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This great bird has managed to escape from my sightings until I visited the great lodge of Tundaloma.  This Ecuadorian owned business provides a very comfortable and secure lodge to visit the most northern-western Chocó area in Ecuador. It is located on the highway that goes from Ibarra to San Lorenzo and it is approximately [...]

Continuing the celebration of commonplace birds we now hail the ubiquitous Great Blue Heron. There are too many images to share so I’ll keep the captions brief and let the pictures do the squawking, er, I mean talking. Their beautiful blue-gray can really pop in the right light. They share our world without too much [...]

Africa has more than its fair share of storks, with 8 of the world’s 19 species gracing the continent. Furthermore we have another very special stork-like bird, the regal Shoebill, previously known as the Whale-headed Stork but now placed in its own family. Storks are typically viewed as wetland species and whilst some storks are [...]

With the release of the widely anticipated Avengers film this week and the latest Batman film set to hit later this year, I thought it might be fun to look at some comic books for a change. You see, everyone knows the bats, wolverines, spiders and cats get their turn as well known superheroes, but what about [...]

Birding the Dry Tortugas in late April has always been high on my bucket-list of the best birding experiences in North America. Now before any of you think that I must be really old or dying to have a bucket-list I must assure you that before April 9th 2012 I was still in my thirties. That means I used to be very young. Almost infantile. Now I’m just young. And last week I got to celebrate my coming of (young) age by crossing one off the old list, courtesy of my mate Adrian Binns and Wes Biggs of Florida Nature Tours. The birding was epic thanks to a superb fall-out the day before we left Key West and I’ve gotta spout that this has been the very best birding I’ve had in Florida in 4 years.

One of the most exciting aspects of bird migration in a coastal location is the potential for large numbers of birds to find themselves over the ocean when dawn breaks. They get to land as quickly as they can and sometimes can be found concentrated in large numbers. This isn’t fallout in the strictest sense, [...]

Living in Northern California offers nature lovers many opportunities to view wildlife in their native habitat. Living near the Sacramento River and its many lakes and tributaries makes it even more likely to see the incredible fish hawk or sea eagle we call the Osprey (Pandion haliaetus). Click on photos for full sized images. Osprey [...]

The subjects of love, sex and relationships have transfixed people for longer than we can possibly know. The many different ways people carry out their love lives are a celebration to some, and an abomination to others…and no matter if we approve or not, it makes for great gossip. Everyone has an opinion on monogamy, [...]

American Oystercatchers, with their orange, carrot-like bills and piercing cries, are a familiar sight on the east coast of the United States. It is the rare beach-goer who fails to take notice of the birds if they are present and it is even more rare for someone to notice them and fail to think that [...]

Purple Swamphens are large gallinules and despite their name they are not actually “purple”, but it’s amazing what you can get away with when naming birds! They are a magnificent blue with a red frontal shield and stout bill. We have discovered that they are more likely to show their “love” for each other in [...]

This week marks the 2-year anniversary of the Deep water Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico. On April 20th 2010, the world received news that eleven men working on the Deep water Horizon oil rig died in an explosion on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect. What the world did not know was the unthinkable [...]

As migration proceeds in fits and starts I find myself torn between wanting to find as many birds as I can on each birding outing and wanting to take my time with each species that I haven’t seen since they left for fairer climes back in the fall. It is a conundrum and one that [...]

Chris Townend is an ace birder, keen conservationist, and proprietor of Wise Birding Holidays, a UK company that leads tours to places most of us dream of visiting. Through his extensive travels, Chris has come to know Ghana very well and shares why this West African country should be high on every birder’s bucket list. [...]

The pine barrens of New Jersey look rather plain and boring if you only see them while driving past on the Garden State Parkway or New Jersey Turnpike. There is sandy soil, lots of pine trees, and not much else. But when you get out and explore on foot the variety of life in the [...]

This post comes by way of an assignment. After seeing an albino squirrel in a Redgannet post, The Management wrote to me suggesting that they would like one of those. Now perhaps the word “suggesting” makes it sound like I have a choice and that would be true in the same way that I have [...]

Here is another in a series of posts that celebrates the beauty hidden in plain sight, the astounding in the ordinary. Our subject today is the humble Mallard. While we all love birds for their spectacular and stupefying relationship to the air, waterfowl have another element to navigate and they are equally attuned to its [...]

Nuthatches are small, short-tailed, sharp-billed songbirds widely recognized for their ability to hitch headfirst down tree trunks and upside-down along limbs. The family has representatives throughout the forests North America, Eurasia (including North Africa), and Indomalaya. Nuthatches are related to the Wallcreeper, treecreepers (Certhiidae), gnatcatchers, and wrens. In North America, we have, traditionally at least, [...]

Since 2006 a pair of Bald Eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) nesting at Turtle Bay in Redding California have successfully raised a dozen eaglets! The past three years the eagle pair dubbed Patriot (the male) and Liberty (the female) have been watched by thousands on an EagleCam installed by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). This year [...]

Yesterday was a public holiday in Austria and we had decided to take a drive out to Lake Constance / Bodensee to see what we could turn up – given that migration season has just started to kick in and we had had a dramatic turn of weather (fresh snows), we had high hopes for [...]

Barbets are a group of medium sized, chunky, generally colorful, frugivorous, hole-nesting near-passerines, that are popular targets for anyone birding in the tropics. They occur in three biogeographic regions; the Neotropic, Afrotropic and Indo-Malaya ecozones, basically tropical South and Central America, Africa south of the Sahara and tropical Asia. Originally they were all placed in [...]