You are browsing the archives of 2007 May.

There is something perverse about awakening before dawn to drive for almost an hour, sit on a road next to a specific field, and get excited about hearing a faint “tdilsk” sound. But I did, I was, and I still am. That is because the “tdilsk” was the call of a Henslow’s Sparrow, a bird [...]

Fifty signals a golden anniversary, so for the banner 50th edition of I and the Bird, we’ve got ourselves a solid-gold host. Bora aka Coturnix, the man who identifies himself with Old World quail, is well-placed among the science blogerati. He has founded, hosted, participated in, and promoted metric tons of blog carnivals at both [...]

Just like Paula alerting me to the baby robins at her parents’, which have fledged, another coworker, Andrea, alerted me to a Killdeer nest at her sister and brother-in-law’s place in Malta, NY.  She actually called me last night to find out what kind of bird it was and to find out what they should do [...]

Ah rose, the color of swanky gardens and rampant optimism. Rose by any other name also appears prominently in the plumage of some very perky birds. Rosy, a proper adjectival form of the word, describes a selection of finches from the genus Leucosticte. Of the four rosy finches, lovely earth-toned birds anointed with stark pink [...]

Gulls… we birders can’t live with them and we can’t live without them. The gregarious, opportunistic, adaptable avians of the family Laridae are never hard to find, no matter how far you are from an ocean, but can prove nigh impossible to identify definitively. The trouble with gulls, at least from a birding perspective (picnickers [...]

On Friday I expended another of my precious days off from work to get a jump-start on the Memorial Day weekend. My friend Tom, just back from surveyor school, and I had planned to hit up the the Adirondacks in an attempt at some of the northern specialties but the warm weather brings out black-flies [...]

so what are you waiting for? Be a part of this historic edition by just writing about what you’ve been doing anyway… looking at birds! Send your link and summary to me or Bora (Coturnix AT gmail DOT com) of A Blog Around the Clock by May 29 for inclusion in the golden May 31 [...]

Just Saturday, I was bemoaning the apparent end of the migratory season. The impression gleaned from a couple of hours at Tibbetts Brook Park was confirmed at Riverdale Park. The torrent of spring migrants passing through NYC has been reduced to a trickle or, at best, some intermittent spurts. But a Core Team excursion on [...]

Happy Memorial Day weekend! If you live in North America and work in an industry that allows for such an indulgence, you’re probably in the midst of a fabulous extended weekend. Rest assured, I am! I’ve recently revised my Birds page, the resource any visitor to 10,000 Birds should consult if looking for information on [...]

In the last post our tenacious Century Run team had just left Cohoes for Vischer Ferry in Saratoga County, our fourth county of the day, and the rain had started coming down hard. The drive along Cohoes-Crescent Road and then River Road was without any new birds and our mood was falling faster than the [...]