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Dale Forbes, with whom I was lucky enough to travel to Kazakhstan this past May (that’s him in the sunset picture in the linked post), now works directly for Swarovski Optik.  As part of his job duties he has a series of videos up on YouTube in which he gives digiscoping tips (I know, I [...]

The nor’easter that blanketed the east coast of the United States did not leave New York City unscathed, and the birds are flocking to the Forest Park feeding stations after the first serious snowfall of the season.  With about a foot of snow down in Queens, many of the natural food supplies that birds were [...]

Once again this winter the Forest Park irregulars, a devoted group of birders who spend far too much time in Forest Park, are maintaining two feeding stations.  Seeing as it is a sunny day and Daisy agreed to let me go outside for a bit, I headed over to the waterhole, which serves as one [...]

On the recent Queens County Bird Club field trip to Kissena Park in search of migrating sparrows, field birds, and whatever else might cross our path, I was distracted by some male House Finches Carpodacus mexicanus feeding on, or, to be more accurate, pigging out on, crabapples.  They were so intent on eating the apples [...]

As was already stated in the post about tracking down and watching the Roseate Spoonbill, I spent Sunday birding at Brigantine, or, more properly, the Brigantine Division of the Edward B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge.  There were many more birds seen than the spoonbill and some of them showed amazingly well despite the thick fog [...]

While wood-warblers are a wonderful type of bird to watch they are not the only species making their way south each fall.  Everything sparrows to shorebirds are moving through and it would be a poor birder indeed who failed to notice the flycatchers.  Though silent Empidonax flycatchers will certainly drive at least some birders nuts [...]

It is near the end of wood-warbler migration in New York City; the hordes of Yellow-rumped Warblers have descended upon us and it has been quite some time since earlier migrants like Worm-eating Warbler have been reported.  Now is the time of Blackpoll Warblers, Palm Warblers, and small amounts of late lingering migrants sprinkled in, [...]

Saturday was one of those all-day birding days that I think are going to pretty rare occurrences before too long.  Will of The Nightjar, with whom I haven’t birded in, well, way too long, finally made the much anticipated trip down to Queens for some Jamaica Bay shorebirding, and we had a grand old time [...]

On Saturday I met up with Patrick, that nice guy from The Hawk Owl’s Nest, at Jamaica Bay for some birding.  Unfortunately, the birds seemed to have missed the memo or something, because they were not there to meet up with us.  That actually is not quite true: I am just a spoiled birder who [...]

Say the title of this blog post five times fast and I guarantee a life bird within two weeks!  Rather than do a full trip report from a twenty-shorebird-day with Birding Dude I’m just going to put up a few of my favorite pictures from the day and wait to do the full post until [...]

This weekend while I was exploring the Shawangunk Grasslands in Ulster County, New York, with my parents (more on that later) we came across a juvenile Brown-headed Cowbird that was positively begging to be photographed.  Actually, it wasn’t begging at all, which is a good thing, as I hate seeing these greedy little monsters begging [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Last year at the end of July I wrote a post about birding Jamaica Bay in which I complained about the bugs, the heat, the mud and the difficulty inherent in identifying shorebirds.  This year, so far, Jamaica Bay has been a much more pleasant place, mostly because water levels on the East Pond have [...]

One tends to think of birding as an idyllic pastime.  One goes into the field, sees gorgeous creatures, identifies them, and then brags to one’s birding friends about what wonderful creatures one saw.  Sometimes one sees one of the gorgeous creatures do something interesting and one tells one’s birding friends about it but with less [...]

Just yesterday, 3 July, I headed north out of the city by bus, met up with more birders in New Paltz, and continued all the way up to the town of Root in Montgomery County, New York, all in order to see my first-ever Mississippi Kite (Ictinia mississippiensis).  Present at the location, at the intersection [...]

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 [...]

Though I have already done a post on the Desert Finch of the Kazakhi deserts I felt that the similar Mongolian Finch (Rhodopechys mongolicus), sometimes known as the Mongolian Trumpeter Finch, deserved its own blog post as well.  These shots were taken at a completely different waterhole than where the Desert Finches were drinking and [...]

After leaving Big Almaty Lake, the site of our Ibisbill dip, we continued uphill to the Tien Shan Astronomical Observatory where lunch was distributed and everyone wandered off in ones and twos and small groups to eat and bird where they wanted for the next hour or so.  I wandered off with Thomas Griesohn-Pflieger, editor [...]

After our two days birding the flat lands near Astana we flew to Almaty late at night and made our way to the Hotel Altyn-Kargaly in the dark.  Before passing out and sleeping like the dead some of us tracked down a Eurasian Scops Owl that had been tooting away at us when we arrived, [...]