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As always, the “Just for Fun Avian ID Quiz” is brought to you by Jory Langner, our esteemed Avian Quizmaster. Jory has come up with an entertaining quiz that lets those who spend waaaay too much time looking at field guides a chance to shine.
The rules are completely different this time.  There is no need [...]

As always, the “Just for Fun Avian ID Quiz” is brought to you by Jory Langner, our esteemed Avian Quizmaster, who assures we 10,000 Birds bloggers that he was not out in the sun too much and did not experiment with peyote prior to making this week’s quiz…and I guess we have no choice but [...]

As always, the “Just for Fun Avian ID Quiz” is brought to you by Jory Langner, our esteemed Avian Quizmaster.  A word of warning before you scroll down and try this quiz: Jory is just back from the southwestern United States and it seems like he caught some excess sun (that, or maybe he was [...]

It’s Saturday.  That means it’s time for the answer to last Wednesday’s “A Doozy of a Just For Fun Avian ID Quiz“.
This last quiz was a bit different from previous quizzes.  I hope you enjoyed it.
First of all, thanks and congratulations to the following folks who either answered correctly or agreed with those that did: Rob, Mike [...]

Once again Jory has agreed to provide 10,000 Birds readers with an identification quiz.  This one is different from his typical quiz: as a specific bird is not being identified and word play is involved instead of field marks and bird behavior.  Good luck (you’re going to need it!) and remember to post your guesses [...]

It’s Saturday.  That means it’s time for the answer to Wednesday’s “Just For Fun Avian Quiz“.
Here are the clues again…
Five things you probably didn’t know about this species:
* Many thousands pass through the James Bay area Canada in late summer.
* May migrate up to 5,000 miles non-stop (that’s longer than most commercial flights ).
* Surprisingly, [...]

Yesterday I posted a photo (reproduced below) taken at the RSPB’s Radipole Lake Reserve (Dorset, UK) and asked whether you could find any Mediterranean Gulls Larus melanocephalus in amongst the Black-headed Gulls. Our great friend Jochen - whom we’ve seen virtually nothing of in the last few months - popped up within seconds and (correctly) [...]

Once again Jory has agreed to provide 10,000 Birds readers with an identification quiz.  Good luck and remember to post your guesses in the comments!
It’s Wednesday.  That means time to put on your “10,000 Birds Avian Thinking Cap” again.
This quiz is structured around tidbits that I find interesting when browsing various reference sources (field guides, [...]

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 [...]

Jory Langner served up another challenging avian ID quiz this week. Here is his answer:
The Just for Fun Avian ID Quiz (if you haven’t tried it yet, don’t proceed to the answer below!) presented the following clues, just for fun:

This bird would be a lifer for me. There was virtually no chance of me [...]

Last week, Jory Langner gave us a truly evil Avian ID Quiz. Now, he’s back with another test of your ornithological prowess.  Don’t let the title fool you… this one is tough!
Last week’s Avian ID Quiz was apparently a bit too easy.  Here’s another quiz just for fun. As before, it is based on [...]

Remember our Evil Avian ID Quiz from last Wednesday? Here is the promised follow-up post and answer.
To review … here were the clues:

Locally common in spring in the Great Plains.
No subspecies.
Worldwide population less than 200,000.
All birds show a distinct whitish eyebrow that, in combination with the darker crown, give them a capped appearance.
Posture is [...]

Jory Langner has contributed some sterling guest posts in the past on 10,000 Birds, sharing how it feels to be born again as a birder and how much effort goes into a New York State Big Year. Fresh off his star turn as a founding member of the 10,000 Birds Butcher Birders, he’s back to [...]

This quiz might have been too hard.  My father even mentioned that he agreed with Jack, the first guesser in this near-impossible-to-answer quiz when Jack typed “The challenge here is not to ID the first bird, but to find it!”  So those who guessed incorrectly should feel good despite their wrongness that they managed to [...]

I’m going to pretend for a bit that the identification of drably-plumaged, migrating fall warblers moving through treetops, hiding behind leaves, and using the sun against the birder isn’t hard enough.  You know, because finding and identifying warblers with sometimes-cryptic field marks while trying to avoid the pain of warbler neck is simply too easy.  [...]

Disappointing. That is the only word I can come up with to describe the answers provided by the folks who guessed at the identities of the birds in Yet Another Diabolical Bird ID Quiz. Sure, Jason, overlook, and bevson each managed to get two out of four correct, but that is still a [...]

Yes, it is time once again for that most dreaded of 10,000 Birds exercises, the Diabolical Bird ID Quiz. This time four small portions of passerines have been selected for your best guesses. The only clues you get are that all the pictures were taken in New York in the month of May. [...]

Three pictures are below. Can you identify all six birds? The first was taken in Ringwood State Park in northern New Jersey, the second from my window , and the last in Forest Park at the waterhole. As usual, the winner, who is the first to properly name all six birds in [...]

Some seriously good identification was done by the many guessers on the one-photo quiz in this post. 10,000 Birds readers know their birds! Congratulations go to Jochen, Nick, Drew, Shawn, and Nathan, all of whom took serious stabs at figuring out the identities of the seven birds of six species in the picture. [...]

On Sunday, after returning from upstate, I hustled out the door as soon as I got home and made tracks for Forest Park. The local listservs had been loaded with reports of great birds in Manhattan and Brooklyn but hardly anything had been reported out of Queens. Somehow I doubted that the flood [...]