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Driving down Rupert Road you will undoubtedly see lots of birds as you make your way toward the Anderson River Park entrance. As you enter the park, across from the boat ramp, on your right, there are soccer fields where the Yellow-billed Magpies hang out. Atop one of the soccer field light poles is an [...]

Despite being the borough that is home to Williamsburg, where irony goes to die, Park Slope, which obnoxious doesn’t even begin to describe, and, worst of all, the Christmas Bird Count that stole half of Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge from the Queens County Christmas Bird Count, Brooklyn isn’t all that bad.  There are some top-notch [...]

On the pelagic trip off the coast of New York this past Sunday one of the highlights of the trip was seeing the small and graceful Black-legged Kittiwakes swoop into the chum, grab food, dodge the larger gulls, and maneuver back out of the crowd, all without seeming to expend any real effort.  Rissa tridactyla [...]

Though it may sound like Dick Cheney’s fondest dream – putting fifty-plus fanatics on a boat for eight hours in the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of winter with a storm coming – in this case it was not torture.  In fact, this specific group of fifty-plus fanatics not only wanted to be on a [...]

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 [...]

Daisy, Desi and I had a wonderful Christmas visiting my folks upstate.  One of the nice things about seeing so many relatives is that everyone wanted to help take care of Desi, which meant that Daisy and I had a bit more time to, well, do whatever we wanted.  For me, this included making a [...]

When a birder sees a really, really, good bird and another birder doesn’t see the bird, the first birder will often “grip off” the other birder.  This is a process whereby the birder who failed to see the bird is reminded of having missed the bird in any way imaginable.  For example, let’s say that [...]

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 [...]

…when it’s been renamed in the newly-released 49th Supplement to the A.O.U. Check-list of North American Birds, Seventh Edition. The new supplement includes various and sundry switches of interest to North American listers, ornithologists, and taxonomists but probably very few others. Paramount among the changes is a new classification and sequence of genera and species [...]

Chrissy Guarino is a birder’s birder. In using that term I mean that not only does she have the requisite skills in terms of identifying avians but that she also brings a certain joy to birding that sometimes is in short supply on those long hard slogs that may or may not have a really [...]

On Friday the weather forecasters said rain. We (Daisy, some assorted family members, and I) decided to ignore said forecasters and head down to La Jolla, the famous northern coastal suburb of San Diego, for the heck of it. Previous visits there had netted me some pretty good looks at a variety of gulls, Brown Pelicans, shorebirds that like [...]

Niagara Falls is a world-renowned tourist destination because of, well, the really freaking big waterfalls there. Because of the monstrous falls a host of tourist traps, from casinos to mini-golf, have sprung up, to say nothing of industrial projects (mostly on the American side) that take advantage of the hydro-electric power generated by the mighty [...]

My day Saturday was spent gulling the Niagara River, a most gull-friendly spot, especially in early winter. Three species were plentiful: Bonaparte’s Gull, Herring Gull, and Ring-billed Gull. I hiked down to the floor of the gorge at “The Whirlpool” and was amazed by the sheer number of Bonaparte’s Gulls that circled ceaselessly searching for [...]

When one is doing a Big Year in New York one must go on pelagic trips. As many as possible. Because I wasn’t doing a Big Year at the beginning of the year I didn’t go on the February trip out of Freeport so I had a giant hole in my year lists where wonderful [...]

The alarm went off at 3:30 AM and I woke up unsure of where I was but convinced I missed the boat. Of course I didn’t but it was a horrible time and way to awaken. I showered, brewed some coffee, and was off to Freeport for a See Life Paulagics trip on the boat [...]

One of my favorite things about birding Jones Beach is how even if there aren’t rare birds around there is still plenty to see. Even when the beach is crowded with swimmers there are still gulls and terns and plovers living their lives, and because they are relatively used to people one can often observe [...]

Gulls… we birders can’t live with them and we can’t live without them. The gregarious, opportunistic, adaptable avians of the family Laridae are never hard to find, no matter how far you are from an ocean, but can prove nigh impossible to identify definitively. The trouble with gulls, at least from a birding perspective (picnickers [...]

A Common Gull Larus canus was spotted in Brooklyn over this past weekend and again on Monday. Common Gulls are native to Europe where they are common (duh).  They are now the same species as our west coast Mew Gull (though they haven’t always been) so you could use either name though they may someday [...]

Yesterday evening and again this morning I checked out areas near the end of the Mohawk River where large concentrations of gulls tend to be in winter. Not only was I wishfully thinking that the errant Ivory Gull might show up but I also hoped to see my first Glaucous Gull of the year, or [...]

So I woke up this morning and checked my email. An Ivory Gull in Piermont! What a wonderful opportunity to see this gorgeous species for the first time. Too bad I had to work, and, worse yet, my work would take me to Poughkeepsie, NY, more than halfway to Piermont…so close and yet so far. [...]