’s Head Hawkmoth photo (sadly) isn’t mine!

 
Today (and yesterday) is (was) National Moth Night here in the UK, a two-night celebration of moths - surely some of the most under-appreciated insects on the planet. Everyone likes butterflies, right? But MOTHS?! Those dull things that fly into lights and get in your [...]

I spent my weekend in upstate New York with Daisy visiting my folks and we had a good old time eating far too much food, having far too much fun, and, somewhat unfortunately, considering some of them were of the biting variety, seeing far too many bugs.  The wet summer that has been the bane [...]

Sitting down to write this I’m keenly aware of Galicissa’s superb and very funny blog post on APOBPS (which is also possibly the first time in recorded history that Jochen has been beaten to the punch in the ’surreal treatment of a birding subject in a blog’ stakes!) but nevertheless, I intend to press on [...]

So, here I am, propped up in bed, my back spasmed again (the last time it was this bad I dropped my old blog and joined 10,000 Birds - so some good comes out of the pain eh?), it’s pouring with rain, and I was wondering whether anyone who visits 10,000 BIRDS would be interested [...]

Folks might remember that last year I did what I grandly called an Anti-Global Warming Big Year, the idea of which was was to see as many species as possible while burning as little carbon as possible.  To offset the carbon dioxide released from a flight to California and back from my home base in [...]

As I mentioned in my breakdown of the Birds of Chicken Inferno 2009, such as they were, moths were where the real action was. A number of lovely species appeared both night and day in great numbers, enough that eventually I had to put my beer down long enough to snap some shots. Apparently my [...]

When we were first being shown around our cottage by our potential landlord, Robert, he pointed out a large buddleia bush (a Buddleia davidii) in one corner of the garden and asked us not to cut it down. Apparently the last tenants had been a touch over-enthusiastic with the trimmers and Robert was a big [...]

Our Puerto Rico Month is almost over (having said that we’ll probably keep it going for a while yet as I’m really enjoying writing about an island I knew virtually nothing about and which turns out be so darn interesting!), and I’m extremely grateful to Mike aka Noflickster, author of the wonderful The Feather and [...]

Photo left copyright Karoline Mena (karomc80@yahoo.com)

Endemic to Puerto Rico and Vieques (and formerly recorded on the Virgin Islands) the rather lovely Puerto Rican Woodpecker Melanerpes portoricensis (Carpintero de Puerto Rico in Spanish) is one of four endemic species of the Melanerpes genus that occur in the Greater Antilles (the others being the Hispaniolan M. striatus, [...]

The Laughing Gull Larus (or Leucophaeus if you go by the 49th Supplement to the A.O.U. Check-list of North American Birds) atricilla, is a common, medium-sized gull of North and South America. It breeds on the Atlantic coast of North America, the Caribbean, and northern South America. Northernmost populations migrate further south in winter, and [...]

Which is better for the environment: a natural forest aeons old, or a new palm plantation on cleared ground? A major international study says palm oil plantations - which are replacing forests throughout Asia - reduce plant and animal diversity and do little to reduce carbon emissions. Who could have guessed…

I spent the morning in glorious sunshine (and the afternoon in a tropical storm!) at the wonderful Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve in northern Singapore (which being a small island isn’t far from southern Singapore in fact which makes access nice and easy…). Sungei Buloh protects one of the last patches of mangroves and tidal mudflat [...]

Monarch Butterflies, as they do every fall, are heading south for the winter.  Along the coast one can see pretty big numbers of them, especially on days when wind out of the north carries them to the shore.  I am always amazed by long migrations, but it is usually birds I think of when considering [...]

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 [...]