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I recently read What the Robin Knows by Jon Young and this book made a surprisingly substantial impression on me. Like most nature lovers, I’m always looking for ways to not just expand my knowledge of flora and fauna but also to interact with nature more deeply and skillfully. Field guides are usually more helpful regarding [...]

Chris Townend is an ace birder, keen conservationist, and proprietor of Wise Birding Holidays, a UK company that leads tours to places most of us dream of visiting. Through his extensive travels, Chris has come to know Ghana very well and shares why this West African country should be high on every birder’s bucket list. [...]

Barbets are a group of medium sized, chunky, generally colorful, frugivorous, hole-nesting near-passerines, that are popular targets for anyone birding in the tropics. They occur in three biogeographic regions; the Neotropic, Afrotropic and Indo-Malaya ecozones, basically tropical South and Central America, Africa south of the Sahara and tropical Asia. Originally they were all placed in [...]

Birding has been an all-consuming interest for Patrick Cardwell since boyhood days spent in a wildlife-rich environment. When he isn’t snapping photos in the field, training local bird guides, or supporting seabird-related conservation initiatives, he runs Avian Leisure, a birding and wildlife safari company out of Cape Town established in 1998, with his wife, Marie-Louise. [...]

We are currently filming in Botswana. What this land-locked country lacks in endemic birds it more than makes up for in accessibility of tough species, numbers of birds and the overall wildlife experience. I will be writing a series of detailed posts on this magnificent country but wanted to share a few images captured by [...]

Ethiopia, a landlocked country situated in the Horn of Africa, has firmly established itself as one of Africa’s top birding destinations. Only twenty years ago it was an out-of-bounds, desperately impoverished and war-torn ex-Marxist state. Tourism infrastructure didn’t exist then and development has been slow. Tours groups that I guided to Ethiopia ten years ago [...]

WONDERFUL WEAVERS There are many different Weavers in the world and as far as I can tell they share the skill of masterful nest building… unlike the shabby unstable creations of, say, Mourning Doves. By the way, I’ve tried to ID everyone appropriately but if you have any corrections please say so in the comments. [...]

The family Picathartidae consists of two very unusual birds; White-necked or Yellow-headed Picathartes, endemic to the Upper Guinea forests of West Africa; and Gray-necked or Red-headed, restricted to Lower Guinea forests of Central Africa. Their strange appearance and habit of communally nesting in rock overhangs and caves has given them their alternative name of rockfowl, [...]

Paging through a fieldguide, it’s always with a sense of dismay and sadness that I come across reference to an extinct species. This is particularly poignant if the bird has disappeared during the course of my birding days or “on my watch” as I like to think of it. Islands, for various reasons, experience more [...]

I don’t think I’ve ever done a post on my home patch of Cape Town, South Africa. This place is such an epic birding location that one cannot possibly do the city and its surrounds justice in one post. So I’m going to feature one of my very favorite locations, just 45 minutes drive from [...]

We humans have a very deep and powerful urge to assemble individual data points into some sort of larger construct — to label and categorize them and understand how they relate to other things we know. Which is why, upon meeting new people, we want to know where they’re from, who their family is, what [...]

Tanzania is without a doubt the quintessential African safari nation. Nowhere else in Africa do the preconceived ideas of the continent really exist in such living detail; tall, red-robed Maasai herding their skinny cattle, endless grasslands studded with flat-topped Acacia trees and grazed by herds of zebras and wildebeest, and dramatic volcanic calderas brimming with [...]

Friends, birders, and globe-trotters, lend me your ears. Better yet, offer up your eyeballs because we have a powerhouse post here that deserves, nay demands your full attention. Adam Riley, owner and managing director of Rockjumper Birding Tours, is a world birder if ever there was one, but has a special place in his heart for [...]