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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, [...]

The Marine Nature Study Area in Oceanside, New York, is, as I have repeatedly stated, a great place to see birds.  The boardwalks through the saltmarsh get you into the habitat in a way that is usually difficult to do without wearing boots and trampling plants, and the constant presence of people there means that [...]

On one of those gloomy, gray, and gross days last week I met up with Doug and Shane, those two irrepressible Brooklyn birders, and we made our way to Nassau County, just east of New York City on Long Island, for some birding along the coast.  The cloud-filled sky occasionally drizzled on us, sometimes rained [...]

One of the things I miss most since I’ve been away from New York City is birding Long Island with Corey. The landmass containing Kings, Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk Counties, deemed the longest and largest island in the contiguous United States, serves up splendid birding every month of the year. June is particularly good for [...]

So, if you aren’t already sick of the birds of the Marine Nature Study Area after over imbibing on Black Skimmers and Great Egrets, there is one more bird that Daisy and Kerry and I spotted there that I would like to share with you: a Clapper Rail!  After we had been at the preserve [...]

In my last post, about the Great Egrets at the Marine Nature Study Area, I said that I would be doing a full post about the birding adventure that we had.  Well, I guess I’m a liar.  Going through the pictures I took (and I managed to fill up my camera) I realized that almost [...]

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 [...]

Yes, it is time once again for the bad rhymes and horrific meter of a birding adventure described in verse. To set the stage I will say that Charlie flew in last Friday night and had to be back to his hotel to get ready to fly back to England by mid-afternoon on Saturday. This [...]

The weekend began for me with a Friday night for the ages, if I could only remember it. Daisy, her two sisters, her brother-in-law and I went to a karaoke bar and I made the mistake of trying to keep up in terms of drinking soju, a Korean liquor. I learned that large quantities of [...]