Whilst in the Jubail area recently I saw plenty of Common Starlings Sturnus vulgaris at local camel pens. These camel pens hold good numbers of livestock and attract large numbers of House Sparrows but also a few Common Starlings in the winter. This winter there appear to be more birds than normal possibly as a […]
Tag: house sparrow
Eurasian Tree Sparrow in Minnesota
On January 4, 2017, Two Harbors’s wonderful birding guru, Jim Lind, reported on eBird that there was a Eurasian Tree Sparrow hanging out with a flock of House Sparrows right in town. It may have been there earlier than that, because I later read an MOU listserv post by Kim Eckert saying it had first […]
House Sparrows
When I was a small child, long before The Waltons was on television, I used to pretend that I belonged to a happy little family that lived in my neighborhood. Every evening at bedtime, as it grew dark outside, I’d listen to them sharing their stories about their day’s adventures and saying good night to […]
Wreath of Sparrows
Wow — a bunch of European house sparrows, Passer domesticus, gathering grain. Are they in a wheat field? Nope. They are systematically taking apart an autumn wreath on the door of a Brooklyn brownstone. Looks a bit bare on the lower left, doesn’t it? A dozen more sparrows sat the on the steps below, waiting […]
Spanish Sparrow breeding and much more – Haradh
Whilst birding the area of Haradh recently where we concentrated on looking in the pivot irrigation fields we also saw a few other good birds around the filed edges and surrounding areas. The first good birds we saw were just outside the main entrance to the huge HADEC farm complex where a nesting colony of […]
Two vagrants still at Khawr Rori
I visited Khawr Rori on Tuesday afternoon for the first time in two weeks. There are two distinct birding areas and I went to both. One is the north west off-shoot of the main Khawr and which contains a large reed bed. It is approached from the main road. On arrival there I immediately came […]
RSPB’s Big Garden Bird Watch confirms many species still declining
The number of backyard researchers in the world’s biggest citizen science survey was up this year, but participants found populations of many bird species continued to decline. More than 585,000 people took part in the RSPB’s Big Garden Bird Watch. The survey took place over a January weekend, as it has for the past 36 […]
Bird News!
There is big news in the bird world this week. For the last four years, hundreds of scientists in an international group called the Avian Phylogenomics Consortium have been sequencing bird genomes. They sequenced the DNA of 45 extant birds and a few crocodilians, and combined that with three previously sequenced bird genomes and then […]