You are browsing the archives of 2006 January.

Spoon-billed Sandpiper. Spotted Greenshank. Chinese Egret. Far eastern Curlew. Black-faced Spoonbill. Saunders’s Gull. Great Knot. If you’re a regular reader of this site, chances are good that you’ve never seen any of these birds. Most likely, you never will. But I want you to care about them anyway. A vast expanse of tidal flats called [...]

I didn’t realize that it was customary at year end to ruminate on one’s previous 52 weeks of avian observation, but I’m happy to take my cue from folks like Nuthatch, John, Eric of Feather Weather, the Birders in Boxers, and others who looked back fondly on their birds of 2005. Number of species seen [...]

My sister and I brought Mason to catch the last weekend of the New York Botanical Garden Holiday Train Show. The trains weren’t exactly the attraction, The conceit driving this exhibition was that the trains navigated a variety of notable NYC and Westchester County landmarks created predominantly of plant matter. Visitors could marvel at bridges [...]

True to form, our unseasonably warm weather snapped just in time for the weekend. Twenty-four hours of torrential rain was followed by twenty-four more of snow, ice, and frigid winds capable of flaying the skin off a hapless birder. But I had to get out anyway. The fact that one person once reported seeing Horned [...]

The term “bird brained” is usually used as a slur to impugn someone’s intelligence. But why should a reference to avian intelligence be insulting? Birds have phenomenal brains. In fact, Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences posits eight different kinds of genius, which include Visual/Spatial (visual perception of the environment, the ability to create and [...]

I spotted the mangy female House Finch featured above at Ann’s feeders last week. Before you panic, this poor wretch doesn’t seem to be suffering from H5N1 poultry flu or leprosy. No, what is afflicting this unfortunate Carpodacus mexicanus is most likely Mycoplasma gallisepticum, otherwise known as mycoplasmal conjunctivitis, house finch conjunctivitis, or simply house [...]

My efforts to bag one last life bird before 2005′s end proved futile. There were no winter finches or white-winged gulls for me, no Horned Larks or Bohemian Waxwings, certainly no Ruffed Grouse! One imagines that remote wildspaces teem with throngs of creatures seeking solace from encroaching urbanization. But my week away from the city [...]

The Blue Crane Grus paradisea is truly a magnificent creature and worthy of being South Africa’s national bird.  It is also known as the Stanley Crane ,the Paradise Crane and some taxonomies consider its scientific name Anthropoides paradiseus.  Sadly, because of its small and declining population BirdLife International classifies the Blue Crane as Vulnerable. A dancing Blue [...]