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I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for owls. Wander through my front door and glance upwards and you’ll find at least two watching you, a Tawny Owl and a Barn Owl, both sadly gathered as roadkills. Above our fireplace is a large painting of a Barn Owl. The current header image of [...]

Western Screech-Owl (Megascops kennicottii) photos by Larry Jordan It’s been an interesting winter in my neck of the woods. Birders in Northern California have been treated to rare sightings of several species, sending avid twitchers from all over the west in our direction. There is a Falcated Duck at Colusa National Wildlife Refuge, Mountain Plovers and Northern Waterthrush near Sutter [...]

The image that made me look hardest in this year’s Digiscoper of the Year 2011 competition was that of a Little Owl (Athene noctua) by Mario Cea taken at night! Digiscoping is normally hard enough during the day and action shots with good light are doubly tough, but this was the first time I had [...]

New York has its famous Red-tailed Hawks Pale Male and, until recently, Lola. Cambridge, Mass has a celebrity raptor pair, too. Last winter, a pair of Great Horned Owls took up residence in a spiny locust (?) tree near The Dell in Mt. Auburn Cemetery. The nest was so tiny, flimsy and low to the ground that [...]

I’ve long felt that birders, as a group, should have a greater appreciation for the book as a physical object – all those years of choosing field guides that have high-quality color prints and will hold up to rough use ought to lead in that direction. Looking at a book like Barn Owl by David [...]

Have you ever seen Long-eared Owl chicks? Take a look… they’re even cuter than you’d expect!

Birds evacuate waste in many ways. It doesn’t all go out the rear end, some of it comes through the front end and these are known as pellets. It’s not fecal material, but parts that are not digestible like fur, bones and the exoskeletons of insects.  Birds will barf them back up out of their [...]

“Jah Man (pronounced Jamon)” is something you will hear often when visiting Jamaica. You will hear it as a greeting, an affirmation and as encouragement. And, if you are baffled by the Jamaican accent or dialect, you can safely use it as a reply. When our local driver asked me in Patois, an English-lexified creole language [...]

Looking for seriously pissed-off Snowy Owls? Nunavut has got them, as this video shows! Apparently, our comrade Clare has been holding out on us…

Way back on the first day of March, Doug, who is a good birder and a decent guy despite his Brooklyn roots, and I were exploring Plum Beach, a location you will recall from the absurdly cooperative Clapper Rails and Nelson’s Sparrows that I digiscoped last year.  We were walking on the south side of [...]

Seriously, that really happens in this excellent video of a Great Horned Owl scavenging a deer carcass by Kirk Mona. Wicked, right?

Taking down a nemesis bird always takes a place of honor on any birder’s litany of triumphs. The act of overcoming a string of dips through sheer ornery optimism surely serves one well in every sphere of one’s life, but when it comes to chasing birds, resilience redounds to success. I’ve been chasing Northern Saw-whet Owls, those [...]

As we roll towards Valentine’s Day, the U.S. as a whole is desperate for signs of spring. Montana is no excpetion. Just this week, Missoula was carpeted with more than 9 inches of snow in one 24-hour span, yet on the list-servs and in conversation the hot topics are the smallest hints of migration and [...]

I read a news report on Tuesday that said 70% of the contiguous United States had snow cover.  Up in Minnesota, it’s a whole mess of snow with super cold temperatures.  And yet, I love that there is a bird around here…and in most of the US that says, “Screw winter, screw snow, I’m mating [...]

I have long wanted to see a Burrowing Owl.  They are owls, which automatically gives them a certain cachet, and they are little, which makes them cute, and they live in the ground, which makes them even more interesting than your run-of-the-mill owl.  Several years ago I had the perfect opportunity to see Athene cunicularia [...]

I’ll need to borrow some photos from the interwebs for this post because this was some truly spontaneous birding and no camera was present. A few weekends ago, Beth, Julian, and I were out and about running errands. After our errands were done, I realized that we were not too far away from the NJ Meadowlands [...]

Jeff Bouton has shared a great video on the behavior of a pair of Eastern Screech Owls in his yard.  It is well worth watching the entire five minutes. …

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 [...]

Yes, the Superbowl of Birding was an absolute blast and I will be recounting in exquisite detail the day the Bloggerhead Kingbirds had in a future post, but for the moment it will be enough (I hope) to recount our day before the Superbowl of Birding, that is, this past Friday, 29 January.  After all, [...]

In the words of the A-Team’s indomitable leader, Hannibal, I love it when a plan comes together. I also love it when new birders come together. It all came together for me this past weekend, at least in terms of birding. The plan was first set in motion, though I didn’t know it at the [...]