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The four days I spent in Kazakhstan, though they sped by while I was experiencing them, now seem to be nearly endless in the amount of material about which I have to blog. Though I have already written about the first waterhole we stopped at on our final day, the cool finch we saw there, [...]

It is time for yet another series of photos of a bird hanging out at a waterhole in Kazakhstan.  This time the Grey-necked Bunting (Emberiza buchanani) gets the honors, and, let me tell you, it deserves them.  Not only did this bird take two water baths in full view at relatively close range when the [...]

As we continued east from Almaty the air got drier and drier and the landscape got more and more desolate.  We passed a town that was almost completely abandoned in the midst of scrub vegetation, and the most common living things we saw were livestock, though how anyone raises animals in such an inhospitable place [...]

On our last day in Kazakhstan we birders traveled hundreds of kilometers to the east of Almaty in order to explore the desert environment there.  And while many birds were viewed, none were quite as fascinating to me as the two pink-winged finches we spotted, the Desert Finch and the Mongolian Finch.  This post, of [...]

Word on the web is that Corn Creek, the gateway to the Desert Wildlife Refuge, is one of the finest spots to go birding in all of Nevada, certainly the best in the Las Vegas area. I certainly can’t imagine better. Corn Creek is a lush oasis in the midst of a surprisingly verdant desert [...]