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This past Monday, Will and his wife Danika were going to drive down from Albany and pick me up at 7 AM for a birding expedition to Long Island’s barrier beaches, hoping to find a variety of migrants.  Their car’s tire had other ideas, however, so I was awake at 6:15 in the morning, jonesin’ [...]

This past weekend Daisy and I were pleased to host my brother, Jonathan, his fiancee, Shannon, and their adorable three-year-old daughter, Natasha.  Though keeping up with a three-year-old is pretty darn exhausting it was great having her around, especially as everything in the city is interesting to a three-year-old from upstate New York.  Whether it [...]

When I got home from birding Jamaica Bay this morning I was greeted by an odd email off the ebirdsNYC listserv.  A rail, unidentified to species, but with a link to pictures taken by the finder, had been found in a vacant lot on the east side of Manhattan.  It was a Virginia Rail!  In [...]

I thought waking up in the dark on a Sunday morning and getting on the subway at 6 AM to join Charlie for some birding was a heck of a task, that is, until I found out that Charlie had just flown in from London yesterday, which he had arrived at from Chicago the day [...]

On my hours-long birding excursion in Central Park yesterday one of the highlights was seeing many Palm Warblers all over the grassy areas wherever people weren’t. The bright yellow of the eastern form, which was all I saw today, was a sight for sore eyes after far too long without the presence of the little [...]

When I woke up Saturday morning I didn’t see my shadow, a good sign on Groundhog’s Day. Even better was the fact that I was on my way to Union Square Park to see the Scott’s Oriole again and this time, because I had taken the train from Albany and not stepped foot in a [...]

Previously brought to our loyal readers’ attention here, a Scott’s Oriole, normally a denizen of desert landscapes in distant places like Arizona and southeastern California, has decided to grace the citizens of New York City with its presence. And, as if a first state record of a bird wouldn’t be enough to convince me to [...]

On my way from Brooklyn to Manhattan this afternoon I got stuck in some serious traffic. Over an hour of bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go up the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway so I could get to the Battery Tunnel to get to Manhattan to go up the West Side Highway to Riverside Drive and 92nd Street. Why was I so [...]