• Common Buzzard vs Red-tailed Hawk: identification by tail band

  Common Buzzard vs Red-tailed Hawk: two buteos that should never meet. On a vagrant the underwing and the tail band are what separate them.

• Eclipse plumage in ducks: moult and identification

  For a few weeks each summer a drake wears the duck's colours and cannot fly. What eclipse plumage is, when it happens, and how identification survives it.

• Kinangop grasslands: endangered habitat and conservation

  The Kinangop grasslands hold a habitat found nowhere else, and a bird that lives nowhere else. What the loss looks like, and who has worked against it.

• Mallard hybrids: identification of domestic and feral crosses

  Mallard hybrids, and the birds mistaken for them. How to tell a true cross from a feral domestic duck, and which field marks still mean something.

• Manky mallard: identification of domestic and feral park ducks

  The odd ducks on every town lake have a name. What a manky mallard is, where the domestic genes come from, and how to tell one from a genuine hybrid.

• Skulking birds: the meaning of the term in birdwatching

  Skulking birds are not secretive ones, and neither are inconspicuous. What the four words actually describe, and why the difference changes what you do.

• The badger cull and the perturbation problem

  A large randomised trial had already shown that culling badgers can spread bovine TB as well as reduce it. The policy proceeded anyway.

• Bird trapping on the Egyptian coast

  Kilometres of mist net along the Mediterranean shore, catching migrants as they make landfall, and the visiting hunters who travel to shoot elsewhere.

• Birders Against Wildlife Crime: reporting what you see

  Raptor persecution on British moorland is documented and under-reported. A campaign built on the idea that those best placed to record it are already out.

• Burdur Lake: the wintering site the White-headed Ducks left

  A closed basin in south-western Turkey once held most of the world's wintering White-headed Ducks. It has lost 47% of its water, and the ducks moved on.

• The Cahow: a petrel that was extinct for 300 years

  The Bermuda Petrel was written off in the seventeenth century and rediscovered in 1951. Reaching a hundred nesting pairs took another sixty years.

• Collins Bird Guide, second edition

  The standard field guide to the birds of Europe, and why the illustration-and-text combination still outperforms photographic guides for identification.

• The Common Agricultural Policy and the farmland bird decline

  Europe's farmland birds have fallen further than any other group, and the biggest single influence on European farming is a subsidy system. They connect.

• The Echo Parakeet: from a dozen birds back to a population

  In the 1980s the Echo Parakeet was reduced to a handful of individuals on Mauritius. What it took to reverse that, and why the recovery is instructive.

• The Eponym Dictionary of Amphibians

  Who the amphibians are named after, in a reference work that turns out to be a history book. Pelagic Publishing, by Beolens, Watkins and Grayson.

• The Extremadura steppes: bustards and open country

  Beyond the oak dehesa, the plains of Extremadura hold Great and Little Bustard, sandgrouse and larks, and require an entirely different way of looking.

• First-winter Mediterranean Gull: separating it from Black-headed

  In its first winter a Mediterranean Gull is neither white-winged nor obvious. The mask, the bill, the wing pattern, and the one feature that settles it.

• Grey Parrots, CITES and the limits of a trade quota

  Export quotas for wild-caught Grey Parrots continued while wild populations fell. What a quota does and does not count, and what changed in 2016.

• House Crow: the bird that arrives by ship

  Corvus splendens spreads by hitching rides on cargo ships. Why a bold, adaptable crow becomes a problem wherever it lands, and why ports are where to act.

• Identifying claimed Spoon-billed Sandpipers

  The bill shape that names the species is invisible from most angles. What separates a Spoon-billed Sandpiper from a Red-necked Stint in a large flock.

• Ilisu Dam and Hasankeyf: flooding an 11,000-year-old town

  The Ilisu Dam on the Tigris would submerge Hasankeyf, said to meet nine of the ten UNESCO World Heritage criteria, along with the river habitat around it.

