It appears that our friends at the College of William and Mary are on a roll. Hot off the epic expedition of Winnie the Whimbrel comes a fascinating study that helps promote biodiversity in the only context most people can understand: human self interest. In essence, a healthy, diverse bird population is also good [...]

Sharpe’s Longclaw Macronyx sharpei
Magumu (north of Nairobi), Kenya. June 2008
 
Occasionally I get a ’sharp’ reminder that while I’m flying around the world having a great time and building up a reasonable year-list, some of the very birds that I’m fortunate enough to go looking for are declining rapidly and are seemingly heading unstoppably towards [...]

I’m just back from a superb two days birding in Cape Town, South Africa (just two days? For those who don’t know I work for an airline - I come, I go, what can I say…) with Brian Vanderwalt. It’s going to take me the best part of next week to work through all the [...]

After a few hours birding on the morning of May 15th at the excellent Marievale Bird Sanctuary I headed over to one of my favourite places anywhere - the Suikerbosrand Nature Reserve. Just a thirty minute drive from Marievale, Suikerbosrand NR protects a superb area of the highveld sandwiched between farmland and townships, an undulating, [...]

Right. Hands up all those of you fed-up with Mike and Corey’s posts on tens of thousands of wood-warblers migrating through various parks and forests in New York. Anyone? Do I see a hand, any hand…just one would do…how about you sir, over in the corner? No? There must be someone…? I guess not - [...]

I started a recent post (Magic Hedge, Chicago) with the following paragraph: “There are few times of the year more exciting in the North American birding calendar than the middle weeks of May. Why should this be? The spring sales in birding stores perhaps? The best time to get a bargain on new binoculars? Maybe [...]

So here I am, innocently trying to figure out why we need both Earth Day and Arbor Day in the same week when yet another shred of my ecological innocence is torn asunder. No, it wasn’t the revelation that Arbor Day always falls on the last Friday of April in the U.S. that horrifies me. [...]

I’d be remiss if I didn’t wish you all, on behalf of the 10,000 Birds team, a very happy Earth Day. However, I’d also be remiss if I didn’t take the time to point out that Earth Day is not at all about the Earth. Earth Day is about us. George Carlin said it best:
…there [...]

For the birds I saw in Meadows Park in Temecula, California, to count for my Anti-Global Warming Big Year I need to offset the carbon dioxide emitted by my traveling there. Fortunately, there exists on the web a wide array of carbon calculators to figure out exactly how much carbon was produced getting me [...]

As regular readers may remember I recently announced my plans to do a birding “Big Year” in 2008 (see ““The Old Friends, New Friends World Tour 2008″). Everything is progressing towards making a flying start (see what I did there? No? I work for an airline…’flying start’? Oh well, I tried) to 2008, but there [...]

A little while ago I read a report about a small town in South Devon called Modbury, that in a project driven by Rebecca Hosking (a freelance camerawoman with the BBC Natural History Unit) had become completely “plastic-bag free”: in other words in a first for the UK local traders had all agreed not to [...]

We often mention the Ramsar Convention (Ramsar) on 10,000 Birds (most often in the failure of South Korea - a Ramsar signatory - to recognise the Saemangeum wetlands as a Ramsar site, and most recently in our Latest News post about BirdLife’s “Think Pink” campaign to protect Tanzania’s Lake Natron), but I would guess that [...]

 
Organisation: Buglife - Conserving the small things that run the world
 
Who are we? Buglife -The Invertebrate Conservation Trust is a registered UK charity and the first organisation in Europe devoted to the conservation of all invertebrates. Buglife was first registered in December 2000 and its formation was announced with widespread support from the [...]

Will at The Nightjar, who enjoys the coveted status of official friend of 10,000 Birds, just completed an excellent series analyzing how American farms have historically affected avifauna. While he concerns himself primarily with agricultural ecosystems prevalent from the nation’s bread-basket to our mid-Atlantic coast, Will’s treatment of grassland birds and the role [...]

In mid-October, the Cape May City Council voted unanimously to amend a beach management plan keep their Trap, Neuter and Release (TNR) program for cats operating despite pressure by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to adopt a plan that would have eliminated TNR. The USFWS had proposed a plan to protect endangered birds like [...]

It’s hardly a stretch to say that the American commons encompasses a massive wealth of natural resources that accrue incalculable benefits not just to the citizenry of the United States but possibly to the entire human race. The challenge in protecting said commons lies in the adjective “incalculable,” a dilemma rooted in the [...]

According to The Drinking Bird, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, who you can contact via email here, hasn’t yet signed (and will probably veto) a bill to ban lead bullets, which are accidentally eaten by critically-endangered California Condors. More information at the Center for Biological Diversity.

I don’t often make “birding statements” claiming absolute certainty as there are just too many variables and (thankfully) too many different people birding to be sure of anything really - but I think I can say without fear of correction that every birder has a “wish list” of birds they’d really, really like to see [...]

Rats are responsible for more extinctions than any creature except humans. Biologists in Alaska are trying to extirpate rats from the soon-to-be-inaptly-named Rat Island, in the Aleutians. Good news for seabirds!

An important anniversary passed quietly by recently. It was 93 years ago this month that the last individual of what had been estimated to be the world’s most abundant bird died. On September 1st 1914 ‘Martha’, the last surviving Passenger Pigeon in existence, was found dead in her cage in the Cincinatti Zoo. The following [...]