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On 26 January 2012, my first full day in Florida for the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival, I had a mission for the evening. My mission was simple in theory – to see, or at least hear, a Black Rail.  But, in practice, the mission became much more difficult. Black Rails are among the most [...]

Today I shall weave a tale of dispair. A tale of jealousy. Of hopelessness. Of anger, fear, aggressioon….the dark side are they. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your…..ahem. Let me start from the beginning. It was the year 2010. One Seagull Steve was living in San Francisco, on a [...]

On 22 December a birder named David Rankin was hiking in the Catskill mountains of upstate New York when a fellow hiker asked him what the bird that just flew off the trail was. Fortunately David had a camera because it seems unlikely that anyone would have believed his report of a Gray-crowned Rosy-Finch, a [...]

All twitchers will experience it at some stage or another. That most dreaded of disappointments. The dip. For those that might not fully comprehend, the birding slang-term to “dip” or to “dip out on” a bird is to go looking for a particular species and not find it. That bird can then be referred to [...]

When Doug Gochfeld posted a belated report he had received of a Gray-hooded Gull* in Coney Island on the New York State birding listserv I was fascinated.  Here was a bird that had only been confirmed in the ABA area once before** and it seemed as if this bird was destined to be a single-observer [...]

I have only maybe ever seen one Green-tailed Towhee.  It was back at the end of 2005, the year that I had started birding.  I was at Meadows Park in Temecula, California, and the newness of all of the birds was kind of overwhelming and lifers were all around me.  I wrote down Green-tailed Towhee [...]

Over two years ago, when I was doing a New York State Big Year, one of the birds that I tried to see but managed to dip was a Common Gull Larus canus that was hanging out in Brooklyn.  Since then I have seen a Common Gull in California where they are referred to as [...]

This past Saturday, when I was supposed to be upstate spending time with my family, an unfortunate chain of events led to Daisy and I staying in the city for the weekend.  Another, completely unrelated chain of events led a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher to spend at least part of the weekend, that is, Friday evening, in [...]

After exploring Van Cortlandt Park we three intrepid birding bloggers headed through the snow and traffic to Pelham Bay Park, which, at 2,700 acres, is the largest of New York City’s many parks. Our goal was to see as many species of owls as we possibly could and we felt good about our prospects as [...]

…Warblers. At least this year. What other reaction can I have to the evil little bird snubbing me at Central Park, avoiding me at Floyd Bennett Field, and leaving me standing in the rain for two hours at Muttontown Preserve? That’s right, Muttontown Preserve. But before I get to the whole sordid story let me [...]

The Eurasian Collared-Dove is a (surprise!) Eurasian species that was introduced in the Bahamas, spread to Florida, and has slowly but surely expanded its range north and west across the southeastern United States. It is a still-rare visitor to New York but one was reported recently in Port Crane, a small town in New York’s [...]

When I posted my pelagic preview last week I was hoping that I would manage to see my four-hundredth bird at sea on Sunday. I didn’t anticipate birding that would result in a lifer prior to the pelagic, as Daisy had put her foot down about my doing any birding this past weekend other than [...]

After our successful search for Sandhill Cranes and various shorebirds at Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, Will, Zack and I headed east, hoping to find the reported Whimbrel that had been hanging around the recently revealed mudflats at the drawn-down Delta Lake. All that we could remember was that it had been reported on the east [...]