• Incheon and Ganghwa tidal power against the tidal flats

  Two proposed tidal power plants at the top of the Yellow Sea, promoted as green infrastructure, would have destroyed internationally important habitat.

• Invisible Connections: shorebirds and the Yellow Sea

  Wetlands International's trilingual photographic account of the East Asian–Australasian Flyway, and why publishing it in Korean and Chinese was the point.

• Kamchatka Gull: the eastern Common Gull

  Larus canus kamtschatschensis is bigger, heavier-billed and paler-eyed than the western form, and shows how subspecies limits actually get argued.

• Lasioglossum calceatum: a common bee nobody looks at

  One of the most widespread solitary bees in Europe, with a life cycle that switches between solitary and social behaviour depending on the season.

• Mangrove Finch: the rarest of Darwin's finches

  A Galápagos finch reduced to two small mangrove patches on one island, and a parasitic fly that kills nestlings faster than the birds can replace them.

• Monfragüe and the dehesa: birding Extremadura

  A dawn in Parque Nacional de Monfragüe, and what makes the managed oak landscape around it one of the best raptor areas in Europe.

• Optics companies sell to birders and to hunters

  The same manufacturers supply both markets and sponsor both worlds. Whether that should trouble a birdwatcher choosing binoculars is worth arguing out.

• Poisoned Oriental Storks, and a shift in Chinese conservation

  An Endangered stork poisoned at a wetland in Tianjin, and the response that followed: rescue, media coverage and public anger from inside China.

• Puerto Rican Tody: the San Pedrito and the family it belongs to

  A six-gram green and red endemic most visitors hear before they see. What the Puerto Rican Tody is, and why todies live only in the Caribbean.

• Saemangeum: what happens when a staging site is walled off

  A 33km sea wall closed in 2006 and enclosed over 40,000 hectares of tidal flat. What the monitoring showed, and why it defines the Yellow Sea argument.

• Scaly-sided Merganser and the legacy of river engineering

  An Endangered duck that needs clean, fast rivers with mature trees along them, and what large-scale river works leave behind.

• Scientific whaling, and what the exemption is for

  The Republic of Korea told the IWC it would resume Minke Whale hunting under the research provision. What that clause is, and why it draws criticism.

• Testing shorebirds for avian influenza without harming them

  Surveillance sampling means catching wild birds. How they are held between capture and release decides the welfare outcome and whether the data is usable.

• Three birding sites around Nairobi

  A capital city with an improbable bird list. Three accessible sites, a golf club in coffee, museum grounds and grassland by the park, and what each is for.

• Trophy hunting, outrage, and what the photograph does not show

  A hunting photograph goes round the world and the argument becomes about one person. The industry behind it is barely touched by that.

• Ulcinj Saltpans: could tourism save a Montenegrin wetland?

  A working saltpan on the Adriatic flyway, abandoned as an industry and coveted as a development site. What was at stake, and why tourism cut both ways.

• What an open spring hunting season did in Malta

  Monitoring camps in 2011 recorded nearly 950 shots outside hunting hours and dozens of protected birds shot at, more than the three previous years.

• The Wildlife Artist's Handbook: Jackie Garner, reviewed

  Jackie Garner's handbook on drawing and painting wildlife: what is in its nine chapters, who it suits, and why it starts with anatomy instead of technique.

Notesshort entries, not full articles

• The 5000 Mile Project: running the length of South America

  Katharine and David Lowrie ran unsupported from Chile to Venezuela to raise money for conservation and to record the grasslands they crossed.

• African Bird Club, BOC and the NHM: a day of short interviews

  Six speakers on the Liben Lark, Lesser Crested Terns in Libya, restoring the lost avifauna of the Mascarenes, and travel in rarely visited parts of Africa.

• Auklets, Brünnich's Guillemot and Siberian Accentor in Korea

  Records of northern seabirds and a Siberian passerine from the Korean peninsula: the kind of observation that fills in a distribution map.

