The southwestern most part of Queens, at the end of the Rockaway Peninsula, is Breezy Point. The small community out there is lucky to have a large Common Tern colony that also hosts breeding Black Skimmers and Least Terns, to say nothing of the Piping Plovers and American Oystercatchers that breed out on the barrier [...]

Being a birder and living in Queens as I do I can’t help but be drawn to the waterhole at Forest Park during spring migration. The waterhole, an unassuming little vernal pool, is often the only water in the eastern half of Forest Park which means that any bird that wants a bath or a [...]

Cuero y Salado Wildlife Refuge, Honduras, March 2009 After our trip to the Cuero y Salado Wildlife Refuge was rained out on our first morning at The Lodge at Pico Bonito we rescheduled our visit for our second and last morning at the lodge.  Everyone wanted to get out into the mangroves (especially me seeing [...]

The Biggest Week in American Birding – on the shores of lake Erie, Ohio – is going really nicely. Sure, this is my first trip to North America, but still, who could find fault with 20+ wood warblers in a day? On my first day, we had found an American Woodcock (Scolopax minor) along the [...]

Queens, New York, May 2010 At one time there was an airport in northern Queens called Flushing Airport.  It was shut down in 1984 due to frequent flooding, a fatal plane crash in 1977, and the growth of LaGuardia Airport.  The land has since started to return to something approaching a wild state.  Unfortunately, developers [...]

Birding the Dry Tortugas in late April has always been high on my bucket-list of the best birding experiences in North America. Now before any of you think that I must be really old or dying to have a bucket-list I must assure you that before April 9th 2012 I was still in my thirties. That means I used to be very young. Almost infantile. Now I’m just young. And last week I got to celebrate my coming of (young) age by crossing one off the old list, courtesy of my mate Adrian Binns and Wes Biggs of Florida Nature Tours. The birding was epic thanks to a superb fall-out the day before we left Key West and I’ve gotta spout that this has been the very best birding I’ve had in Florida in 4 years.

This will be a quick and happy tale. I was at work in New Jersey. An email went out over the listservs that Eric Miller had found a Golden-winged Warbler at Crocheron Park in Queens. I got out of a work a bit early and drove to Crocheron Park. After about a forty-minute vigil the [...]

Chris Townend is an ace birder, keen conservationist, and proprietor of Wise Birding Holidays, a UK company that leads tours to places most of us dream of visiting. Through his extensive travels, Chris has come to know Ghana very well and shares why this West African country should be high on every birder’s bucket list. [...]

The pine barrens of New Jersey look rather plain and boring if you only see them while driving past on the Garden State Parkway or New Jersey Turnpike. There is sandy soil, lots of pine trees, and not much else. But when you get out and explore on foot the variety of life in the [...]

Copan, Honduras, February 2009 A word of warning: this is going to be a rather long post so go grab a snack and make yourself comfortable before you start reading.  Normally, the birding I did on the morning of February 28, 2009, would be enough to fill up a week’s worth of posts but seeing [...]

It doesn’t seem like 12 years since the Olympics were in Sydney, but time has slipped by and the area that was used for the Olympics in 2000 is still there and still being utilised. You can still stay in a hotel there and you can use the facilities. Aside from that-you can go birding! [...]

The Adirondack Mountains of New York State, March 2007 Daisy and I took advantage of her spring break and one of my precious vacation days to spend the day birding in the Adirondacks. Normally students on spring break wear sunglasses to protect their eyes from the bright tropical sun in some place like Cancun. Not [...]

Yesterday was a public holiday in Austria and we had decided to take a drive out to Lake Constance / Bodensee to see what we could turn up – given that migration season has just started to kick in and we had had a dramatic turn of weather (fresh snows), we had high hopes for [...]

On our recent trip to Sydney we explored several areas that were easily reached by public transport & we discovered that there are some great walk trails that start near train stations. There are two good day walks that start at either Berowra or Mt Kuring-gai train stations and they can be done in either [...]

On Wednesday morning I had a meeting in Bayonne, New Jersey for my job and as is my wont I left my house in Queens early to beat the traffic and therefore found myself with a little over an hour to kill before my meeting. Rather than do my usual stroll on the Hudson River [...]

Nothing frustrates me more than a report of a good bird that reaches me while I am at work or on my way there. And the frustration is magnified all the more when the bird, like the one Thursday morning, is reported from Queens and is also one that I have not yet seen in [...]

Birding has been an all-consuming interest for Patrick Cardwell since boyhood days spent in a wildlife-rich environment. When he isn’t snapping photos in the field, training local bird guides, or supporting seabird-related conservation initiatives, he runs Avian Leisure, a birding and wildlife safari company out of Cape Town established in 1998, with his wife, Marie-Louise. [...]

Whilst we were planning our trip to Sydney we were hoping to fit some hiking and birding into our schedule and found a great website that would help us decide on some walks. We searched for walks that started and ended near public transport, as we were going to get a ticket-MyMulti 3-that would let [...]

We have just returned from a three-week trip to Sydney, which was primarily to help out where needed with a house move and to ensure that both houses were occupied until settlement. My sister and family were not moving far, so commuting between houses was not hard and our two nephews have settled into their [...]

Queens, NY, March 2010 For some reason, maybe because of the heroic effort I have made of late to get our new apartment completely unpacked and set up, Daisy agreed to let me out of the house for a few hours Monday morning to take what is perhaps my favorite walk in Queens, which is [...]