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What’s in a Name?
David Tomlinson The recent announcement by the American Ornithological Society that it intends to replace names of all birds named after people has caused quite a stir here in the UK. There are many...
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Birding Heligoland in Late September
Volunteering on Heligoland for a month allowed me to get a sense of changing migration patterns in autumn. The first half of September (covered in my previous post) was very productive, but the second...
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The Snow Partridge
eBird calls the Snow Partridge a “stone-colored terrestrial bird of stony hillsides, mountain ridges, and meadows above treeline” – and in fact, it is impressive how well the bird fits in with its...
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Birding the Garden City of Georgetown
Guyana’s capital city of Georgetown, a quaint, sprawling network of roads and waterways is a regulated introduction to the country’s 800+ species of birds. After several years of planning and failed...
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Kerkini in Winter
Back in July, my fellow 10,000 Birds contributor Dragan wrote a delightful piece about birding Lake Kerkini in spring. I first visited Kerkini and this bird-rich region of northern Greece 15 years ago,...
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Birding Sepilok, Borneo (Part 3)
The Bornean Bristlehead is kind of the star bird of Sepilok. eBird calls it “a ‘grail bird’ of many birders visiting Borneo. Ironically, while I was very keen on seeing it during my week at Sepilok, I...
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Birds of the Northern Forest – An homage
Ever since I was a kid I wanted to learn how to draw, but alas I never made it past the stickman. More precisely I wanted to learn how to draw wildlife. I guess it’s a gift you either have or you...
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Looking for Lazarus
When I grew up in the seventies we didn’t have global warming, we had global cooling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling). Consequently, the summer weather was awful, always. Continuous...
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Horrible Hybrids
As a general rule, birders don’t like hybrids. For a start, they may struggle to identify them, while secondly they can’t even tick them. On BirdTrack, the British equivalent of e-Bird, the list of...
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Birding on Texel in Late October
The Dutch Island of Texel is well-known amongst European birders due to the exciting number and quality of birds it attracts during spring and autumn migration times. Although not as exciting as...
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Birding Shanghai in November 2023 (contractual obligation post)
This November, I went birding in Shanghai exactly once – the result of both some unpleasant changes in the accessibility of some good birding sites and some traveling that took me away from Shanghai...
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Our Favorite Bird Books of 2023
What a bountiful year it’s been for birding books! We’ve gotten them all—field guides to foreign countries; memoirs and big year books; narratives about ornithological research, then and now;...
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Terns of North America: A Photographic Guide–A Book Review
Tern lovers rejoice! A new book about the angelic-looking, identification-stumping birds of the oceans, rivers, and marshes has finally been published! And it’s fantastic. Terns are too often...
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Guyana: Popular, not Populous
Our first full day in the Land of Many Waters predictably began with a trip on one of these many waters. After leaving our hotel in the dark, we arrived at the small dock about half hour after sunrise...
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Musings on a Life List
Would you know a Firewood Gatherer if it landed in front of your binoculars? Or, come to that, a Greater Thornbird or a Buff-bellied Flowerpecker? To be honest, I wouldn’t be too confident of...
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Chronic Exposure in Colorado
Before anything else, a confession. Most of the lifers I saw in Denver were named after (in)famous people, so Messrs. Say, Bullock, Brewer, and Cassin will lose their English namesakes in the recently...
View ArticleWant to be famous?
Well, writing posts for 10,000 Birds is probably not the right way to get there. But if you are interested in birds and think you might enjoy writing blog posts for our site – either occasionally or...
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Birding Kabul, Afghanistan
Right. I did not actually go to Afghanistan for birding. I had another reason for that, trying to support a local NGO and its projects to educate Afghan women – something that is extremely important...
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Swarovski BTX – A new era in birdwatching
Did you know that my wife actually invented the binocular spotting scope? I lack proof of this but she did, honestly. As a scout would say “On my honour it is so”. Seriously though, we were walking...
View ArticleTen Birds That Changed the World — a review
You might think that birds don’t change the world, birds are the world – but by his odd title, Ten Birds That Changed the World, author Stephen Moss means, he says, that birds have, in various ways,...
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