Saturday was set aside for birding. Redgannet was in town and had all day to get out looking for birds so I had booked us for the pelagic trip out of Freeport and our plan was to find his life Snowy Owl and then get on the boat and enjoy a host of alcids, gulls, [...]

While Birding the Choco Region near Esmeraldas we had an amazing day with many raptors at the Botrosa Road. We had some very nice looks at Black Hawk-Eagle, Semiplumbeous Hawk, Double toothed Kite, Laughing Falcon, and two others not yet positively identified. Black Hawk-Eagle Semiplumbeous Hawk Laughing Falcon Double-toothed Kite

Originally found on Saturday, 7 January, by Peter Priolo, the Barnacle Goose in these pictures has been present on Eastport Lake in Eastport, New York, since, though it does fly out to feed in nearby fields from time to time. I *ahem* coincidentally happened to be in the area on the day after it was found and [...]

On my way to work this morning I thought I would take a quick stop at Inwood Hill Park way up on the far northern tip of Manhattan.  The park is barely out of my way to my office in New Jersey so I figured I would be remiss in my birding if I didn’t [...]

Zimbabwe is last in the alphabetical atlas of countries of the world. And, given the unstable political situation (slightly improved since the unified government of 2009), paucity of fuel, high crime-rate and dire poverty, it is probably last on the list of many traveling birders. But eastern Zimbabwe is an almost mythical place and a [...]

At 10:45 AM my phone beeped with a text message.  The message was only four words long. Within a minute I had let Daisy know that I would be gone for a couple of hours, grabbed my microwaving beef pattie out of the microwave, kissed Desi goodbye, grabbed my gear, and gotten out the door. [...]

There is no need for me to go into detail about past birding experiences at Bryant Park. Regular readers of 10,000 Birds will recall a host of cooperative wood-warblers, an absurdly obliging woodcock, and many more good birds over the last several years.  But even the annals of Bryant Park bird sightings, if such annals [...]

What is there to say about a Mountain Bluebird, a bird of the west, of high elevation grasslands, of the Rocky Mountains, in New York State? What is there to say, that is, other than “Wow” as you head out the door to track it down? First found on Monday by Lenore Swenson and Diane [...]

On 22 December a birder named David Rankin was hiking in the Catskill mountains of upstate New York when a fellow hiker asked him what the bird that just flew off the trail was. Fortunately David had a camera because it seems unlikely that anyone would have believed his report of a Gray-crowned Rosy-Finch, a [...]

Our late autumn has been absurdly warm in the northeastern United States and though winter is only days away it seems no one has notified the weather.  That is, no one had notified the weather until this past Sunday, the day of the Queens County Christmas Bird Count. While it wasn’t unreasonably cold it was [...]

In December in the northeastern United States you expect snow.  In New York City so far this year we have only had a dusting from the Halloween storm that wreaked so much havoc elsewhere and since then the weather has been mild.  In fact, yesterday when I spent the day birding the coast of Long [...]

Sometimes my job, which is for a New Jersey-wide labor union, requires me to meet in Bayonne, across the Hudson River, which at that point is indistinguishable from New York Harbor, from Staten Island. To get there from Queens I have to drive through heavy commuter traffic down into Brooklyn, cross the Williamsburg Bridge into [...]

It is one thing for a single hummingbird to show up at a single location in the northeastern United States in November.  In fact, it wouldn’t even be surprising to have several hummingbirds show up at several different feeders – western hummingbirds that have lost their way are becoming a more and more common occurrence of late. [...]

Until today the only Painted Buntings I had ever seen were in Honduras. And, despite their absurdly gaudy appearance, I am sad to say that those buntings were not given their due because of the sheer volume of insanely good birds that were there for the watching.  This bunting was different. This was an absolutely [...]

I had the good fortune to be asked to represent one of the UK’s national birding magazines ‘Birdwatching’ on a press trip to Southern Portugal earlier this month. Co-funded by two of the regional tourist boards, Alentejo and Algarve, we were led by one of the very best birders in Portugal João Jara who as [...]

Hoopoe Upupa Epops With a name like that you would just want to see this bird! It sounds good and it looks good….even a non-birder would be impressed! We saw these birds in Egypt in 1994 and they were just great and Grant saw 5 in Busan, South Korea a few weeks ago, just after [...]

When Mike still lived in the Bronx, lo those many years ago, he would regularly make the run up to Yonkers, in southwestern Westchester County, to visit the Lenoir Preserve.  Though he regularly sang its praises I never took the time to visit the small park along the Hudson River. That changed this week when [...]

Paging through a fieldguide, it’s always with a sense of dismay and sadness that I come across reference to an extinct species. This is particularly poignant if the bird has disappeared during the course of my birding days or “on my watch” as I like to think of it. Islands, for various reasons, experience more [...]

John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge, AKA Tinicum, is an outstanding urban oasis in southern Philadelphia, less than one mile from Philadelphia’s airport.  Being a New Yorker, I had never birded the refuge before.  After all, why would I drive over two hours to bird in habitat that is very similar to much closer locations?  But [...]

The Brown Booby is a bird that helps explain why birders don’t always want to share what they are doing with non-birders.  Explaining to people that the main goal you have for a visit to Cape May is seeing a Brown Booby and you will, at the least, get an odd look.  Others will crack [...]