This is is the most magical time of the year, one filled with holiday cheer, festive celebrations, and… surveys of winter avifauna? That’s right! For the American birding community, the holiday season heralds more than blinking lights, tree trimming, and rampant consumerism. It’s also time for the Christmas Bird Count.
The Christmas Bird Count (CBC) is [...]

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 [...]

We quite often mention Important Bird Areas (IBAs) on 10,000 Birds without explaining what they are. Perhaps we should…

IBAs are basically key sites for bird conservation. BirdLife International (the UK-based “global Partnership of conservation organisations that strives to conserve birds, their habitats and global biodiversity, working with people towards sustainability in the use of natural [...]

A hybrid thrush has been found on Stratton Mountain in Vermont.  The bird, which was determined through DNA analysis to be part Bicknell’s Thrush and part Veery, was found by researchers with the Vermont Center for Ecostudies who were studying Bicknell’s Thrush on the breeding grounds.  It was first noticed by a researcher who heard [...]

Blue Crane Anthropoides paradisea
Agulhas Plains, Cape Province, South Africa. April.

One of the smallest of the 15 crane species worldwide the Vulnerable Blue Crane is the national bird of South Africa. It’s endemic to southern Africa, with more than 99% of the population occurring within South Africa (a small disjunct breeding population of approximately 60 individuals [...]

When I was in Sydney last week I photographed a Little Corella Cacatua sanguinea (a common species endemic to Eastern, North-western and Northern Australia) in Centennial Park. I first saw the bird from behind and was surprised how approachable it was: it wasn’t until it flew up to a tree and turned around that [...]

Last month (Feb 08) I was “lucky” enough to arrive for a day’s birding with the rest of the 10,000 Birds team at the same time as the worst storm of the winter thumped into New York. Our exploits are here, here, and here, as is a photo-gallery of a fluffed-up and admirably stoic Horned [...]

I was working back from Los Angeles yesterday - a post on the stunning Carrizo Plain is on its way incidentally - when a colleague (whom I’d told on the flight from London that I was going birding on my time off) asked me politely how I’d got on and if I’d managed to get [...]

The bane of all (or nearly all?) bird photographers is blurring, where the pin-sharp, award-winning image you see in the viewfinder morphs somehow into a smeared mess fit only for the Recycle Bin. While it’s true that some shots benefit from a bit of creative blurring - I remember seeing a lovely shot of [...]

Mike’s photo of Corey and I (I’m the older and not so good looking one of the pair) in his typically evocative Put on a Happy Face post was taken at St. John’s Pond in Long Island, and just off to one side of the image is a Ring-billed Gull. Looking through the photos I’d [...]

Read any blogs or magazines devoted to birding (or any branch of natural history for that matter) and sooner or later you’ll come across the terms “lumping” and “splitting”. Hardcore birders may well understand what “lumping” and “splitting” is all about, but I suspect that many more casual or neophyte members of our jargon-ridden ‘raison [...]

As long as the ivory-bill’s existence remains ambiguous, North America’s reigning woodpecker must be the Pileated Woodpecker.  This hulking beauty, black and white with a preposterously scarlet crest, is a most pleasing presence across much of the United States and Canada. That crazy coiffure along with its whinnying laugh betray this bird’s claim to fame [...]

When I was in San Jose last week my good buddy Jack suggested going to Redwood Shores (Redwood City), a site where large numbers of shorebirds gather close to the road at a high-tide roost before then flying in groups over observers’ heads as the adjacent tidal-flats are uncovered by receding water. Amongst large numbers [...]

Am I ever opening a can of worms with this post or what? Buying a camera is often such a matter of personal taste, but let’s put that to one side, dive straight in, and say that the most important questions to ask when buying a camera for nature photography is not “Will this one [...]

Men, as many of you will know, are curious animals. For example, we know we are at least an inch taller or a stone lighter than the most accurate measuring-devices say we are; we don’t need to use a map to get anywhere because we just know the route already; and we seem to [...]