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Any day that includes a sighting of a Red Knot is a good day for a birder.  The bird we see in the northeastern United States, the rufa subspecies, is declining rapidly, “from a high count of 95,000 in the 80s and 90s to fewer than 10,000 earlier this year.”  Fortunately for both the birds and [...]

The Great Egret is a great bird.  With a dagger attached to a head that has glaring eyes and distance from body as its other notable attributes, it is also a bird you don’t want to find sneaking up behind you in a dark alley at 3 o’ clock in the morning.  Fortunately, the Great [...]

Black Skimmers are another of those birds, like White-breasted Nuthatches, that people can’t help but like.  They have awesome bills that slice through the water in search of fish, they bark like small dogs, they have a cool color scheme.  It is impossible not to be amazed by skimmers as they effortlessly glide over the [...]

Until recently I had only ever seen a single Sandwich Tern.  It was back in July of 2009, the day that I saw more species of tern than any other day of my life, and I have no pictures of my first Thalasseus sandvicensis because I had managed to forget my digiscoping adapter that day.  You [...]

I could watch terns all day long.  Flying, hunting, calling, preening, or just sitting around, I find terns fascinating.  It just seems so improbable that creatures that live in the air and on land could evolve to catch creatures that live in the water, but, of course, terns can and do.  On my last visit [...]

As if Cory’s Shearwaters, a Brown Pelican, and Royal Terns weren’t enough, Seth, Dave, Bobby and I made our way out onto the mudflats at Cupsogue Beach County Park as soon as the tide had receded enough to let us cross the deepest water without soaking our optics.  This is a different strategy then I [...]

On Saturday, for the second weekend in a row, my plan to get on a boat and search for seabirds off the tip of Montauk fell through.  Last week’s villain was a flat tire and this week the problem was a predicted lack of visibility at sea, a product of too much heat and humidity.  [...]

When we left our intrepid pair of birders we had thoroughly enjoyed the appetizers of seawatching and sparrow-seeking and were hungry for the main course of rare-for-New York terns.  Forgive me if I stretch the gastronomic analogy a bit too far, but Patrick and I could practically taste the Sandwich Terns that we were sure [...]

When last I birded with Patrick Belardo he was still cursed so I was really looking forward to birding with him again to determine if whatever evil had a hold on him had let go or if he was doomed to never again see a rarity.  Our plan this past Monday was to take a [...]

When the birding day starts with a frantic search through a backpack for a digiscoping adapter at the first birding stop one would think that the day was doomed.  That is kind of how I felt when Andrew Baksh and I arrived at Jones Beach early on Saturday morning and I realized that I had [...]

This past Sunday I mounted a full expedition out to Suffolk County on Long Island with Andrew Baksh, otherwise known as Birding Dude.  We saw a bunch of great birds (a full post on the day is in the hopper) but an Arctic Tern (Sterna paradisaea) was easily the best bird of the day, at [...]

On Saturday I managed to drag Daisy from bed at 6 am and out the door by 6:30 on our way to some extreme Suffolk County birding. The plan was simple: drive out the Long Island Expressway to exit 70, head to a DEC bike trail where Yellow-breasted Chat and Northern Bobwhite were recently reported, [...]