A few days ago I had a chance (courtesy of Zeiss UK) to use the ‘new’ Zeiss PhotoScope 85 T* FL, a combined telescope and 7 megapixel digital camera first demonstrated at the 2008 Photokina and which, according to a Zeiss press-release of October 2008, “features a high-power digital camera with a super tele-lens in [...]

Are you a birder with relatives who constantly call to ask you what the weird bird at their bird feeders is?  Do you have a child in your family who you think is on the cusp of becoming interested in birds?  Is there a blank spot on your wall that is just begging for something [...]

In which one of the 10,000 Birds team goes to Mittenwald in the Bavarian Alps as a co-leader with Wildlife Travel and the other two stay in New York…

 
My first trip with Wildlife Travel begins with an introduction at the Eurostar Terminal at St Pancras International. For someone with one of the worst memories for [...]

We’re very fortunate here at 10,000 Birds that we fairly regularly receive books to review - or are mailed asking us whether we’d like to receive books to review anyway. Given 48 hour days and the sort of self-financing bloggers lifestyle that I (I’m not sure about Mike or Corey) often cast jealous glances at, [...]

‘Rewilding’ is one of those conservation buzzwords that has been around for some years now, but - I suspect - most laypeople, myself included, have little idea how the concept might be defined.

Is rewilding ‘turning a formerly wild area back into a wild area’? Does it refer more to wildlife being returned to once [...]

An era of phenomenal photographic field guides is dawning, its golden rays finally extending all the way to the blue-water beaches of the Caribbean islands. Only last year, I declared Birds of the West Indies by Herbert Raffaele to be the finest field guide to the entire region.  Visitors to Jamaica would still do well to purchase that excellent reference [...]

The end of April is a perfect time to write a review of a new book on bird migration: birders across the UK - myself included - are looking for returning birds, or being serenaded by the songs of migrant warblers like Blackcaps and Chiffchaffs that have already reached their breeding territories (and seem determined [...]

Lucky bird blogger that I am, I was invited to attend a screening of Ghost Bird , a documentary film about the search for (and controversy surrounding) the alleged rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker , which will be playing at 7 PM nightly from 28th April to 4th May at the Anthology Film Archives in New York [...]

‘Birding Ethiopia. A Guide to the country’s birding sites’. Ken Behrens, Keith Barnes, Christian Boix
 
The blurb on the back of this beautifully-produced new book poses a very targeted question that will almost instantly separate the people reading it into two very distinct camps: “Interested in seeing some of Africa’s most incredible endemic birds, from [...]

About three years ago the announcement came that the Collins Bird Guide - universally recognised as the finest bird field-guide in Europe (and, apologies to David Sibley, in my opinion the best field-guide in the world full stop) - was to be updated and published as a second edition. No dates were given but it [...]

So how come, 10,000 Birds readers may be asking, are you reviewing a crime novel - and a crime novel that hasn’t even been published in the US yet? Well actually, that’s quite a good story (not as good as ‘Blue Lightning’ as it happens, but still worth telling).

At last year’s BirdFair I made the [...]

Q: Which well-known birder has just produced a book of Frequently Asked Birding Questions (FABQ)?

A: Blogger, writer, radio personality, Science Editor at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and well-known font of birding knowledge Laura Erickson.

To quote from ‘Introducing “The Bird Watching Answer Book” (’TBWAB’) page on ‘Round Robin’, Cornell’s bird blog, “One of the most-visited [...]

A week ago we posted about the latest 10,000 Birds Conservation Club give-away, a copy of Russell Slack’s superb “Rare Birds Where and When: Volume 1 sandgrouse to New World orioles” (RBWW) which Russell had kindly (and totally unprompted) donated to our cause. At the time I promised to write a review once “my blocked [...]

Dale Forbes, with whom I was lucky enough to travel to Kazakhstan this past May (that’s him in the sunset picture in the linked post), now works directly for Swarovski Optik.  As part of his job duties he has a series of videos up on YouTube in which he gives digiscoping tips (I know, I [...]

Though you’d never know it from the way most teens turn their noses up at anything related to nature, kids love birds. Young children in particular love birds, though in an undifferentiated way that bears little resemblance to the obsession evinced by more mature birders. My budding naturalists Mason and Ivy love, to my alternating [...]

Like many people the world over I’ve wanted to visit the Galapagos Islands ever since I knew they existed.  Whether this desire is because of the influence of the islands on Darwin and his theory of evolution, the numerous documentaries about them, the fact that Kurt Vonnegut based a novel there, their distance from everything [...]

Rarely can an author crack my list of favorites with just a single work but somehow, Lyanda Lynn Haupt did. More than 3 years ago, I reviewed her fabulous narrative of Charles Darwin’s explorations of the Americas, Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent. I’ve thought often of that book since then, savoring the memory of [...]

I am a firm believer that birders should invest in two categories of field guide: those they will need and those they want to need. New guides and references for the areas you reliably visit increase your knowledge, which is a worthy endeavor indeed. But guides to parts of the world you’ve never yet visited, [...]

Can you ever really know someone through just her blog? I mean, I’ve been blog friends with Dr. Bronwen Scott for years as the pseudonymous author of A Snail’s Eye View. Long have I enjoyed her clever observations of Australian avifauna, ecosystems, and, of course, mollusks. But, though I jumped at the chance to review [...]

In the arena of North American avian field guides, illustrated guides have reigned supreme. However, if one could imagine an arms race between illustrated guides and photographed ones, it is safe to say that the latter have taken huge strides in recent years in closing the gap. Sure, everyone loves The Sibley Guide to Birds [...]