You are browsing the archives of 2005 August.

This planet of ours is impossibly vast, as those eager to bird the length and width of it might attest. Watching birds in a new territory can be a tense affair; if you don’t spot and identify that tody-flycatcher during your brief stay in a distant land, YOU MAY NEVER GET ANOTHER CHANCE! There are [...]

Birds follow a different calendar than we humans do. Even though we’re still clinging desperately to sweet, sweet summer, their fall migration has already begun. Jewel-toned warblers are filtering through the five boroughs, with scads of songbirds spotted recently in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Eager to relive those heady migratory days of May, when we spotted [...]

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Fermilab to its friends, is the largest high-energy physics laboratory in the United States, second in the world only to CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. Fermilab, which gets its name from Enrico Fermi, a pioneer in the science of particle physics, is a hotspot for high-energy physics research. Its [...]

Tim Gallagher’s The Grail Bird is the definitive narrative of one of the most exciting ornithological discoveries in recent U.S. history. Yes, that’s right — I’m talking about the identification of living Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in an Arkansas bottomland swamp. What other bird story has inspired such passion, delight, and, most important, media attention in the [...]

The Core Team’s excursion this weekend was a soggy slog through Constitution Marsh in Cold Spring, NY. Although the weather report promised that the heavy cloud cover over NYC would burn off quickly, we didn’t consider that conditions might be different 55 miles to the north. But the clouds persisted, thickened, and finally burst just [...]

I received a disturbing e-mail from a reader last week: I came across something today that might be of interest to you and your group. I’m a researcher. I came across an individual who spends his days trying to figure ways to torture, poison, kill and otherwise harm wildlife, including birds. This is his “research” [...]

The whole team visited the New York Botanical Garden this afternoon. Our primary objective was their Wednesday Farmer’s Market, not nearly as impressive as it used to be. While we were there, however, we had to take in at least some of the flora and fauna. Few flowers were blooming this fine August day, nor [...]

I’ve been so busy actually watching birds that I neglected my second anniversary of writing about watching birds. August 11 was our blogoversary! The last year has been quite productive for the Core Team. We spotted 71 brand new birds and loads of familiar ones. We also visited some fantastic locales, including Washington State, Puerto [...]

Perhaps I’ve become jaded by Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, one of the premiere birding spots on the east coast of North America. While waiting for the rest of the Core Team to return from their rural retreat, I dropped in on Jamaica Bay for brief spot of bird watching. My destination was the oft-ignored East [...]

My breakfast bird walk earlier in the week was so enjoyable that I decided to take my show on the road for another one this morning. Today, I visited Tibbetts Brook Park in Yonkers, a large public space with a string of large ponds. Water makes summer birding more interesting, but I was still on [...]