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Like many people the world over I’ve wanted to visit the Galapagos Islands ever since I knew they existed.  Whether this desire is because of the influence of the islands on Darwin and his theory of evolution, the numerous documentaries about them, the fact that Kurt Vonnegut based a novel there, their distance from everything [...]

Can you ever really know someone through just her blog? I mean, I’ve been blog friends with Dr. Bronwen Scott for years as the pseudonymous author of A Snail’s Eye View. Long have I enjoyed her clever observations of Australian avifauna, ecosystems, and, of course, mollusks. But, though I jumped at the chance to review [...]

Birds inspire people.  Whether one is inspired to go out and buy a bag of bird seed to attract birds to one’s backyard or chase a reported rarity to increase one’s life list isn’t what matters.  No, what matters is that it is birds that drive one to such acts.  In Bright Wings: An Illustrated [...]

Back in mid-September I reviewed Anthony McGeehan’s “Birding From the Hip“, the third book published by the innovative and highly talented ‘Sound Approach’ team in as many years (the first was 2006’s superb and highly-recommended “Sound Approach to Birding“). At the end of the review (which was positive throughout but not for reasons that the [...]

When MyBinocularHarness contacted us at 10,000 Birds about reviewing their binocular harness I was skeptical.  I always thought that those who wear a binocular harness looked a bit dorky and weren’t helping birders overcome the not-so-flattering view that many have of our pastime.  But I was volunteered to review the harness and several days later [...]

I don’t seem to have nearly enough time these days to read books (and I apologise profusely to those publishers who’ve sent me books recently - I will read and review them all I promise) and ‘Birding from the Hip’ has been sat on a shelf in its wrapper for almost a month. Sometimes it’s [...]

How does one end up with a Great Blue Heron in one’s bathroom?  Or spending hard-earned cash on medication for a Wild Turkey with a “nasty wet rasp” coming from her chest?  Or chasing an American Goldfinch that refuses to leave a flight cage even though there is nothing wrong with him any more?  Easy, [...]

First published in 2000*, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers - a personal chronicle of vanished birds” is named - as many literate visitors to 10,000 Birds probably already know (and as a semi-literate Brit I have to admit to not knowing) - after an Emily Dickinson poem which uses the metaphor of birds and [...]

How, might readers who think about the hours I’ve spent putting these Puerto Rico posts together (odd how us bloggers ‘talk’ to an imaginary audience that we fondly imagine share in every drop of sweat we exude while putting our blogs online - in the nicest possible way it has to be said that we’re [...]

If you have any plans to bird Mesoamerica you need to purchase A Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Northern Central America posthaste.  The two who put the guide together, Steve Howell, who did the text, and Sophie Webb, who did the plates, spent over seven years on the project and the expertise that [...]

When we organised our Parrot Month’ theme in January one of the people who was really supportive of our (somewhat naive and unformed) efforts right from the outset was Monica Engebretson, Senior Progamme Associate for Born Free USA united with Animal Protection Insitute. Monica was actually a more inspirational muse than she may have realised. [...]

“Invisible Connections”: no, not the 1985 album by ‘Greek composer of electronic, progressive, ambient and neo classical music Vangelis’ (though I’m sure some old muso will end up here through Google at some point), but a beautifully photographed and lucid account in three languages (Korean, Chinese, English) of the journey made by migrating shorebirds [...]

One of the most rewarding elements of our recent ‘Parrot Month’ was the way that experts (both researchers and owners) came forward and offered us their support and help. One of those experts was Greg Glendell, the UK’s only full-time pet parrot behaviourial consultant who is based in Somerset. Greg has had a life-long interest [...]

Of Parrots and People: The Sometimes Funny, Always Fascinating, and Often Catastrophic Collision of Two Intelligent Species, by Mira Tweti, is a wonderful source for those looking to understand the intersection of people and parrots.  The book progresses nicely from a brief overview of the current scientific understanding of the complexities of bird brains, focusing [...]

With the holidays coming, discerning shoppers have been stocking up on our classic I BRAKE FOR BIRDS bumper stickers. And why wouldn’t they? These beauties make truly thoughtful stocking stuffers for  birders, bird watchers, or even ironic nature haters…

There are only 14 left in this classic design, the one carried over from the original incarnation [...]

The advent of advanced computing and the internet has been a incalculable boon to birders everywhere. However, the one area where birdwatchers have been slow to cross the digital divide has been in the realm of species identification. We birders just haven’t had good reason to leave our field guides on the shelf. But with [...]

I’m a New Yorker.  I was born in the Hudson Valley and grew up in the Catskills, went to school in the Southern Tier, lived in Albany, our capital city, explored the Adirondacks and the North Country, repeatedly visited western New York and now live in New York City, easily the best city in the [...]

Just two weeks ago the various listserves that cover South Africa lit up with correspondents raving about a brand new regional guide covering Gauteng (the bird-rich province that contains Johannesburg and Pretoria) written by two of the area’s better-known and well-respected birders: Etienne Marais, who amongst other things runs Indicator Birding, and Faansie Peacock, who [...]

Years ago, I wrote about the glaring homogeneity in North American birding circles and by glaring, I mean all that bright white skin. The lack of diversity in the ranks of enthusiasts has long been recognized as a deficiency at best and at worst the certain death knell of our nation’s natural resources. After all, [...]

When I am having anything larger than the mailbox in my apartment building shipped to me I specify that I need to have it shipped to my job because it is a pain to walk over to the local post office and pick up a package seeing as the hours that I work tend to [...]