Some months ago we here at 10,000 Birds learnt about Charleen Turner, and her amazingly patient (and loving) documentation of a pair of Mute Swans and their cygnets that she’d been watching through the summer. Charleen had a gift for telling a story and had taken hundreds of photos too - a combination that seemed [...]

Do you feel it in the air? The last whispers of summer are slipping away. Many of us grow wistful this time of year, and dear Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was no exception. Fortunately, she could find words for the sense of loss that accompanies the passing of a cherished season. One of the greatest [...]

Chapter 1 of Birdtopia can be found here, in which the narrator, George, finds and identifies a dead chickadee, reveals his crush on Lisa, and drops some tantalizing hints about what life in Birdtopia is like…
Back at my house I went down to the basement and tried working on my nyjer seed bird feeder prototype [...]

The morning sun shone through the sticker-laden kitchen window and warmed me as I prepared my breakfast.  The burner on the electric range, powered by the solar panel array on the roof, clicked as heat flowed into it.  I guesstimated the amount of water I would need for my oatmeal and set it to boil, [...]

Roger Tory Peterson commands respect. His legacy is not simply that he made the world a better place but that his works changed, and continue to change individual lives for the better.  We asked you to share your thoughts about the Great Man in our Praiseworthy Peterson Field Guide Giveaway and you responded with just [...]

It’s hardly a secret that we love coots around here (the birds, not senile old men!) We love them in their magnificent diversity from their black, beknobbed heads to their fantastic fissipalmate feet. Our affection for them is so deep that we can get lost for hours in the tiny little details that separate Black [...]

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 [...]

I can’t imagine staying at a hotel in the US, Europe, or the Far East without being able to plug in and broadcast (via 10,000 Birds of course) a stream of words and photos to a waiting world - I’m exaggerating of course, but that’s what I like to pretend to myself sometimes - and [...]

As Mike mentioned in his Where are you birding this final weekend of July 2008? post, I’ve been wearing one of my other hats for the last two days as a co-founder of the conservation organisation Birds Korea. I was extremely happy/pleased/honoured to be able to help organise the UK part of a Europe-wide trip [...]

William Blake, the 18th and 19th century English poet, painter and engraver, is most remembered for his two linked collections of poems, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.  Of all of Blake’s poems, people are most familiar with the oft-anthologized “The Tyger” from the latter volume, though he wrote many other poems worth reading [...]

A couple of days ago I posted a short trip report on a visit I made to one of my favourite spots on earth - Suikerbosrand Nature Reserve in South Africa. Writing the post reminded me of just how many birds I’ve seen at this one small site, and I thought I might put a [...]

Wednesday was my birthday, one that has deposited me on the yawning precipice of the big 4-0. This year’s observance was low-key but Sara made my day with an amazing gift:

This miracle of design is “Gallinule and Gator” by the inimitable Charley Harper. Beautiful, isn’t it? Since we’re smack in the middle of the Core [...]

Emily Dickinson is one of the first poets I can remember admiring. I’m not sure whether it was her near rhymes, her life story, her often understated but amazing imagery, or the fact that she really wasn’t appreciated as a poetic genius until after her death: whatever it is that drew me to her [...]

Have you ever had the pleasure of reading any of Rosemary Mosco’s comics at Bird and Moon? It’s rare to find a talented comic artist who really gets nature, so when one actually appears, it feels like a revelation:

How cool is that? The remarkable Ms. Mosco has all kinds of bird-inspired web projects going on [...]

Perhaps one of the best known bird poems, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Eagle: A Fragment” packs a punch as powerful as a Golden Eagle’s in merely six lines. First published in 1851 in the seventh edition of Tennyson’s Poems, it became a favorite and is now frequently anthologized. The alliteration and assonance utilized [...]

On November 15th 2007 my best friend, long-time mentor, and closest confidante Peter Mowday died of cancer after a long pain-filled struggle that had lasted two years. It was a desperately sad end to a life lived to the full.

I first met Peter almost twenty-five years ago when I moved “down south” to live [...]

Beware, my friend, of crystal brook
Or fountain, lest that hideous hook.
Thy nose, thou chance to see;
Narcissus’ fate would then be thine,
And self-detested thou would’st pine,
As self-enamored he.
- William Cowper, On an Ugly Fellow

 
“And the three boys had a dream - a simple dream where the world was at peace, where birders took the highest political offices on the planet, where the world’s religions preached birding as a way to heal the deep wounds between the communities of the earth, where conservation became as fashionable as the i-phone, [...]

Today, the winter solstice, December 22, is the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. It is also, despite the quantity of snow on the ground outside of my house as I type this, the first day of winter. That’s the bad news. The good news is that every day [...]

“The White Birds,” a poem W.B. Yeats wrote early in his career as a poet and dramatist, is like his other early works in that, according to Wikipedia, it meditates “on the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects.” Not a well-known poem, it is overshadowed by another of his early poems, “The Lake [...]