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I love puffins.  Before my trip to Washington the only species of puffin I had ever seen in the wild was the puffin of the Atlantic Ocean, the appropriately named Atlantic Puffin.  I had high hopes, however, of adding Tufted Puffin to my life list provided I could overcome a series of seemingly insurmountable obstacles [...]

Though it may sound like Dick Cheney’s fondest dream – putting fifty-plus fanatics on a boat for eight hours in the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of winter with a storm coming – in this case it was not torture.  In fact, this specific group of fifty-plus fanatics not only wanted to be on a [...]

When one is doing a Big Year in New York one must go on pelagic trips. As many as possible. Because I wasn’t doing a Big Year at the beginning of the year I didn’t go on the February trip out of Freeport so I had a giant hole in my year lists where wonderful [...]

For some people, the idea of waking up before dawn to board a boat plying icy winter waters for distant views of ambiguous seabirds DOESN’T sound like fun. What are these people thinking? Clearly, we’re not talking about birders; members of that group usually thrill to the thought of a February pelagic cruise. The Core [...]