You are browsing the archives of 2007 April.

A beautiful spring day began in Woodside, Queens, with coffee, a shower, a drive to Flushing to drop off Daisy at the library (haha, law-student), and then Hempstead Lake State Park.
Warblers! Black-and-white, Northern Parula, Palm, Pine, and tons of Yellow-rumps! The Northern Parula, a brilliant male singing on occasion, foraged high up in [...]

Get your links in by the end of the first day of May for inclusion in the next I and the Bird at Greg Laden. Send them to Greg (laden002 AT umn DOT edu) or me and have a merry May Day!

Garret Mountain Reservation in West Paterson, NJ has a reputation as a phenomenal site to observe waves of colorful migrants. Patrick of The Hawk Owl’s Nest and I met there this morning to find that, even when the birding isn’t phenomenal per se, it’s still pretty fantastic. Actually, Patrick already knew that, since he seems [...]

Chipping Sparrow, macro-style
On Friday, at my Aunt Bonnie and Uncle Paul’s house in Saugerties, NY, I enjoyed myself watching their feeders and photographing the freeloaders. Their two clear-plastic feeders suction-cupped to their living room window had a steady stream of visitors but only titmice, chickadees and Chipping Sparrows would let me get close [...]

Agulhas Clapper Lark Mirafra majoriae
South Africa, April 2007

The Agulhas Plains near Malgas (south of Swellendam), Western Cape

 
The Agulhas (pronounced Uh - gull - ous) Plains (or Overberg) is a fynbos region of incredible floral endemism right at the bottom of Africa that also lays claim to two species of endemic lark: the Agulhas Clapper Lark [...]

Agulhas Long-billed Larks Certhilauda brevirostris
South Africa, April 2007

The Agulhas Plains near Malgas (south of Swellendam), Western Cape

 
The Agulhas Plains (or Overberg) is a fynbos region of incredible floral endemism right at the bottom of Africa that also lays claim to two species of endemic lark: the Agulhas Long-billed Lark and the Agulhas Clapper Lark. Much [...]

Lang Elliott and Wil Hershberger (Houghton Mifflin, May 2007)

A book and CD on North American “singing insects” (the crickets, katydids, grasshoppers, and cicadas) being reviewed on a bird blog. What’s going on Charlie…?

I’ll tell you what: I think that ‘inside every birder is a naturalist trying to get outside’, and every birder I know [...]

In a civilized world, one needn’t strictly segregate business and pleasure. While I am all business when I’m in the office, it helps that said office overlooks a reservoir teeming with exceptional avifauna. New Jersey’s Oradell Reservoir is a large, peaceful body of water that sustains a marvelous diversity of bird species throughout the year. [...]

Central Park, New York USA>
27 April 2007

 
I wandered down to Central Park for the second time in a few days this morning looking for spring arrivals. When I visited on the 24th the sun shone in a cloudless sky and the migrants that should have been combing through the trees for insects and caterpillars were [...]

This morning in a pea-soup fog I drove up to the Saratoga National Cemetery before work in the hopes of tracking down Vesper Sparrows. They had been reported there over the weekend by Jory, who you met when we went looking for a Tufted Duck. I even spoke to Jory yesterday to make [...]