In July last year I read an online article (in the July 27th 2008 edition of the Charlotte Observer) which concerned a visit made by Karen Cheek Justice, founder of the Parrot University to the Al Wabra Wildlife Preservation in Qatar where she worked with the collection of Spix’s Macaws. I emailed Karen the day [...]

When the last Spix’s Macaw Cyanopsitta spixii disappeared from the wild in October 2000, most observers who knew anything about the species were ready to write it into history. The by now iconic blue macaw was held in captivity in small numbers, but many were illegally obtained birds poached from the last substantial population in [...]

A few days ago I wrote about the Puerto Rican Parrot Amazona vittata, an island endemic which had come perilously close to extinction through a combination of habitat destruction and hunting. Numbers of both wild and aviary birds are now slowly being built up by skilled and dedicated aviculturalists in Puerto Rico and there is [...]

As Dr Jamie Gilardi, exec-director of the World Parrot Trust said in his interview with us for Parrot Month, one of the greatest threats facing parrots today is habitat destruction. Most of us probably think of the Amazon basin when we think about deforestation on a huge scale, but sadly tropical forests across the world [...]

Last month we posted a short ‘trail’ for a theme we were planning for January about parrots (at Next Month is Parrot Month on 10,000 Birds). We’re not just posting about parrots all month (we’ll have the usual mix of general posts too of course), but it’s time now to expand that ‘trail’ and look [...]

Next month (January 2009) we’re going to be trying something new here on 10,000 Birds by spending 30 days (no-one writes on New Years Day do they?) concentrating on one ‘theme’ in particular: yes, we’ll be looking closely at parrots (the clue was probably in the phrase “Parrot Month” in this post’s title?).

We won’t [...]

We don’t normally go in for wholesale reproduction of press-releases here on 10,000 Birds (wherever possible we like to write our own posts), but the saga of the Lesser Flamingos breeding on an artificial island at Kamfers Dam in southern South Africa is one we’re very interested in (see eg here) so we’ll make an [...]

The most eco-ignorant quotation of the week (and in the death-throes of the Bush Administration we should expect more than a few to come our way) comes courtesy of the agency in charge of over-seeing the immoral and short-sighted destruction of what was perhaps the most-important wetland in the whole of the Yellow Sea - [...]

Regular readers will know (because they helped pay for it!) that 10,000 Birds recently set up the “Small African Fellowship for Conservation” which helps fund a young Kenyan researcher called Dominic Kamau Kimani. Dominic (with Luca Borghesio, the Friends of Kinangop Plateau, and Dr Muchai Muchane of the National Museums of Kenya) is trying to [...]

As part of the ongoing co-operation between 10,000 Birds and the teams working on the ground in Kenya to plot the distribution of the Sharpe’s Longclaw, a pipit-like species confined to the Kenyan Highlands close to Nairobi, Luca Borgesio has sent through a field report from the core of this Endangered bird’s world-range. We are [...]

When I was at Singapore’s wonderful (and, as more mangroves are cut down, increasingly important) Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve a few days ago, I came across a Milky Stork Mycteria cinerea feeding quietly in a low-tide channel in the middle of the reserve. Like (I suspect) many readers of 10,000 Birds I knew very little [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Nick Sly is an ornithologist, recently graduated from Cornell and cast into the real world. He is currently located in Venezuela, in his first field job out of school, helping a Cornell PhD student, Karl, with his dissertation on vocal communication in Green-rumped Parrotlets. This population of parrotlets is located on one of the many [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Our appeal to raise funds for the inspirational young Kenyan Dominic Kimani (photo left) is drawing to a close, and as the ‘Chip In’ widget in the sidebar shows thanks to a small number of our conservation-minded readers we’ve collected more than the 2000 USDollars we were aiming for (when I wrote this you’d [...]

Less than a month ago 10,000 Birds launched a fund-raising project aimed at providing funding - in the form of the “Small African Fellowship for Conservation” (SAFC) - to a young Kenyan called Dominic Kamau Kimani who comes from the Kinangop Plateau near Nairobi. The Kinangop Plateau is the core area of the Endangered and [...]

More fun to support “The Small African Fellowship for Conservation” our serious campaign to help save the Sharpe’s Longclaw (the what now? click right here to find out). I asked last week for your ’snarky’ or otherwise captions to the photo below (me and a whale on the kind of diet plan that most [...]

Our campaign (in partnership with the National Musems of Kenya) to raise funds for the “Small African Fellowship for Conservation” - in essence to support the admirable Dominic Kamau Kamani in his struggle to promote awareness amongst his own community of the threats facing the Endangered Sharpe’s Longclaw - is going very well, thanks to [...]