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The evocatively named Lake Panic is overlooked by a thatched, rustic style hide in one of the most delicious settings that a birder is ever likely to encounter. The bird life of Kruger National Park appears to be distilled into a small area surrounding the hide and they seem oblivious to the observers with their battery [...]

The Little Blue Heron, like most (all?) herons and egrets, flies with its neck bent and its head drawn in close to the body so that it sometimes appears neckless but always looks like a heron.  Except sometimes they don’t.  This was the downfall of an extremely competent New York City birder who recently saw a [...]

For many birders a highlight of birding the southeastern United States, maybe even the definitive birding experience of the region, is taking in the great numbers and diversity of long-legged wading birds.  The epicenter of large, charismatic, and often photogenic, fish-eating birds is in Florida, at places like Everglades National Park and Ding Darling National Wildlife [...]

Back when we used to run the 10,000 Birds ID Clinic (as opposed to just answering lots of e-mails about bird identification!), we received an inquiry about a bird “about the size of a small duck, much bigger than a jay… a crest similar to a jay or a roadrunner and it has a remarkably [...]

The Great Egret is a great bird.  With a dagger attached to a head that has glaring eyes and distance from body as its other notable attributes, it is also a bird you don’t want to find sneaking up behind you in a dark alley at 3 o’ clock in the morning.  Fortunately, the Great [...]

Yellow-crowned Night Herons have a presence about them when they are hunting that reminds me of Buddhist monks.  If “The greatest prayer is patience,” as the Buddha is alleged to have said, then the comparison is perhaps apt, as nothing embodies patience more than Nyctanassa violacea.  I spent forty-five minutes in the company of the Yellow-crowned [...]

    This is all you usually see of a shitepoke. They’re shy.   My father had stories he’d tell, time and time again, and one of them was from his one-room schoolhouse when he was a farm boy in Iowa. The teacher asked the kids to make a list of all the birds they [...]

It is not every day that one gets to explore Central Park with a friend, birder, and first-time visitor to the Big Apple.  It is even more odd to be birding Central Park in June, when migration has essentially wrapped up and all that is left are breeders and stragglers.  But that is what I [...]

Last week the most amazing thing happened-a Striated Heron Butorides straita came into our garden! Now we don’t live far from the coast, especially when the tide is in, but this was a first for us. I suppose I should not say that, as there could quite easily have been one in before and we [...]

Here at 10,000 Birds we have already reviewed Watching Sparrows, Watching Warblers, and Watching Warblers West.  Somehow, we never got around to reviewing Watching Waders, another in the series of excellent films by Michael Male and Judy Fieth.  Watching Waders is chock full of great footage, as one learns to expect after having seen other films [...]

During a family holiday this week, my wife suggested that other road users and pedestrians may take my erratic driving and sudden stops as incompetence behind the wheel. I suspect that this may have been a veiled insult to my driving prowess, but since she will neither drive nor navigate while abroad and stubbornly refused to help identify the [...]

On a recent outing across coastal Nassau County on Long Island on a rainy, windy, dreary day, Stella Miller and I spent several minutes watching a Great Egret Ardea alba with an odd foraging strategy at the Marine Nature Study Area in the town of Oceanside.  As the bird slowly walked through the wind-whipped water, [...]

An early morning visit to Jamaica Bay recently led to several notable sightings, but nothing could compare to the sight that awaited me as the first person of the day onto the south end of the East Pond.  A horde of Snowy Egrets stalked the shallows, forming a wall of white feathers, and those that [...]

On one of my recent visits to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge I was fortunate enough to come across a cooperative Black-crowned Night-Heron Nycticorax nycticorax very close to the blind at Big John’s Pond.  It was not the first cooperative bird I have seen there and I am sure that it won’t be the last.  Enjoy [...]

I spent Saturday morning and into the early afternoon with my becoming-a-birder friend, Kerry, with whom I’ve birded before, birding in Queens and a bit into Brooklyn.  We didn’t see anything too spectacular until we were about to leave Fort Tilden, though Kerry was very interested in the variety of ducks we found at Jamaica [...]

Long ago I promised an extensive gallery of Boat-billed Herons Cochlearius cochlearius but I never got around to it.  Now that the summer doldrums have arrived I felt like it was necessary to fulfill my promise and dig up some shots for posting.  All of these pictures were taken during my visit to Cuero y [...]

It is not every day that a Great Blue Heron tolerates one’s presence from just across a small pond.  But then, it is not every Monday afternoon that one finds oneself in a position to test the tolerance of Ardea herodias, no matter how unintentionally.  But, on my vacation day from work and an off [...]

The Oceanside Marine Nature Study Area in Hempstead, NY, a marvelous saltmarsh preserve on the south side of Lond Island, is well known for its nesting Seaside and Saltmarsh Sparrows, to say nothing of the video camera-monitored Osprey nest and breeding Clapper Rails (which this year also had a camera on the nest which allowed [...]

When I saw the post on the New York State listserv that a Cattle Egret, and sometimes two Cattle Egrets, had been seen in Drake Park in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx I knew I had to make a stop there on my way back upstate. Not only so I could see the [...]

Since last Sunday a rare-for-North America Western Reef Heron has been alternately frustrating and rewarding birders from the Empire State and beyond as it appears and disappears from an unassuming stretch of waterfront property in the borough of Brooklyn, New York City. It was back again today and I was in the neighboring borough of [...]