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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 [...]

The Ruffed Grouse is a bird of the forests across much of North America, from Alaska and the mountains of the west through Canada, and in the east down through the Appalachians to Georgia.  It is a beautiful bird and well worth taking some time to examine closely if such a situation can somehow be [...]

What better way to spend Christmas Eve than driving so far north in New York State that you are actually north of the Adirondacks (to look for birds, of course)? Nothing! So when Daisy dragged me out of my warm bed before sunrise this morning, insisting we head way up to the town of Malone [...]

What to do on a sunny Saturday in August in upstate New York? Go to one of our beautiful lakes for some swimming? Rent a canoe and paddle down one of our wonderful rivers? Go cook out in a gorgeous state park? No, no and no! Daisy and I took the obvious choice of hiking [...]

I had an unexpected opportunity to torture myself some more today when my job (you know, the thing you do between birding expeditions) required me to be in Champlain, a small town way up in the northeastern-most part of New York State. It wasn’t the visit to the town that was torturous but what I [...]

After a decent night’s sleep the intrepid gang of four awakened in the dark once again, hoping to top the previous day’s birding adventure. From Cranberry Lake, just across the road from our motel, came the haunting calls of Common Loons, amplified by the damp air. The sound was enough to send shivers down my [...]

It was somewhere around the twelfth hour of birding the Adirondacks this past Saturday that it struck me: birders are insane. I had been up since 3:30 AM and had already traveled a couple of hundred miles through mountains and forests and was standing on the side of the same dirt road in the middle [...]

I’m just back from a weekend’s birding in the Adirondack Mountains and St. Lawrence County and I am absolutely exhausted and it will take awhile for the experience to sink in to the point that I will be able to blog it properly. I had great company while exploring some of the most remote and [...]

When the alarm clock went off at 3:30 AM Sunday morning I never even heard it. Daisy did though, and awakened me, and our sleep-clogged bodies got ready for a full day’s birding in the Adirondacks without the help of our still-sleeping brains. We picked Will and Danika up and headed west on the New [...]

Phil Brown, editor of Adirondack Explorer (a newsmagazine), visited Bigelow Road in the Adirondacks to try to find boreal birds a couple of weeks ago…and failed miserably.  He should have accompanied Will and I back in February. Once I looked beyond the annoying use of “bird brain” in the title of his piece that appeared [...]

The Adirondack Mountains have long fascinated me. There are some seriously deep woods up there where bears roam and people are scarce. Winters are harsh with below zero temperatures the norm rather than the exception and snow that may not melt until May. This winter is even more interesting than most for the amateur ornithologist [...]