With 2010 being the ‘International Year of Biodiversity’ and with me being just a little - er, cynical that what the world needs after Copenhagen is yet another unproductive talking-shop I thought I might look further forward than just to the end of 2010 and predict some of the environmentally-based cliches that people may be [...]

2010 - International Year of Biodiversity

Starting on January 11th, 2010 becomes - and I’m sure this will come as a surprise to many of us - the start of the United Nations-designated International Year of Biodiversity (UN General Assembly Resolution 61/203).

2010 is supposed to be the year when commitments and agreements signed in 2001 [...]

When a birder sees a really, really, good bird and another birder doesn’t see the bird, the first birder will often “grip off” the other birder.  This is a process whereby the birder who failed to see the bird is reminded of having missed the bird in any way imaginable.  For example, let’s say that [...]

A bird’s crop is an expandable “muscular pouch near the gullet or throat.”  It is used to store excess food for later digestion.  Essentially an extension of the esophagus, the crop can expand a rather remarkable amount, to the point where it can make a small-headed, long-necked bird look like a big-headed, short-necked bird (because [...]

From BirdLife: “After a 3-year seabird risk assessment that found tuna and swordfish longline fishing has significant impacts on Atlantic seabird populations, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas failed to act at a recent meeting in Recife, Brazil”. No, I’m not at all surprised either…

Much of the following article is based on information from Dr Glyn Young of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, who has been extremely generous both with his information and time. Our thanks go to him.
 
In 2006 the Madagascar Pochard Aythya innotata - one of the world’s rarest birds - was listed by the IUCN as [...]

…thanks very much to everyone who contributed to our Appeal which is raising funds to support a survey in Myanmar of Spoon-billed Sandpiper wintering sites by Christoph Zöckler, Chair of the Spoon-billed Sandpiper Recovery Team. With just 300 pairs (maximum) of this Critically Endangered shorebird left on the planet they clearly need any help that’s [...]

Over the past few days we’ve been running a series of posts on the Critically Endangered Spoon-billed Sandpiper Eurynorhynchus pygmeus, a stint-sized shorebird confined to the East Asian/Australasian Flyway. The global population of the species has plummetted in recent years and there are now thought to be less than 300 pairs left, with numbers apparently [...]

I’ve been involved with Spoon-billed Sandpiper conservation for much of this decade, thanks entirely to my brother Nial Moores (photo left) who has lived and breathed shorebird conservation for over fifteen years - first in Japan, and then South Korea (where he’s now lived for ten years). A series on the Spoon-billed Sandpiper without his [...]

I was recently reading a rather vitriolic comment thread on a blog post related to carbon dioxide and global warming and came across references to the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which people who made what seemed to me like outlandish statements about climatology while admitting that they had no formal training in any related field were [...]

Two very similar species of Poecile (formerly Parus) tits occur in the UK: the Marsh Tit P. palustris dresseri and Willow Tit P. montana kleinschmidti. Both are small, active birds that are essentially black-capped and whitish-cheeked with grey-brown and off-white bodies. The respective UK races especially are so similar to each other that it wasn’t [...]

Hen Harriers in England continue to be persecuted both in the breeding season and at communal roosts in the winter, and especially on areas managed for Red Grouse. Their recovery as a species hangs in the balance as a result, according to Natural England’s national ‘Hen Harrier Recovery Project’. Hunters or Harriers? I wonder which [...]

The other day I was sent an email with an attached photograph of a bird seen on Kauai, the most westerly of the main Hawaiian Islands. The photographer was Donald Thornton, a Californian on holiday on Kauai, who told me that he and his wife had been taking bird pictures in Spouting Horn Park near [...]

Birds seem to be popping up everywhere in trivia these days. Just yesterday, I was listening to a quiz show on NPR when the host asked a really thought-provoking question: does it take birds longer to fly south for winter or return north in spring?
Consider the answer and, if you’d like, share your guess [...]

When I was having dinner with the highly-entertaining YC Wee and KC Tsang (doyens and co-founders of the Bird Ecology Study Group) in Singapore earlier this month, I was asked a casual question that at first sight seemed rather clear-cut: “as a ’serious’ birder do you think that birders who go birding with cameras but [...]

Yesterday I posted some photos of an adult non-breeding Mediterranean Gull Larus melanocephalus I took at Radipole Lake in Dorset (right here in fact). Now that we’re all experts at Med Gull ID (yes, that was irony as I still find them pretty tough sometimes), how about a quick quiz?

I took this photo on the [...]

A bird that (on 10,000 Birds anyway) often gets mentioned as a potential vagrant to North America is the Mediterranean Gull Larus melanocephalus*, a species which has undertaken a westerly expansion from its core breeding range (which is still almost entirely in Europe) since the 1950s. From Hungary, where it was breeding regularly by 1953, [...]

Senegal Coucal Centropus senegalensis
Abuja, Nigeria. July 2008
Coucals are large members of the cuckoo family, with eleven representatives in Africa. The Senegal Coucal Centropus senegalensis ranges right across Africa from the Gambia to northern Sudan, with a separate population spread over a wide area of southern Africa. It’s a bird of grassy habitats with trees, such [...]

The photo we posted in this week’s SkyWatch of a flying American White Pelican has gone down very well, and as the photo was actually one of a series of four I took I thought I would post the others as well (and hopefully not over-egg the pudding in the process).

I took these [...]

At the end of last April I posted a short series of photos taken in India of a Black Kite feeding on the intestines of what I thought was probably a large dog. Judging by the number of page views this series attracted it seems that there are a fair few 10,000 Birds readers who [...]