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David Sibley

sustainability

Here’s a neat tool from American Public Radio – an educational game that calculates your global ecological footprint. Overconsumption is at the core of virtually all environmental problems, and most of that consumption is stuff that we don’t even think about. Especially in the fast-paced world of the US middle class, we do things the […]

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Fitting pegs in holes

I’ve thought more about the “square-peg-in-round-hole” analogy in my previous post, and made a few simple drawings to expand that analogy. In many ways, bird identification is like a matching game. The observed bird (here in black) must be identified by matching it to illustrations in a diagnostic key (the gray shapes here). This is

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Two upcoming events

On Thursday, 27 Sep 2007, I’ll be in New Haven, Connecticut lecturing at Yale’s Peabody Museum (where I spent many afternoons as a teenager in the 1970s) as part of their John H. Ostrom program series. Details here (click on September and scroll down) On 19-21 Oct 2007 I travel to Oklahoma to speak and

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Rare bird news

An eventful few weeks for bird records in North America: The long-anticipated first nesting record of Lesser Black-backed Gull in North America (even though it hybridized with a Herring Gull) – on Appledore Island, Maine. Green Violetear reaches Maine – the farthest northeast record to date. 19 Aug 2007 on Mount Desert Island; photo here

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Judging size of birds

Size judgment is one of the constant quandaries of bird identification – critically important but fraught with error. In a recent online discussion about these photos of sandpipers in flight, I was intrigued by the question of how I, and others, “just knew” that these birds were too small to be Knot or Pectoral and

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