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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 [...]

The Queens County Bird Club field trip this past Sunday to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn was relatively well-attended, with eleven people present, and loaded with some of the more common species that one would expect in November.  Great Blue Heron, Green-winged Teal, Cedar Waxwing, Dark-eyed Junco, Common Loon, American Kestrel, Yellow-rumped Warbler, Belted Kingfisher, [...]

As we wrote the last time Chrissy Guarino provided a guest post, she is our “most prolific guest blogger” and with blog posts like these, well, we’re glad about that!  This is the second time Chrissy has written about banding Northern Saw-whet Owls on 10,000 Birds but this time she is focusing more on the [...]

So far in 2009 almost all of my birding has been confined to weekends, and most of it has been in local parks that I can access easily.  Of course, I have taken some trips that took me out of the the city, and, while going through the pictures I’ve taken on those trips I [...]

When a Northern Hawk Owl, normally a denizen of the far white north, was reported in Peru, New York, as a result of local birders combing the area for the Plattsburgh Christmas Bird Count I really wanted to go see it.  When Jeff Nadler posted his amazing pictures of the bird on his website I [...]

That notoriously bad Bergin owl luck seems to be breaking. Perhaps my recent expedition to Texas’ Rio Grande Valley cleared out the curse; after all, within hours of landing, I spotted a screech owl (Eastern or Mexican, you take your pick) in a Sabal Palm and two days later eyed not one but two Ferruginous [...]