The most recent BirdLife Cyprus newsletter had a feature article that was just too good to pass up comment and elaboration on: Our avian forest gems… (English names emphasized by me) Cyprus, although only 16% of its land mass is covered with forest, hosts more than 34 species of forest birds, 15 all-year residents, eight [...]

The Loch of Strathbeg reserve in Aberdeenshire Scotland has begun to use eight rare ‘Konick’ horses to manage and improve it’s wetland habitats for birds. The breed is a direct descendent of the Tarpan, a wild forest horse driven to extinction in central Europe in the late 19th century. Hardier than their domestic cousins, konik [...]

Whooping crane reintroduction efforts on the Eastern Flyway involve raising young whooping cranes and accompanying them on their migratory flights with ultralight gliders. The USFWS designated the whooping cranes in this population “nonessential and experimental.”  So, one might surmise, it’s OK if they get shot by hunters thinking they’re sandhill cranes? It gives one to [...]

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service desperately needs your feedback as they craft a new vision for our National Wildlife Refuge System. More important, they WANT your feedback! The USFWS and the National Wildlife Refuge Association are spearheading a public engagement effort asking we the people to share and vote on ideas that will shape [...]

I bet you do! I recently heard from Chris Kirkby, the Managing Director and Principal Investigator at Asociacion Fauna Forever, a Peruvian not-for-profit organisation based in Lima and Puerto Maldonado, about a series of bird-banding workshops being held this June and November in the rainforests of Tambopata in south-eastern Peru. Longtime readers of 10,000 Birds may [...]

U.S. Route 12 passes through Idaho and Montana as a two-lane undivided highway snaking along the Clearwater and Lochsa rivers, shaded by the trees and cliffs of two national forests. It takes tourists to hot springs and historic markers, bicyclists and motorcyclists on the ride of their lives, locals to the skiing and sport fishing [...]

While in recent weeks I’ve Britain has a bit of a controversy over the Songbird Survival proposal, Cyprus too has had an issue with Corvid shooting. A couple years ago in fact, I’d done some research on this and found some interesting information… From a 2003 article in the journal Zeitschrift für Jagdwissenschaft (Science magazine [...]

Just about everyone likely to read this post probably agrees: Ambelopoulia poaching is a problem and even an ecological disaster. Where opinions might differ here at 10,000 Birds is why this illegal bird trapping is, well, illegal or a problem. In fact, from responses I’ve seen here and there from trappers themselves, it’s perceived by [...]

As some of you might have noticed, it was Wikipedia’s birthday a week and a half ago. Ten years since Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger had the unlikely idea that letting the public write their own encyclopaedia might produce anything other than garbage, and were so taken with the notion that they actually made it [...]

On Friday, January 21, the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency voted to table the proposal to open season on sandhill cranes for two years. More than 100 people packed the Nashville hall to present hunting arguments both pro and con, but the con’s carried the day, buoyed by the thousands of letters, emails, calls and comments [...]

Feeder fillers everywhere, we salute you! From Suet balls to seed cakes, not forgetting fresh water everyday, you maintain a vital lifeline for birds and animals when the weather gets tough. Of course nobody expects any thanks or praise for this beneficence, just the joy of seeing birds visiting your feeder and  surviving through ’til spring is [...]

Today, January 20, a public meeting is convening in Nashville, Tennessee, to decide the fate of anywhere from 300 to 2,199 Sandhill Cranes, depending on which Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency estimate you look at. In two previous posts, I’ve presented Tennessee’s proposal to be the first state in the Eastern Flyway to hunt Sandhill Cranes. [...]

Six posts over seven weeks may seem a lot to devote to the wrecking of New Zealand’s bird fauna. Perhaps it is, although entire books can and have been written on the subject. But I felt it was important to cover this, and early on in my position as the New Zealand beat writer, because extinction is so much a part of birds and birding here.

The third stage of the extinction events I’ve been cataloguing here began with the settlement of New Zealand by Europeans, mainly Brits, after the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. Here, however, the story becomes complicated.

Not only are dead birds continuing to inexplicably rain from the skies from Arkansas to Italy, but now we’re seeing massive fish kills around the globe. Even the experts that read 10,000 Birds are baffled. But Saudi Arabian officials may have uncovered a critical lead in the case: an Israeli spy vulture. Do you see a [...]

It’s been a very wintry winter here in southeastern Ohio. As each passing front has embraced our ridge-top farm, it has given us new things to enjoy and new birds to watch. Some of these winter-borne souls are regulars and we greet them like old friends—the purple finches, a smattering of pine siskins, the last [...]

No moa, no moa In old Ao-tea-roa Can’t get ’em They’ve et ’em They’re gone and there ain’t no moa’ New Zealand folk song. At the time of Maori settlement in New Zealand, New Zealand’s bird fauna had been impacted by the arrival one thousand years earlier of rats, but those impacts had been focused [...]

There are many things that are special about Montana, but my favorite, the thing that makes me most pleased with my new state, is one that few people know about. It’s not visible to the naked eye like the mountains and the rivers and the fabled Big Sky; it’s not easy to find with a [...]

How many of us are really aware of the plight of the Rusty Blackbird? Sure, it’s not flashy, it’s rarely a target species for many as it’s buried there in the back of the field guide, and often can be difficult to tell from other blackbirds especially given the Icterid propensity to hang out together [...]

Like a big wingshot bird, the proposal by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Commission to open season on sandhill cranes keeps flopping around in my head. People who object to hunting sandhill cranes do so for a number of reasons. However, we are generally characterized by advocates of hunting as being uninformed, leading with our hearts rather [...]