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Snowy Owls are iconic birds. You rarely find a person – birder or non – who doesn’t want to take a good long look at a bright white owl. And, of course, you rarely meet a photographer who doesn’t want to take a good close picture of a bright white owl. On Saturday, as has [...]

Our late autumn has been absurdly warm in the northeastern United States and though winter is only days away it seems no one has notified the weather.  That is, no one had notified the weather until this past Sunday, the day of the Queens County Christmas Bird Count. While it wasn’t unreasonably cold it was [...]

Finally!  It took long enough but I have finally seen an Eurasian Wigeon in my home borough, at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge’s East Pond to be exact.  It was nice to add bird number 284 to my Queens life list, though it seems kind of absurd that it has taken so long to see one [...]

Kissena Corridor Park underwent habitat restoration over the last two years which seemed to consist of the New York City Parks Department ripping everything out except some native trees and plants, planting saplings, and regularly applying herbicides to areas where invasive plants tried to take over the park.  If the birding there over the last [...]

Yesterday evening I returned to Kissena Corridor Park, site of an amazing array of rare and difficult-to-see birds over the weekend, and enjoyed birding with some fellow Queens birders.  We refound several of the birds that had been seen earlier in the day and on Saturday.  But the wood-warbler in these images caused a disagreement [...]

Though they have a world-wide distribution and can be found on every continent except Antarctica, Caspian Tern Hydroprogne caspia is a bird that is not often spotted in Queens.  Before this past Saturday I had only ever seen one in Queens, back in 2007, and eBird only has records of nineteen different Caspian Terns ever reported in Queens, [...]

Bobolinks are among my favorite birds.  It is impossible to hear their silly song being sung from on high without growing a grin on your face.  And what kind of bird is black beneath and pale above?  The Bobolink is an absurd bird and any birding outing is made better when one spots Dolichonyx oryzivorus.  Unfortunately [...]

Seth Ausubel is one of the best birders in Queens, New York, and Corey is ever-so-thankful that Seth does not use eBird because that way Corey can pretend that he is the top lister in the borough.  Seth is generous with his knowledge, and, knowing this, Corey cajoled him into providing this post about one [...]

Yes, it is that time again!  Now that I have added ten more birds to my Queens life list we must revisit the list and predict my next ten birds in Queens (and see how my last set of predictions turned out).   Queens, the finest borough in New York City, as I may have mentioned [...]

It feels like it has been forever since I did a simple post like this where all I did was go to my favorite local patch, Forest Park, take a few pictures of some of the common feeder birds, and share those pictures with the 10,000 Birds audience.  Sometimes in the search for the new [...]

It was Saturday afternoon.  I was chatting on the phone about blog stuff with Mike, as we tend to do, when he heard what must have been a string of incomprehensible babble before the line went dead.  What had happened? I had spotted a Turkey Vulture!  Well, I had looked out the sliding glass door [...]

After spending the early morning on Saturday birding at Alley Pond Park I was happy with having seen my first Eastern Phoebe of the year and thought I could rest on my laurels for the rest of the weekend.  Then the accursed listserv had to ruin my peace of mind by letting me know that [...]

This past Saturday I made my way to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge’s West Pond a bit before sunset in order to try to get more flight shots of ducks like these as they made their way in to the pond to roost for the night.  On my way in I convinced a fellow Queens birder, [...]

It has been virtually forever since I last visited Jamaica Bay.  And by virtually forever I mean, of course, that it has been since 20 September, over four months, since I last laid eyes on the West Pond, the North Gardens, or any other portion of the wonderful wildlife refuge that has provided so many [...]

Christmas Eve Eve dawned cold and relatively clear.  It also dawned windy, with steady winds from the northwest around twenty miles per hour and gusts up to forty-five!  Of course, as is only to be expected when Daisy has the day off from work and has agreed to take responsibility for our son and I [...]

This year’s Christmas Bird Count in Queens was a very different experience for me than the last two.  I was in a completely different section of the count with completely different birders, and the new (to me) section of the count traditionally gets the most birds simply because of the ocean, beach, bay, and grassland-like [...]

It is not every day that the beginning of a birding outing consists of calling 911, but that is how my walk around Meadow Lake started today.  Just as I was getting to Flushing Meadows Park I noticed a plume of smoke coming from scrub on the northwest side of Willow Lake, close to the [...]

On 3 July, just under four months ago, I published a blog post predicting the next ten birds I would add to my all-time Queens list and promising to revisit the topic when I found ten more birds.  Well, yesterday I added four more species for Queens meaning that since my last post I have [...]

It was surprisingly easy.  There were four of us birding the edges at Fort Tilden when I saw a flash of extremely bright yellow out of the corner of my eye.  My bins were at my eyes in a second and I was focusing on a mostly dull green bird with a bright yellow chest [...]

After Mike and I did a thorough job birding Fort Tilden last Saturday morning I was surprised when Daisy agreed to let me out of the house for another morning’s birding at the same spot on Sunday.  The company was different, with Seth and I, both Queens birders, being joined by Isaac and Tom, two [...]