"[Irruption] is the term birders use to describe an unusual mass movement of birds into an area. But even that big word fails to capture what happened last winter when thousands of owls descended on northern Minnesota." [more inside]
posted by jessamyn on Oct 16, 2009 - 70 comments

E.J. Peiker, Nature Photgrapher There are a lot of nature photographers out there -- some better than Peiker and some worse -- but what fascinates me about Peiker's site is the number of photos available. A birdwatcher's dream, it features pages of photos of over 500 different species of birds, including an index devoted solely to wild waterfowl. Maybe animals are more your speed? How about nearly 150 pages of photos of wild animals (including my favorite - a quite handsome, flower-eating porcupine.) There's also a section for scenic photography featuring 23 states and 20 countries (or you can search by national park.) The photos are, unfortunately, not that big but there a ton of them, many of them quite pretty.
posted by LeeJay on Feb 29, 2008 - 13 comments

Bee eaters and lesser kestrels.
posted by Wolfdog on Mar 3, 2007 - 12 comments

Gregory Colbert's Ashes and Snow has been linked to twice before on Metafilter. However, you can now view 10 minutes of his film as part of his Ted Talk--it's the most stunning nature footage I've ever seen. In the talk he also mentions a new concept he's developing called Animal Copyright, which I think is long overdue.
posted by dobbs on Jan 2, 2007 - 29 comments

Birds that rap and cows with accents. The big picture is urban adaptation, which is pretty cool. (...and the egg wins.)
posted by ewkpates on Dec 28, 2006 - 17 comments

Birds As Art: Photographer Arthur Morris shares his dazzling images of (mostly) feathered creatures in his (up to 196 so far) email bulletins. It's quite worth wading through the archive.
posted by of strange foe on Jul 6, 2006 - 9 comments

the new urban jungle . . . is a growing movement led by cities like San Francisco, New York, and Leiden to restore active and vibrant natural systems in urban areas. Far from the eden-like depictions of nature of yesteryear, i.e. the garden of earthly delights (nonetheless, still attracting some dynamic new christian converts), the movement has morphed into today's backyard and grassroots environmental movement which is more and more a picture of hybridity, compromise, mixed-use, and ultimately, taking nature out of the walled islands of zoos, aquaria, national parks and other thick-walled institutions and offering a different kind of everyday "unmediated" community experience with the new urban wilderness. VIDEO LINK
posted by huckhound on Jul 6, 2006 - 1 comment

A good resouce for bird idenification / watching: USGS's Patuxent Bird Identification InfoCenter includes calls, photos and population coverage maps and seasonal birding checklists. And on a completely unrelated note, they have a sweet guide on the morphology of tadpoles. -mi-
posted by bigmusic on Jul 3, 2006 - 4 comments

Searchable Ornithological Research Archive a site containing back issues of avian journals dating back to 1884. Some highlights: The landing forces of domestic pigeons, [pdf] an 1889 comparison of bird brains [pdf]
posted by Pink Fuzzy Bunny on Apr 13, 2006 - 5 comments

Songs of Brazilian Birds A fantastically diverse collection of .au files, including the beautifully evocative Organ Wren or Uirapuru, the mooing of the Capuchinbird, the sci-fi minimalism of the Short-tailed Antthrush and a duet of Laughing Falcons (they'll make you laugh at the end).
posted by mediareport on Jan 23, 2006 - 14 comments

Harmonie/Harmony: a beautiful flash of birds,poetry imbedded 435 clicks
posted by hortense on Oct 29, 2005 - 8 comments

Bird Watchers Guide on Flickr. "Linked list of species submitted; find all photos of a species here".
posted by nthdegx on Jun 5, 2005 - 11 comments

Seabirds Skull Gallery An amateur birder in Holland is fascinated by the internal structure of various seabirds. [via Incoming Signals]
posted by mediareport on Feb 19, 2005 - 7 comments

Listen to nature. If the sadness of life makes you tired, remember that in California, all the treetops are bursting with birds, and be happy again (unless you don't like pages that load with sound, or commercial sites, or Flash; don't go adding to your sorrows).
posted by melissa may on Dec 9, 2004 - 12 comments

Crows better than chimps at making tools? British scientists were reportedly "astonished" when a captive crow named Betty "spontaneously bent a straight piece of wire and used it to retrieve a snack." But another scientist says crows have been seen making two kinds of hook tools in the wild, although he's not sure we should say they have "insight." It's clear that there are lots of different kinds of animal intelligences, so why are humans so surprised when dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors, chimps demonstrate culture and lions engage in social problem-solving? What explains the reluctance to admit that animal "consciousness" exists?
posted by mediareport on Aug 9, 2002 - 72 comments