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In recounting my Rochester Snowy Owl encounter last week, I mentioned my new birding buddy, Laura Kammermeier.  Bill of the Birds made our mutual acquaintance but in spite of our efforts, we hadn’t actually found the opportunity to go birding together. Fortunately, we found time to make a run at the waves of White-winged Crossbills [...]

One of the prime benefits of living just a Great Lake away from the Canadian wilderness (e.g. Toronto) should be a bevy of winter birds. Every year, exotic owls and finches irrupt out of the vast boreal, often only as far as our northernmost counties. Well, if I lived any further north, I’d be eating [...]

When I woke up bright and early on Saturday morning the air was clear and cold and moving fast (by which I mean it was windy).  It had been weeks since I made a proper tour of Forest Park so I was out and about and looking for birds as quickly as I could get [...]

My first day of birding at the 2008 Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival was pretty stupendous. Would the second day hold up? Considering that we were headed to the celebrated King Ranch, the Lone Star State’s largest ranch in Texas and a haven for birds for over a century, all signs pointed to yes. After [...]

After exploring Van Cortlandt Park we three intrepid birding bloggers headed through the snow and traffic to Pelham Bay Park, which, at 2,700 acres, is the largest of New York City’s many parks. Our goal was to see as many species of owls as we possibly could and we felt good about our prospects as [...]

Long-eared Owls have long eluded me. Two winters ago Will found some roosting at Five Rivers, one of my favorite local birding spots, while I was in California. When I came home I scoured Five Rivers in the freezing cold and snow three times and never found a single owl but later found out that [...]

Christine Guarino is a serious birder in a funny hat. When she is not writing about chickadees, identifying out-of-place sparrows, or tracking down winter finches she stays busy educating future generations of birders in her job as a high school biology teacher. If you ever have a chance to go birding with Christine, take it, [...]

It was Friday night so what did I do? I went birding. Wait, on a Friday night? Yeah, say what you will, but I was out looking for my first Timberdoodles of the year. The cute, chunky, cryptically-colored, snipe-like, short-legged, long-billed, crepuscular, dancing and displaying bird had already been reported in the area and I [...]

After reading Mike’s post on Long-eared Owls at Croton Point Park a couple of weeks ago I was eager to get there for a shot at seeing the owls that have repeatedly eluded me. These owls were supposed to be steady, having roosted in the same stand of pines in autumn and winter for at [...]

As you read yesterday Will and I had a marvelous morning (and early afternoon) of birding in the north country on Saturday. Driving back through the Adirondacks we saw a pair of Hooded Mergansers in open water in the town of Saranac Lake. Other than that we didn’t really see anything interesting on our drive [...]

In my previous post , I described a moderately successful owl prowl, in that I did spot an owl or two, obscured though those views may have been. But I ended the account with a cliffhanger, alluding to an even better owl sighting later that day. If you read the title of this missive, you [...]

Two owls in the Genus Strix populate North America. The first of these, the Barred Owl, is highly adaptable, common throughout the eastern United States and much of Canada, and in the process of expanding its range. The second, the  Spotted Owl, is sedentary, rare, and specialized, requiring very specific habitat to survive. The two [...]

We are losing species of birds, along with every other type of living creature, at a rate unprecedented in history. Dr. Stuart Pimm, world-renowned conservation biologist, summarized the severity of the situation in an 1998 interview with the American Museum of Natural History: There are about 10,000 species of birds on the planet at the [...]

Starting this blog must have pleased the birding gods. Tonight, the Core Team got a great look at a bird we’ve wanted to see for a long time — the Eastern Screech-Owl. We were out for a walk through a stretch of woods along the Hudson River called Riverdale Park. As our bird watching has [...]