You are browsing the archives of 2007 May.

At a press conference today an unidentified sparrow pooped on the warmonger in the White House.  You can watch a video of him trying to wipe it off here. At least something in Washington is speaking for the American people.  And my favorite comment on the video?  “If only elephants could fly.”

When we left off our exhausted team, having birded for over 13 straight hours already, was headed north from Coxsackie with a little over 100 species for the day. A quick stop at the Dunn Memorial Bridge in our third county of the day, Rennselaer County, to pick up the nesting Peregrine Falcons was successful [...]

The promise of spring migration lies in both potential and certitude. As we welcome back favorite fair-weather friends arriving with clockwork precision, we also hold out hope for the surprises that invariably come to the vigilant. Here are a few of my observations from a week of very limited bird watching: Cuckoos have always seemed [...]

At the end of part 2 of the Century Run Saga it was a half an hour shy of noon and Will, Danika, Chad and I were descending from the wilds of western Albany County just a bit shy of 100 species for the day (part 1 is here). Our next destinations were two reservoirs: [...]

learned on the way to 3000 visits a day and 2200 RSS subscribers are tendered for your consideration over at Pick The Brain. Good stuff for micropublishers everywhere.

the 80th edition of the premier science carnival can be found at Geek Counterpoint.

When I ended part one our intrepid team of bird-seekers was still at Black Creek Marsh and the sun had just risen. Flycatchers were calling and we spent more time than we should have identifying both Willow and Alder Flycatchers. They look almost exactly alike so we told them apart by their calls: in fact, [...]

Identity theft occurs with astonishing regularity in the avian world where all too often, species share so many overlapping traits as to appear virtually indistinguishable. Empidonax flycatchers are an excellent example of this phenomenon in North America, as are scaup. More esoteric, but no more simplistic, is the difference between Gray-cheeked and Bicknell’s Thrush. Bicknell’s [...]

I returned to the robins’ nest I posted about last week on Monday afternoon to see that the four baby robins are growing amazingly fast! They have to grow fast, as they will leave the nest about two weeks after hatching. The nestlings here are about six days old. They also have to be big [...]

This past Saturday was the Hudson Mohawk Bird Club’s Century Run, the annual event when teams of birders try to find as many birds as they possibly can in a single day. Some teams choose to focus on a single park, some a single county, some, like the team I was on, choose the whole [...]