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Chapter 1 of Birdtopia can be found here, in which the narrator, George, finds and identifies a dead chickadee, reveals his crush on Lisa, and drops some tantalizing hints about what life in Birdtopia is like… Back at my house I went down to the basement and tried working on my nyjer seed bird feeder [...]

The morning sun shone through the sticker-laden kitchen window and warmed me as I prepared my breakfast.  The burner on the electric range, powered by the solar panel array on the roof, clicked as heat flowed into it.  I guesstimated the amount of water I would need for my oatmeal and set it to boil, [...]

William Blake, the 18th and 19th century English poet, painter and engraver, is most remembered for his two linked collections of poems, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.  Of all of Blake’s poems, people are most familiar with the oft-anthologized “The Tyger” from the latter volume, though he wrote many other poems worth reading [...]

Emily Dickinson is one of the first poets I can remember admiring. I’m not sure whether it was her near rhymes, her life story, her often understated but amazing imagery, or the fact that she really wasn’t appreciated as a poetic genius until after her death: whatever it is that drew me to her poetry, [...]

Perhaps one of the best known bird poems, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Eagle: A Fragment” packs a punch as powerful as a Golden Eagle‘s in merely six lines. First published in 1851 in the seventh edition of Tennyson’s Poems, it became a favorite and is now frequently anthologized. The alliteration and assonance utilized by Tennyson [...]

Today, the winter solstice, December 22, is the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. It is also, despite the quantity of snow on the ground outside of my house as I type this, the first day of winter. That’s the bad news. The good news is that every day from now until [...]

“The White Birds,” a poem W.B. Yeats wrote early in his career as a poet and dramatist, is like his other early works in that, it meditates “on the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects.”* Not a well-known poem, it is overshadowed by another of his early poems, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” that [...]

Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is a marvel of modernist poetry. It is only 246 words long, divided into thirteen sections, each labeled with the corresponding Roman numeral, and a surface reading will show that it is about, not surprisingly, thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. Reading deeper, though, will [...]

There is no single reason why I enjoy finding, identifying, photographing and now blogging about birds. Having grown up in Saugerties, NY, at the base of the Catskill Mountains, without cable television, I was kind of forced into an appreciation of the outdoors. Hiking in the mountains, exploring green-shaded woodlands, and swimming in crystal-clear creeks [...]