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On 26 January 2012, my first full day in Florida for the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival, I had a mission for the evening. My mission was simple in theory – to see, or at least hear, a Black Rail.  But, in practice, the mission became much more difficult. Black Rails are among the most [...]

The endangered subspecies of the Clapper Rail known as the California Clapper Rail (Rallus longirostris obsoletus) has been found breeding in San Francisco’s Heron’s Head Park, the first time in decades that the subspecies has been found in San Francisco.  Huzzah!

If studying insects would lead you to suppose that God had an “an inordinate fondness for beetles”, studying the pre-human avifauna of the Pacific would lead you to conclude that God was also quite partial to rails. Pretty much every major island, and many smaller ones, had an endemic rail or two. They were descendants [...]

Everyone knows what a jinx bird is.  It is a bird that dodges you like sanity does Michele Bachmann.  No matter how hard you try to find a jinx bird it eludes you.  They are frustrating, annoying, anger-inducing, and, when you finally find one, amazingly rewarding!  Jinx birds are one of the aspects of birding [...]

One of the items currently before the American Ornithologists’ Union’s North American Checklist Committee (NACC) is a proposal to split Old World and New World forms of the Common Moorhen (Gallinula chloropus) into separate species. The AOU’s South American Checklist Committee (SACC) passed a very similar proposal last year, and the IOC followed suit shortly [...]

Lema Ranch is one of Northern California’s birding hotspots. It is located in Shasta County, in the northern most part of the Sacramento Valley, in the city of Redding (pdf map here), about 160 miles north of Sacramento. The property is the headquarters for the McConnell Foundation, a philanthropic organization working for the betterment of [...]

When Shane Blodgett and I made plans to bird for most of a recent day our main objectives were to find migrating Nelson’s Sparrows, good lingering shorebirds, and any scarce-for-New York birds that might have been fattening up at coastal sites in Brooklyn or Queens before continuing on their migration.  Shane was kind enough to [...]

The Inaccessible Island Rail is perhaps the coolest bird that neither I nor anyone I will ever meet will ever see.  The world’s smallest, still-extant, flightless bird is only found on the aptly-named Inaccessible Island, an island in the Tristan da Cunha archipelago of the south Atlantic Ocean (the largest island in the archipelago is [...]

There are many wonderful things that happen when you join the world-wide community of nature bloggers, but one of the most valuable is that you get to share thoughts and discuss ideas with other bloggers – people who invariably have skills and knowledge that you yourself don’t. We’re gratified that we’re getting so much input [...]

When I got home from birding Jamaica Bay this morning I was greeted by an odd email off the ebirdsNYC listserv.  A rail, unidentified to species, but with a link to pictures taken by the finder, had been found in a vacant lot on the east side of Manhattan.  It was a Virginia Rail!  In [...]

So, if you aren’t already sick of the birds of the Marine Nature Study Area after over imbibing on Black Skimmers and Great Egrets, there is one more bird that Daisy and Kerry and I spotted there that I would like to share with you: a Clapper Rail!  After we had been at the preserve [...]

The weekend began for me with a Friday night for the ages, if I could only remember it. Daisy, her two sisters, her brother-in-law and I went to a karaoke bar and I made the mistake of trying to keep up in terms of drinking soju, a Korean liquor. I learned that large quantities of [...]

Am I ever glad that I woke up at 5:15 this morning to go to Black Creek Marsh! Will and I heard or saw 10 Virginia Rails, including a couple that came right out to us in response to Will’s tape. Amazing! I have never had such looks at this normally shy and sneaky marsh-bird. [...]