You are browsing the archives of 2005 September.

A question I often get asked is: “Where’s the best place you’ve ever been birding?” I work for a major British airline and am fortunate enough to have birded all over the world. Not always intensively, not always very well, but in sites from Canada down to Argentina, Cairo to Cape Town, and from the [...]

Many birders, present company included, give the impression that only uncommon birds matter to us, the rarer the better. Yet, while we are admittedly excited by exotic avifauna, often willing to go to great lengths to view the unusual or unexpected, these are not the species that sustain our passion. More than likely, a birder [...]

After the excitement of Corn Creek, Vegas turned out to be rather mundane from a birding perspective. A brutal sleep schedule, the steep cost of getting around the city, and a few other factors conspired to keep me close to my hotel yesterday rather than at one of area’s urban parks. Despite the squalor of [...]

Word on the web is that Corn Creek, the gateway to the Desert Wildlife Refuge, is one of the finest spots to go birding in all of Nevada, certainly the best in the Las Vegas area. I certainly can’t imagine better. Corn Creek is a lush oasis in the midst of a surprisingly verdant desert [...]

Birds of Southern India (Grimmet R and Inskipp T, Helm Field Guides 2005)
 
I get out to India with my airline job a couple of times a year but have actually spent very little time in the field in recent years, and a trip to Kolkata made me realise just how long it had been since [...]

The green side of Kolkata…: Kolkata, India
15 September 2005
 
In 1690, Job Charnok, an agent of the East India Company chose a site for a British trade settlement. The site was carefully selected, being protected by the Hooghly River on the west, a creek to the north, and by salt lakes about two and [...]

This weekend was supposed to mark the Core Team’s first pelagic birding trip until high seas scuttled the expedition. What exactly does ‘pelagic’ mean, and what’s the big deal anyway?
Our birding word of the day, pelagic, means of, relating to, or living in open oceans or seas rather than waters adjacent to land or inland [...]

I drove down to Bramley Frith Environmental Education Centre (Bramley Frith EEC) in Hampshire today with Toby Nowlan and his brother to have a look at a British mammal I shamefully knew virtually nothing about and had never seen - the Common or Hazel Dormouse Muscardinus avellanarius, a four inch, fuzzy-tailed, round-eyed bundle of golden [...]

Mai Po Marshes, Hong Kong
06 September 2005
 
The wetlands around the Mai Po Marshes and Inner Deep Bay in the northwestern corner of Hong Kong, have been known as an important staging and wintering area for migratory waterbirds (including threatened species such as Black-faced Spoonbills and Spoon-billed Sandpipers) for many decades. Not recognized as any form [...]

My brother, Matt and his long-time love, Ursula got married this weekend. The event was spectacular; if you’ve never experienced a Bronx wedding reception, you are missing a true cultural experience. Where else in the world would an Italian tarantella be followed by the Jewish hora? The preparation for the wedding, the nuptials themselves, and [...]