Any adventures about the more rural parts of the UK typically involve (for me, anyway) a lot of looking at the Rook Corvus frugilegus, a remarkable Old World corvid that occurs from the far western shores of the UK and France all the way east to Japan (it’s generally absent from the cold northern parts [...]

Thanks to Ville Sinkkonen, I’ve just learnt of this Finnish news article: it reports wildlife photographer Lassi Kujala’s discovery of more than ten Common redpolls Carduelis flammea killed by Great tits Parus major. A Yellowhammer Emberiza citrinella was killed as well. I understand that tits are called titmice in some parts of the world. So, [...]

Here’s a brief extract from the birds chapter (Naish 2012) of The Complete Dinosaur, second edition, with some slight tweaks [get the book here on Amazon.com; here on Amazon.co.uk]. Much more on this volume soon. The section of text here is on suboscine passerines. Within passerines (the so-called ‘perching birds’), molecular work shows that New Zealand [...]

The word ‘crow’ typically conjures up an image of a reasonable large, typically black, typically unadorned passerine bird. Crows of this kind occur just about worldwide with the exception of South America and Antarctica – they’re very successful birds. But far less well known is that there is also a really interesting assortment of brightly [...]