Webpage launched

25^th December, 2016 | News & updates

Today, this website was launched. In this post, I would like to introduce it and its purpose.

First, this is my personal website. One of its purpose is therefore to promote my work, which is mainly my research and research of our team. Other purpose is to inform people about what our team is working on right now. But it is also, quite simply, a webpage where people can find information about my scientific career, my publications, my CV and my contact information in case they would like to contact me. These information can be found on the page called about & contact .

Second, I’d like to create kind of a blog and publish articles mostly related to my research and bird ringing. For easier browsing through those hundreds of future articles I will try to categorize them into these three categories:

News & updates – where articles like the one you are reading right now will be published. Articles informing about news on this website or (hopefully) news on newly published scientific papers.
Trip reports – category for articles about field trips and general birding trips. However this category will have a little broader topic than its name suggests. Also articles dealing with bird ringing will be added to this category.
Reviews – category for review articles, mostly about bird related books and ringing equipment.
Misc – finally, category for articles which are a little bit tricky to put into other categories.

I hope I’ll be able to add articles as often as possible but it is more than clear that you can’t expect updates on daily basis, not even weekly. Still I hope I can add interesting content quite often. You can see the most recent updates on the homepage and in the blog section as well.

Third comes the part I’m right now probably most excited about but still not quite sure, how it should look. So unfortunately, this part is not ready yet so you will not be able to find it on this website yet. But what will it be? It will be a gallery of photographs of birds in hand. This autumn I started to take pictures of birds in hand in front of middle grey card with quite nice shooting camera. Result is right now an interesting collection of birds in hands with pictures of whole bird and closeup photo of spread wing or tail. As far as I know, these kind of pictures are not that commonly found online and in the future may, or may not, be of some use as a bird ageing reference.

My goal would be to take pictures of as many bird species and as many individuals from each species as possible to create a gallery of pictures of birds in hand to complement websites like Ringers' Digi Guide of the Ottenby fågelstation or Identification Atlas of Birds of Aragon . Not an easy goal but with possible interesting results.

Here I present you some sample pictures of one 1cy male Eurasian Blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla, October 2016, Czech Republic). Apart from the few remaining brown feathers in his cap, you can clearly see the moult limit in the wing with the outer six greater coverts retained juvenile and the rest post-juvenile. Click on the picture to see larger resolution. Images will open in a new tab. WARNING – images have around 5 to 9 MB each!

I will make a blog post when this part will be ready. For those who had the nerves to read it up to this point – this post is getting annoyingly long so I think it is more than fair to stop it right now. I really hope one day you will find some interesting information.

Thanks for visiting.
Ondřej Kauzál