• Azzam Alwash on restoring the Mesopotamian marshes

  The marshes of southern Iraq were drained deliberately in the 1990s. The founder of Nature Iraq on returning in 2003 to try to bring them back.

• Barn Swallow roosts at Ebbaken, Nigeria

  European Barn Swallows winter in West Africa in enormous roosts, and ringing at Ebbaken connects them to breeding populations far to the north.

• The Biggest Twitch: a world record year, by the people who did it

  Ruth Miller and Alan Davies spent 2008 chasing a world year list across 27 countries, beat a record that had stood since 1989, and finished on 4,341 species.

• BirdLife and the search for breeding Spoon-billed Sandpipers

  A 2011 episode on the expedition to northern Russia looking for undiscovered breeding pairs of the Critically Endangered Spoon-billed Sandpiper.

• Ceri Levy and the Ghosts of Gone Birds

  An art exhibition about extinct birds, raising money for BirdLife's Preventing Extinctions Programme and reaching people conservation reporting does not.

• Ceri Levy on what Malta is actually like

  A documentary filmmaker's reaction to seeing the illegal shooting of migrants first-hand, recorded shortly after returning.

• Chris Collins on returning from Chukotka

  A 2011 conversation recorded a day after the Heritage Expeditions guide returned from the Spoon-billed Sandpiper fieldwork in north-eastern Russia.

• Christoph Zöckler on the Rudong tidal flats

  A survey week at Rudong recorded at least 106 Spoon-billed Sandpipers, possibly a third of the world population, on mudflats threatened with reclamation.

• Christoph Zöckler on the Spoon-billed Sandpiper Recovery Group

  A 2011 interview with the coordinator of the Spoon-billed Sandpiper Species Recovery Group, recorded before the survey expedition to eastern Russia.

• Christoph Zöckler: an update from Slimbridge

  Recorded a week after the first Spoon-billed Sandpipers reached Slimbridge, on the breeding programme, hunting on the wintering grounds, and reclamation.

• Conference Calls, December 2011

  An edition of the Conference Calls series, recorded on 2 December 2011.

• Conference Calls, September 2011: listing, and the panel format

  An edition of the Conference Calls series from 10 September 2011, which took in bird listing and the services birders keep their lists on.

• Dan Rhoads on birding in Cyprus

  An American birder, trained at the Cornell Lab, on watching migration from an island where the birds are both spectacular and heavily persecuted.

• Debbie Pain on the Spoon-billed Sandpiper breeding programme

  A 2011 conversation with Dr Debbie Pain of the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust on the breeding programme set up as a last resort for the Spoon-billed Sandpiper.

• Development on the shoreline of Lake Qarun

  A resort proposed on the shore of a protected Egyptian lake recognised for its wintering waterbirds and breeding Slender-billed Gulls.

• Discarded fishing tackle and the Black-faced Spoonbill

  A Globally Endangered spoonbill with a world population in the low thousands, and a threat that rarely makes the list: line and hooks where birds feed.

• Filming the Bogotá Sunangel question

  A hummingbird at a private reserve in north-eastern Colombia, and whether it is a species known from a single nineteenth-century specimen.

• Geoffrey Saliba on illegal hunting in Malta

  A second conversation with BirdLife Malta's campaigns coordinator on the illegal shooting and trapping of migrating birds, and what campaigning costs.

• The Great March of Anatolia: Turkey's rivers and its dams

  Engin Yılmaz of Doğa Derneği on Anadolu Vermeyeceğiz, the citizen campaign against a hydroelectric programme spanning thousands of kilometres of river.

• The Grumpy Birder: Bo Beolens on what irritates birders

  Bo Beolens, the Fatbirder, on the things about birdwatching that are worth complaining about, in a long-running column.

