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Since New Zealand is currently consumed by rugby fever and we haven’t the time to indulge in anything so tedious as birdwatching, I thought I’d dive back under the sea to introduce one of New Zealand’s most iconic aquatic organisms, the Australasian Snapper (Pagrus auratus). The species is fairly widespread in the Western Pacific, ranging from New [...]

There are few stories in ornithology I enjoy more than those of a Lazarus taxon, a species thought to be extinct being found alive and well in some hidden part of the world. There is a depressing finality about extinction, but knowing when for certain something is extinct is an imprecise science and on occasion we’ve gotten it spectacularly wrong. Jerdon’s [...]

Continued from Birdwatching Rio Canande Reserve.. On our final day of bird watching this northern Esmeraldas Choco Endemics site, we decided to do roadside birding on the renowned Botrosa Road .  This road was constructed by Botrosa Logging Company to harvest the luscious forest which they started purchasing more than thirty years ago.  As we [...]

The order Suliformes holds a lot of special birds from anhingas and darters to cormorants and shags as well as frigatebirds, pelicans, and tropicbirds. But the sleekest of the sulids may be found in the family Sulidae. Gannets and boobies are pulchritudinous plunge divers possessed of long wings, conical bills, and totipalmate (all four toes are webbed), [...]

Who doesn’t love a macaw? Big, bold, beautiful parrots full of character and charm, macaws make us long for some of the world’s wildest places and assure us that, as long as they fly free, those magical wild places are still intact. One of the most majestic macaws is the Hyacinth Macaw (Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus), a [...]

The Loch of Strathbeg reserve in Aberdeenshire Scotland has begun to use eight rare ‘Konick’ horses to manage and improve it’s wetland habitats for birds. The breed is a direct descendent of the Tarpan, a wild forest horse driven to extinction in central Europe in the late 19th century. Hardier than their domestic cousins, konik [...]

Last Sunday marked the end of an era in New Zealand with the sad passing of the conservationist and ornithologist and all round inspiration Don Merton. His career began just before the extinctions and translocations at Big South Cape Island, when I have previously mentioned the modern age of conservation in New Zealand began, and [...]

Wouldn’t it be great to work in a building designed to produce as much energy as it uses?  That captures heat given off by computer servers to heat the building?  That has specially designed windows that reflect light upward to the ceiling to reduce electricity used for lighting?  There is such a building and The [...]

Fourteen brave protesters are spending the weekend doing a sit-in at the office of the Governor of the State of Kentucky, Steve Beshear, in an attempt to draw attention to the issue of mountaintop removal mining and to change the governor’s mind.  Congratulations to the brave fourteen and here’s hoping that they manage to effect [...]

Before Christmas Day of last year the largest flock of Sociable Lapwings ever reported in Oman was 48.  But on 25 December 2010, Spanish birder Daniel Lopez Velasco, who was on a birding trip to Oman with friends, found a flock of 90+ of the critically endangered bird.  You can read about it at BirdLife [...]

Just about everyone likely to read this post probably agrees: Ambelopoulia poaching is a problem and even an ecological disaster. Where opinions might differ here at 10,000 Birds is why this illegal bird trapping is, well, illegal or a problem. In fact, from responses I’ve seen here and there from trappers themselves, it’s perceived by [...]

Like a big wingshot bird, the proposal by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Commission to open season on sandhill cranes keeps flopping around in my head. People who object to hunting sandhill cranes do so for a number of reasons. However, we are generally characterized by advocates of hunting as being uninformed, leading with our hearts rather [...]

“Probably one of the most common birds in California, and know to almost everybody, as they are visible at all times of the day, and not timid.” This was the description of the Burrowing Owl, Athene cunicularia, in the Geological Survey of California, Ornithology, Volume 1, Land Birds, published in 1870. What has happened since [...]

In the 1980s, single-species conservation projects abounded with concerned groups fighting to save the rhino, cheetah, tiger, blue whale, and many others. People ‘declared war’ on poachers and made a lot of impassioned noise. In the ‘90s, people started to see how the conservation of particular species was contingent on our ability to conserve entire [...]

It sometimes feels like conservation news is nothing but doom and gloom, so sit back and enjoy a recent success story from New Zealand. The story involves one of the less well known of New Zealand’s species, the Hutton’s Shearwater. Hutton’s Shearwaters (Puffinus huttoni). Image Credit: Duncan Wright New Zealand has a lot of seabirds, [...]

Kia ora, and greetings from Aotearoa*, the Land of the Long White Cloud. As I type this on the final day of the long weekend in Wellington the high white cloud which has covered the city for the last three days shows no sign of wandering off and finding other cities to bother. But I [...]

We here at 10,000 Birds tend not to wear our politics on our sleeves, preferring to focus on birds, bugs, nature and conservation.  But the current election for President of the United States is critical: after eight years of the Bush Administration gutting environmental regulations and being almost completely inactive on global warming (when not [...]

Sunday was a day with Daisy’s family, and what better way to spend it than with bawdy lasses, courageous jousters, hilarious jesters, and strong mead?  No better way, of course, which is why we headed to Sterling Forest in Tuxedo, New York, to the New York State Renaissance Fair.  For those who don’t know, Renaissance [...]

Did you hear this incredible news? The Canadian Province of Ontario announced last week that it will conserve a huge swath of the province’s northern wilderness, the area we frequently reference as the Boreal Forest. The promise to permanently protect at least 225,000 square kilometers of the Canadian Boreal Forest has been universally lauded by [...]

You might want to drop in on the House Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife and Oceans Oversight Hearing… The House Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife and Oceans will hear from experts including American Bird Conservancy’s Vice President for International Programs Dr. George Wallace and others to further investigate the factors affecting stressed bird populations and bird habitats, [...]