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POOP WARS

By June 25, 2011 4 comments

The next time a bird poops on your car, think carefully before you act. Consider who the rightful owner of this rich resource might be and weigh the consequences of hasty action. Now a car manufacturer might suggest that you remove the caustic substance immediately with a soft cloth, but are they really the right people to [...]

The Skylarks of Brooklyn

By January 30, 2011 4 comments

It seems bizarre to even think it but there was a time when the Skylark Alauda arvensis, the famous bird with the beautiful voice that populates the English countryside, was well-established in Brooklyn and one could hear its “profuse strains of unpremeditated art” from above whilst wandering around Flatbush.  Skylarks in Flatbush?  From the vantage [...]

Great Moments in Birding History: Identifying a Cape May Warbler

By November 30, 2008 3 comments

Up until the early 1900s the birding scene was still dominated by the shotgun set.  That is, to identify the birds that one could see, one shot them and collected their still-warm carcasses for identification purposes.  Some had switched over to using the low-powered optics of the day but this new method of identifying birds [...]

Great Moments in Birding History #1: The Footnote

By November 18, 2008 1 comment

In 1955 Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher published Wild America, the tale of their travels across North America, from park to park, and bird to bird.  Peterson had convinced Fisher to take the trip with him, partially to show Fisher the America that most tourists did not see, but, as Peterson confessed in the [...]