• The Incheon tidal power proposal

  A tidal barrage proposed on internationally important intertidal habitat near Incheon, and the assessment questions it raised.

• The IUCN Yellow Sea report, and a whaling announcement

  An IUCN situation analysis on East Asian intertidal habitats, and Korea's announcement at the IWC that it would resume hunting Minke Whales.

• Jeff Gordon on the American Birding Association

  A membership organisation founded in 1969 and widely written off by 2010, and its new president on what it was for and whether it still had a role.

• Lekki Conservation Centre: birding a fenced reserve in Lagos

  A 78-hectare swamp and savannah reserve on the Lekki Peninsula, the species a visit recorded there, and what the access problem actually is.

• Mark Avery on Fighting for Birds

  The RSPB's former conservation director on his second book after leaving, on conservation politics, farmland birds and the shooting industry.

• Mark Avery on whether an individual can make a difference

  Recorded after an autumn statement widely read as hostile to environmental regulation, on what one person can actually do.

• Mark Barter and the counting of the Yellow Sea

  An Australian shorebird researcher who established, by survey, not argument, how much of the East Asian flyway depended on the Yellow Sea.

• Martin Hellicar on ambelopoulia and bird trapping in Cyprus

  Blackcaps trapped in their hundreds of thousands for an illegal delicacy, and the campaign against a trade with a substantial commercial value.

• Matt Shardlow on neonicotinoid insecticides

  The chief executive of Buglife on a class of systemic insecticide, what it does beyond its target, and why invertebrate declines are so poorly monitored.

• Nial Moores at the IUCN World Conservation Congress

  Recorded shortly before the Republic of Korea hosted the IUCN congress, on what an international conference does and does not change for the tidal flats.

• People's Park, Nanning: birding a city park in Guangxi

  An urban park in subtropical southern China, and what city parks are actually good for when you have a few hours and no transport.

• Rob Lambert on the Isles of Scilly

  Whether Scilly's decline as a birding destination has been exaggerated, and what changed: with a historian of British birdwatching.

• Simon Tonkin on farmland birds

  A conversation on the conservation of farmland birds, and on working with the agricultural systems that determine what survives on them.

• The Spoon-billed Sandpiper on the 100 most threatened list

  A note on the species' inclusion among the world's hundred most threatened, and on what such lists are and are not useful for.

• The Spoon-billed Sandpipers at Slimbridge

  Birds taken as eggs in Arctic Russia, reared and flown to Gloucestershire, shown for the first time, and what a captive population that size can do.

• Surveying wintering Scaly-sided Mergansers in Korea

  A river survey update on an Endangered duck with a world population of around 1,700 pairs, a significant share of which winters in the Republic of Korea.

• Terry Townshend on illegal mist-netting in China

  Millions of birds a year taken in illegal nets, and the Chinese activists documenting and dismantling them.

• Terry Townshend on Jankowski's Bunting

  One of East Asia's rarest birds, and a BirdLife Species Champion's effort to keep it from extinction. Recorded in Beijing.

• Tristan Reid: tattoos, and a walk across Turkey

  The Inked Naturalist on drawing attention to Turkey's threatened biodiversity: first with bird tattoos, then with a plan to hike thousands of kilometres.

• Voices from the London march against the badger cull

  Short interviews recorded on 1 June 2013 with marchers and campaign organisations opposing the English badger cull.

• What a birdfair is actually for

  A large annual gathering that funds a specific conservation project each year, and does several other things that are harder to put on a poster.

By series

• Gullfest —
• Podcasts 30

By subject

• Birding culture 5
• Books 6
• China 6
• Conservation 9
• Ducks 6
• Endemics 4
• Habitat 13
• Hunting 9
• Korea 9
• Malta 3
• Mauritius 1
• Plumage 4
• Policy 7
• Shorebirds 5
• Site guides 5
• Spoon-billed Sandpiper 8
• Turkey 4
• Turtle Dove 1
• Wetlands 4