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I recently took a walk off-trail at Papscanee Island in Rensselaer County, New York, taking advantage of deer trails to find my way through the thick brush. I was startled by an American Robin flushing from directly in front of me, not more than three feet away. A closer look at the location the bird [...]

The bird landed just to my  side, puffed up and fluttering with its wings down dragging the ground. It was a Baird’s Sandpiper and it was obviously in distress. Or was it? I was making my way towards a Pacific Loon nest that I have been monitoring when the Baird’s Sandpiper appeared. A pair of [...]

Have you gotten a look at Avian Architecture: How Birds Design, Engineer, and Build by Peter Goodfellow yet? If you’re fascinated with the ways birds design, engineer, and build their nests or ever wondered what an architectural blueprint of a nest might look like, this book is for you (check out Robert Mortensen’s glowing review). And lo and [...]

In Queens, which is, as I may have mentioned before, the best borough in New York City, there is a park that has hosted breeding Great Horned Owls Bubo virginianus for several years running.  That is as specific as I am willing to be about the location of the nest simply because too many people [...]

It’s not every day that one has a discussion about a spate of recent Common Raven Corvus corax sightings in one’s home borough.  It is even less common for such a conversation to lead to one of the participants claiming that not only are ravens common in his neighborhood but that they even nested there [...]

You know your interest in birds has blossomed from passing to passion when you realize that you’re even enamored of avian artifacts from their abodes to their ovums. Yet, your aviphilia need not be avid for you to enjoy Egg & Nest, an absolutely gorgeous work by Rosamond Purcell, Linnea S. Hall,  and René Corado. [...]

The Killdeer eggs at my coworker Andrea’s sister’s house have hatched! three hours out of the egg Well, three of the four have so far, and a couple of days early too. The heat that reached the nineties today in Saratoga County left the mother panting (birds don’t sweat), but she hung in there, shading [...]

Just like Paula alerting me to the baby robins at her parents’, which have fledged, another coworker, Andrea, alerted me to a Killdeer nest at her sister and brother-in-law’s place in Malta, NY.  She actually called me last night to find out what kind of bird it was and to find out what they should do [...]

I returned to the robins’ nest I posted about last week on Monday afternoon to see that the four baby robins are growing amazingly fast! They have to grow fast, as they will leave the nest about two weeks after hatching. The nestlings here are about six days old. They also have to be big [...]

The robin that I blogged about earlier this week is now a proud parent! Either three or four eggs hatched and mom and dad are busy feeding the hungry nestlings. A quick stop lunchtime today revealed mom incubating the baby robins, keeping them warm on such a chilly day: After only two or three minutes [...]