You are browsing the archives of 2009 April.

May is well and truly upon us and with it, the kind of mass migrations that make your heart pump and blood sing. We should all be moving somewhere this weekend, if only to be consistent to the spirit of the season. Where will you be making your move this weekend? Will you be birding? [...]

Migration. Isn’t that what it’s all about? We’re all, by the standard definition of the word, migrating, moving from place to place, hither and yon. Atoms migrate within molecules. Teeth migrate within mouths (though we’d rather they didn’t). But of most importance, particularly to those of us attuned to the rhythms of the natural world, [...]

Well, I’m finally getting towards the end of the Honduras trip, with only about three more days worth of birding to go!  I never thought it would take me so long to write up ten days worth of neotropical birding, but I guess a first visit to the neotropics tends to make birders a bit [...]

It was extremely difficult to decide a winner of the Corvus: A Life with Birds giveaway.  Five stellar entries were received and all are deserving of victory but there can only be one winner.  Fortunately for this overworked and underpaid blogger I got to remove a couple of the entries from competition based on technicalities [...]

A couple of weeks ago, when Daisy asked if I wanted to go away for the last weekend of April, and suggested Cape Cod or Cape May, well, as a birder, I had no choice but to say “Why yes I would like like to go away for the last weekend of April. Let’s go [...]

Canada is blessed with 1.4 billion acres of Boreal Forest, a vast ocean of habitat that lives up to the title of North America’s Bird Nursery. Why is the Boreal a big deal? Here are four good reasons I’ve shared before: The Boreal Forest is the world’s single-largest terrestrial carbon storehouse. The Boreal Forest contains [...]

While on the familiarity trip in Honduras I was fortunate enough to meet Fito Steiner, (photo left, copyright Robert Hyman) a conservationist and the Volunteer Director for the Honduran Emerald Reserve.  We actually met over dinner during the one night the participants of the familiarity trip stayed in Olanchito, but I was feeling rather lousy [...]

Curl up with a good book review and writing blog carnival. Check out the newest edition of Just Write at Incurable Disease of Writing.

The three days I recently spent at my mother-in-law’s farm in Potter County, PA were magical for photography. Shot after shot of feeder birds were inexplicably exceptional despite the fact that I was shooting through a smudgy glass pane. I considered cleaning my children’s grubby handprints off the window but decided not to mess with [...]

Have you spent your April wisely? Will you look back on this past month as one of action or inertia, of adventure or apathy? You’ve got precious little time left to make things happen. So what will you be doing this weekend and do your plans involve birding? Share your ambitions and expectations in the [...]