You are browsing the archives of 2006 March.

Apart from the first frenzied hours of my arrival in Oakland, birding was restricted primarily to those species eking out a living in my hotel’s foliage. Not that I tired of my spare minutes with the same old scrub-jays, ruby-crowns, yellow-rumps, crows, gulls, Anna’s Hummingbirds, Black Phoebes, and Brewer’s Blackbirds …it’s just that I wasn’t [...]

Yesterday, I described the excitement of landing in Oakland and birding Arrowhead Marsh. By the time I finished there, checked into my hotel, and found my way to the hills above Oakland, the sun was growing low in the sky. The dramatic heights of Oakland Hills and the other elevated areas east of Oakland proper [...]

Business has brought me to California this week and I’ve got to say, flying into Oakland is pretty sweet. Not only is the airport nice and clean, it sits less than a mile from premier birding habitat! Arrowhead Marsh, part of the Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Shoreline Park, is a birding bonanza, a waterfowl [...]

Last December, I joined a large and diverse collection of bloggers in examining how the concept of race impacts certain areas of our lives on Blog Against Racism Day.  I looked at racism in birding, since this is my beat, so to speak. Now I’ve learned that we’ve got a Blog Against Sexism Day. My [...]

Alluring rumors of Pine Siskin enticed me to visit Van Cortlandt Park this weekend, but alas, just like every other time I’ve chased rarities there, I came up empty. New York City’s third largest park simply covers too much acreage, 1146 to be precise, with too few landmarks by which to chart sightings and too [...]