You are browsing the archives of 2006 August.

the soul longs to move
migration is one true path
nesting another
This modest verse is my way of introducing Mariya of migrateblog, someone who knows all about weighty matters like migration and nesting. She slings a mean haiku too, as you’ll find out when you read her perfectly poetic presentation of I and the Bird #31!
Is bird […]

Adding a second child, even a healthy one like my lovely and robust Ivy, to the Core Team has ensured that we’ve been seeing lots of doctors. I didn’t realize how many we’d visited in the last three months until Mason told Sara yesterday that he wanted to “co-pay some money.”
My adorable, adventurous, and highly […]

One of the most compelling reasons to take up bird watching doesn’t include birds at all. You see, no bird is an island. Every avian exists as part of a rich ecosystem teeming with all manner of flora and fauna. Keep your eyes open for birds and you’ll be amazed at what else you see.
Since […]

Little Ringed Plover (Charadrius dubius) by Charlie Moores
When shorebird season arrives, one group you should keep your eyes open for, no matter where on Earth you call home (unless for some inexplicable reason you live in Antarctica) are plovers.
Plovers are relatively small shorebirds, compact but gracefully tapered, somewhat reminiscent of teardrops with bird legs. Sixty-six […]

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail
I think hobnobbing with so many fantastic bug bloggers is getting to me because I find myself paying increased attention to invertebrates out in the field. I’m particularly enjoying butterflies, moths, and dragonflies, the species most bird watchers seem to be susceptible to. In some cases, these creatures are hard to ignore. The […]

On June 01 this year I posted a ‘comment’ piece on the death of Colin Watson, who was allegedly an obsessional egg-collector and had recently died falling from a tree in a Yorkshire wood (UK’s notorious egger dies in fall). I had never met Colin Watson, of course, but in my piece I tried to […]

Least Sandpiper
I dropped in at Crestwood Lake in Westchester during my Saturday morning shopping, both to give Mason a chance to throw rocks in the water and me an opportunity to check out some of the local birds. We all have our hobbies, right? Anyway, I saw little sign of the early wave of passerine […]

 
Paradise Flycatcher sp
Nigeria. 12 December 2004 and 15 August 2006
 
“Whilst in Abuja [15 August 2006] I took a rather poor photo of a Paradise Flycatcher Terpsiphone sp [photo 1 below] in the hotel garden. It was getting pretty dark and I only saw the bird “through the camera” before it flew off and didn’t look […]

My sister and I went to the Giants (New York football, not San Francisco baseball) game last night to watch them handily dispatch the Kansas City Chiefs. Sporting events, at least outdoor ones, present opportunities for decent birding, particularly if you like gulls. Giants Stadium is home to the standard complement of these adaptable seabirds, […]

Birding, bird watching, bird spotting… no matter what you call it, you’ll only be telling part of the story. This activity may begin with birds, but it rarely ends there. Legendary conservationist John Muir said it best: “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the […]