10,000 Birds

Corey is a lifelong upstate New Yorker who recently took the plunge and moved to the city. He's only been birding since 2005 but has garnered a respectable life list and broke the magical 300 barrier in New York State in 2007 by birding whenever he wasn't working as a union representative. He lives near Forest Park in Queens with Daisy and their two indoor cats, Hunter and B.B.

Northern birds are becoming scarcer and birds from southern Europe are arriving in larger numbers according to a review of twenty-five years worth of data by researchers at Durham University, Cambridge, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.  Less Snowy Owls for the British, but more Cetti’s Warblers…

After having a blast touring the Swarovski headquarters and trying my hand at digiscoping last Thursday, we bird bloggers visiting New England for the Swarovski bird blogging summit headed to the beach on Friday.  No, we weren’t going to improve our suntans and our swimming strokes: we were going for the birds!  And we had high […]

It was while watching flocks of shorebirds on Friday on Cape Cod (an adventure I will soon describe) that I first heard of a Red-necked Stint being found at Jamaica Bay.  I got back-to-back calls that I let go to voicemail from Jory and Will, my upstate birding buddies, and when I checked my voicemail […]

After the fun-filled factory tour and roundtable discussion at Swarovski headquarters the whole bird-blogging bunch of us headed out to Beavertail State Park for some light birding.  Some of us, including me, tried our hand at digiscoping with equipment provided by Swarovski.  While it was rather easy to get images, getting good images is a […]

After getting my golden ticket I was on cloud nine.  A free trip to Swarovski Optiks American Headquarters with a bunch of other bird bloggers, along with a all-day birding excursion to South Beach on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, is, well, a pretty exciting way to spend a couple of days.  It beats the heck […]

July.  Summer heat and sweat.  Breeding birds go silent and migration hardly exists until the end of the month when shorebirds start to move.  It is a time to savor air conditioning, cold beer, and vacations.  It is not a great time to bird, well, unless you are some kind of sadist.  Nonetheless, we 10,000 […]

Monday was a well-spent vacation day.  Why?  Well, Charlie was in town and we went birding at Jamaica Bay!  I’ll leave it to Charlie to tell the tale of the birds we saw and didn’t see and stick to three of the insects that we spotted: a fly, a butterfly, and a cicada.  Charlie also […]

Friday night my parents, Daisy and I enjoyed a baseball game at Shea Stadium, just up the road from my apartment.  The St. Louis Cardinals, the team with the best fans in baseball (and the fact that my father and I are die-hard Cardinals fans does not prejudice me at all), were in town for […]

William Blake, the 18th and 19th century English poet, painter and engraver, is most remembered for his two linked collections of poems, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.  Of all of Blake’s poems, people are most familiar with the oft-anthologized “The Tyger” from the latter volume, though he wrote many other poems worth reading […]

The shorebird time is upon us.  The time of heat and mud and undying stench.  The time of bloodthirsty mosquitoes and ravenous deer flies.  The time of heat shimmer, feather wear, and sweat streaming into eyes.  The time of spotting scope, rubber boots, and odd looks on the bus.  Shorebirds suck.
Which is why I didn’t […]

In my walk around Jamaica Bay today I saw many cool birds, some neat bugs, and, best of all, a Diamondback Terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin) burying her nest.  Unfortunately for her eggs, she chose to bury them right in front of a bench on the trail around the West Pond (a not uncommon occurrence at Jamaica […]

So, if you aren’t already sick of the birds of the Marine Nature Study Area after over imbibing on Black Skimmers and Great Egrets, there is one more bird that Daisy and Kerry and I spotted there that I would like to share with you: a Clapper Rail!  After we had been at the preserve […]

were found in Arkansas.  While conjoined twins would not be big news were they mammals, among birds conjoined twins, formed from a double-yolked egg, are a serious rarity.  The specimen (the birds did not survive) will be sent to the Smithsonian.

In my last post, about the Great Egrets at the Marine Nature Study Area, I said that I would be doing a full post about the birding adventure that we had.  Well, I guess I’m a liar.  Going through the pictures I took (and I managed to fill up my camera) I realized that almost […]

A hybrid thrush has been found on Stratton Mountain in Vermont.  The bird, which was determined through DNA analysis to be part Bicknell’s Thrush and part Veery, was found by researchers with the Vermont Center for Ecostudies who were studying Bicknell’s Thrush on the breeding grounds.  It was first noticed by a researcher who heard […]

The Oceanside Marine Nature Study Area in Hempstead, NY, a marvelous saltmarsh preserve on the south side of Lond Island, is well known for its nesting Seaside and Saltmarsh Sparrows, to say nothing of the video camera-monitored Osprey nest and breeding Clapper Rails (which this year also had a camera on the nest which allowed […]

This past Monday I burned one of my many vacation days in order to extend my stay upstate long enough for me to hike up a mountain.  Like last year’s epic adventure up Wakely Mountain with Mike, Will and Patrick, this hike’s main goal was to track down a Bicknell’s Thrush, the seldom-seen bird that […]

Though I’ve been back in the city for almost a week I haven’t come close to using up all of my upstate birding tales yet!  Like the last time I visited my folks I spent some time photographing hummingbirds, but this time I was at my Aunt Bonnie and Uncle Paul’s house taking advantage of […]

Great pictures of nesting Ruby-throated Hummingbirds are available on KidWings, a site dedicated to teaching “young and old about the wonders of birds.”  My favorite is of a nestling upset about an approaching tent caterpillar.

Way back when I started my Anti-Global Warming Big Year I decided that if I flew somewhere and stayed there for more than a couple of days I could count the birds I saw there provided I offsetted the carbon that the flight produced.  So I counted a bunch of birds in California that I […]