On Wednesday morning, I got up early at Ghaftayn rest house to see what passage there had been over-night. These desert stops have highly variable windfalls of migrants during the passage seasons. One morning can be heaving while another can have virtually nothing. The same goes for the rarity of the birds. This was only […]
How to watch the great migration of animals from Serengeti
Every year a million wildebeest, half a million gazelle and 200,000 zebra make the perilous trek from the Serengeti park in Tanzania to the Maasai Mara reserve in Kenya in their search for water and grazing land. It is one of nature’s most spectacular sights – and one that few people are able to see […]
Short-toed Snake Eagle – Ash Shargiyah Development Company Farm
Whilst birding Ash Shargiyah Development Company Farm, near Jubail on 11 September 2015 I saw a juvenile Short-toed Snake Eagle over one of the spray fields. The bird dropped down behind the horizon and looked like it may have landed in the field. We drove around and saw the bird take off and fly away […]
POLL: Should the Western Australian shark cull be stopped?
There is a simple populist action that would quickly see a reduction in the numbers of sharks, including great whites, off the north coast of New South Wales. It would definitely cut down on the number of shark attacks – so far there have been 13 attacks, including one death, in the area this year, […]
Águila crestuda negra (Black-Hawk Eagle) Spizaetus tyrannus
El Águila crestuda negra (Spizaetus tyrannus), también conocida como el águila tirana, es una especie de ave Accipitriforme de la familia Accipitridae. Se trata de un ave rapaz neotropical ampliamente distribuida por la América Central y del Sur. Se puede observar desde México hasta la zona central del Perú, el sur de Brasil y en […]
Can Anything Save the Sumatran Rhino From Extinction?
In 2008, a rhino wandered into an oil-palm plantation in Sabah, a state on the Malaysian island of Borneo. It was limping from a snare injury and, for a rhino, was unfamiliar looking: very small—and hairy. When Rasmus Gren Havmøller—a Danish Ph.D. student focused on conservation, ecology, and genetics at the University of Copenhagen—read about […]
Dowkah delivers again
My Eid trip lasted from Tuesday afternoon until Saturday evening. It involved 3500 kilometres of travel and took me to several birding locations. This and the next four blogs will chronicle the results.I headed north out of Salalah on Tuesday and reached one of my favourite birding locations, Dowkah desert farm, with time to bird […]
POLL: Should the annual moose hunt in Sweden be stopped?
A mild-mannered monster of the Scandinavian forests is setting Swede against Swede as farmers and hunters bicker over how to coexist with the world’s largest population of moose. Hunting season will open in the south of Sweden on 12 October, when more than a quarter of a million Swedes will fell about 90,000 moose in […]