Filmed 2/28/07 at several ponds on the Jersey shore as well as Lake Etra, Hightstown. The Redheads were filmed on Lake “Tak” in Long Branch, a large flock for the area. Featuring Canada Goose, American Black Duck, American Widgeon, a barking Gadwall, Northern Shoveler, Ring-necked Duck, Common and Hooded Mergansers, Great Blue Heron, roosting Black-crowned Night-Herons, American Coot, and the usual Belted Kingfisher.
Today on Texel island.
First, the old dike of the Waal and Burg polder. The dike was made in the middle ages to save older polders from the sea; Waal en Burg then was still sea. It only became a polder in the seventeenth century.
Today, there is a bicycle path along the old dike. One can see many birds from there.
The first birds were pied wagtails, looking for insects between cows and calves on a meadow.
There were migratory birds: barn swallows, meadow pipits.
A marsh harrier.
On a field: black-headed gull, lesser black-backed gull, gray lag geese, northern lapwings. Two black-tailed godwits. Common gulls. Rabbits. A group of whimbrels.
Later on a little lake, among many coots and moorhens, a couple of gadwall ducks.
Still later, another lake. Oystercacher; redshanks. A snipe flying away. Three little grebes.
It had been a beautiful morning and we looked forward to a beautiful afternoon.
However, then came rain … and more rain …
Two grey lag geese and a domestic goose gone wild near Wagejot reserve … and we had to go back. Rain … rain …
This video from the USA is about ‘Jersey Shore Birding with snowy and great egrets, common, least, forster’s and gull-billed terns, black skimmer, laughing gull, american oystercatcher, lesser yellowlegs, short-billed dowwitcher, black-bellied and semipalmated plovers, ruddy turnstone, dunlin, semipalmated, least and a wayward curlew sandpiper. ‘
I chose this video especially for the dunlin.
Yesterday, 27 September, in the harbour of Den Helder in the Netherlands. Around the boat, waiting to depart to Texel island, are black-headed gulls and herring gulls circling. Also jackdaws; but as soon as the ferry boat departs, they probably do not like a longish flight over the Wadden sea, and leave. The gulls stay.
Many dunlins are flying to the east, in flocks of about ten to about one hundred.
A walk in the Muy area in the dunes. Reed buntings. A whinchat. A rabbit. In the Buiten Muy dune lake: four shelducks. And a great cormorant flying.
Many dragonflies, and a speckled wood butterfly.
Along the floodline of the seashore, small groups of sanderling.
Today, 28 September, a walk to Ecomare, a zoological museum, which also takes care of sick marine mammals and seabirds.
In front of it, they made a ‘hotel’ of wood, bottles, reed, etc., for solitary bees and wasps.
David Miliband, the foreign secretary, yesterday attempted a break with a decade of Blairite foreign policy, admitting a scarred government needed to stop and think why its well-intentioned interventions had alienated millions of Muslims.
In a frank speech, he also admitted there could be no military solutions in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying the government had found it hard to win peace in such countries.
Mr Miliband, why, then, are right at this moment, British soldiers still dying; and still killing Afghan and Iraqi civilians; in pursuit of those ‘military solutions’ which you, correctly, claim are illusory? Shouldn’t you bring those British troops home; right now?
And why, Mr Miliband, have you waited with speaking out till Tony Blair was safely gone? At least, your predecessor Robin Cook had the decency to resign, protesting the Iraq war. Your colleague Clare Short, to her discredit, stayed until after the 2003 Iraq invasion; but, to her credit, then resigned and protested the war.
When people like Mr Miliband would have stood up to Blair before the 2003 invasion, they might have saved over a million Iraqi lives.
Still, “better late than never”; and now, Mr Milibands words should be followed up by actions.
Integrity doesn’t seem to matter, invading Iraq and lying about WMD. We have lost all ethical value. Blair should be known as the man who murdered truth and now Brown is pretending he was asleep during those meetings.
According to the zoo, they probably are the only specimens of this species in Europe. Blijdorp will try hard to get these special animals to produce offspring, as the first zoo anywhere in the world.
It has been hailed as a major breakthrough: Burgers’ Ocean, the marine section of Burgers’ Zoo in the Dutch city of Arnhem, has successfully bred jellyfish in captivity.
Boston - A South African scholar was barred from the United States because of his criticism of US policy in Iraq and the Guantanamo Bay prisoner camp, a civil rights group said in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday.
The lawsuit charges the government’s decision to revoke Habib’s visa last year forced him to turn down speaking engagements, thereby violating the First Amendment rights of US citizens who could not hear his views.
Habib, a deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Johannesburg, was detained for seven hours and interrogated about his political views and associations when he arrived in New York in October 2006 for meetings with organisations such as the World Bank, the ACLU said in its complaint.
He was eventually escorted by armed guards to an airplane and deported back to South Africa, according to the 29-page complaint, which names Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff as defendants.
“Over the past few years, numerous foreign scholars, human rights activists, and writers - all vocal critics of US policy - have been barred from the US without explanation or on unspecified national security grounds,” she said in a statement.
This behaviour by the Bush administration is not that surprising.
A FROG believed to be extinct for more than two decades has been rediscovered by a Manchester scientist.
Zoologist Andrew Gray found the brown and metallic-green tree frog - with the Latin name Isthomhyla rivularis - in the remote forests of Costa Rica in Central America. His discovery has excited zoologists, biologists and conservationists around the globe as it raises new hope that other species considered to have become extinct as a result of climate change may have survived.
These include the fabled Golden Toad of Costa Rica, believed to be one of the first casualties of global warming.
Andrew, a curator at Manchester Museum, trekked for 16 hours to the remotest area of the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve before making the discovery.
It’s small, ugly and lives in stagnant bogs. If it disappeared into extinction few would even notice.
But environmental authorities have deemed the “acutely threatened” Canterbury mudfish worth fighting for.
They are even planning a series of public events in its honour.
Next month, Mudfish Day will be held in the North Canterbury town of Oxford, where it was first discovered in 1924.
Other events include a display in the Christchurch Botanical Gardens, the launch of a mudfish website, and an expert lecture at Christchurch Art Gallery.
There are five species of mudfish in New Zealand, but the Canterbury species, or kowaro, is the second most threatened native fish in New Zealand.
It is limited to only 80 known habitats, many of which are under threat from the scarcity of water and huge growth in agriculture across the region.
Freshwater ecologist Leanne O’Brien agrees the mudfish might not have the same appeal as the likes of the kiwi, but she thinks it has a beauty of its own worth preserving.
“Maybe it doesn’t photograph well. I know they are a little brown fish. But most people are quite amazed when they see them. Some of them have little gold flecks in them.
From the 
