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I don’t know what is wrong with me. After a wonderful day last Saturday doing a Big Day in Queens I decided to do another Big Day upstate this past Saturday with Will from The Nightjar. The last two years when Will and I have done the Hudson-Mohawk Bird Club’s Century Run we […]

4:15 AM. Shower, coffee, kiss Daisy good-bye. Rain and cold and dark. Queens Boulevard, Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Grand Central Parkway, Triboro Bridge, Major Deegan, Thruway, Tappan Zee Bridge, Thruway, sunrise, Exit 23. Home, feed cats, drop off stuff, pick up other stuff. 787, I-90, Northway, Exit 6, Route 7, Rosendale Road. […]

After my last adventure in the high hills of western Albany County I got an email from Christine, the birder who found my year Lark Sparrow, asking if I might be willing to try to show some Pine Grosbeaks to her over Thanksgiving weekend. Of course I was game, not only because I felt […]

This is a big year for winter finches! Already John of A DC Birding Blog has summarized Ron Pittaway’s Winter Finch Forecast for 2007-2008 and Nicholas of Biological Ramblings has posted on the Invasion of Winter Finches, to say nothing of the Backyard Finches Drew of The Nemesis Bird has spotted or the irruptive […]

In all the fuss and frenzy of trying to do a Big Year in New York I’ve been all over the state but when I get some time during the week I get out to the local patches pretty often too. After all, regardless of rarities, it is the local locations in which I […]

After our anniversary weekend I drove Daisy to the train station and pondered my options. Go home to watch football? Do some much-needed apartment cleaning? Run some errands? No to all of those, of course, I went birding!
But instead of wandering through fields and forests I decided to find myself a spot […]

So far this year in New York I have seen Red-eyed Vireos, White-eyed Vireos, Warbling Vireos, Yellow-throated Vireos and Blue-headed Vireos. The Philadelphia Vireo, which nests much further north and only in scattered locations in the Adirondacks, has eluded me. Eluded me, that is, until Sunday.
On Sunday morning at 6:30 AM a fellow […]

A recent evening saw me birding with Will at Peebles Island and we had not seen nearly enough birds. We were hoping to track down migrants fueling up for their flight south and had mostly found Black-capped Chickadees. Normally in the fall this is a great thing as, at least around here, “to find warblers […]

On Saturday, September 1, 2007, Will and I participated in the Hudson-Mohawk Bird Club’s first Fall Century Run. Was the best part of the day watching a flushed American Bittern fly over a marsh? Or was it when a flock of noisy Blue Jays went in a screaming chase after a Great Horned […]

Have the summer doldrums gotten you down as much as they have me? Well, don’t fret, look for shorebirds! Though they may be indistinct and indistinguishable, especially at the great distances from which one usually sees them, they are still birds. And these birds of mudflats and seasides, wet fields and drainage ditches, sewage ponds […]

If I have some time to spare I like to take back roads from place to place. Not only does this allow me to explore areas I might otherwise not visit, but it also often rewards me with sightings and photographic opportunities I would never have had otherwise. So enjoy these shots, all […]

Upland Sandpiper in Ames, NY.
There is something perverse about awakening before dawn to drive for almost an hour, sit on a road next to a specific field, and get excited about hearing a faint “tdilsk” sound. But I did, I was, and I still am.
That is because the “tdilsk” was the call of […]

In the last post our tenacious Century Run team had just left Cohoes for Vischer Ferry in Saratoga County, our fourth county of the day, and the rain had started coming down hard. The drive along Cohoes-Crescent Road and then River Road was without any new birds and our mood was falling faster than […]

the only picture you get today…sometimes just looking at the birds is better than trying to photograph them
Will Raup and I decided we would spend all of Cinco de Mayo scouting for the Hudson Mohawk Bird Club’s Century Run that will be on May 19th. We birded ourselves to exhaustion and was it ever […]

Am I ever glad that I woke up at 5:15 this morning to go to Black Creek Marsh! Will and I heard or saw 10 Virginia Rails, including a couple that came right out to us in response to Will’s tape. Amazing! I have never had such looks at this normally shy […]

It seems like everyone I know has gone back to school. Tom, the birder who has shown me more life birds than any other, is home from surveying school for his spring break and we went out looking for birds this morning before I had to go to work.
Birding with Tom is a pleasure. […]

It was Friday night so what did I do? I went birding. Wait, on a Friday night? Yeah, say what you will, but I was out looking for my first Timberdoodles of the year. The cute, chunky, cryptically-colored, snipe-like, short-legged, long-billed, crepuscular, dancing and displaying bird had already been reported in […]

Sunday afternoon was great. Doing my favorite activity (birding) at my favorite location (Five Rivers Environmental Education Center) with my favorite person (my other half, Daisy, up from law school for the weekend) is my idea of a good time. Five Rivers is a large preserve run by the state of New York’s […]

When I finished work yesterday I raced to the winter entrance of Papscanee Island. Papscanee is not actually an island, but it is a marvelous preserve, part mature forest, part open fields. It is directly across the Hudson River from the south end of Albany. I got my first and only Cerulean […]