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Birds inspire people.  Whether one is inspired to go out and buy a bag of bird seed to attract birds to one’s backyard or chase a reported rarity to increase one’s life list isn’t what matters.  No, what matters is that it is birds that drive one to such acts.  In Bright Wings: An Illustrated [...]

When MyBinocularHarness contacted us at 10,000 Birds about reviewing their binocular harness I was skeptical.  I always thought that those who wear a binocular harness looked a bit dorky and weren’t helping birders overcome the not-so-flattering view that many have of our pastime.  But I was volunteered to review the harness and several days later [...]

How does one end up with a Great Blue Heron in one’s bathroom?  Or spending hard-earned cash on medication for a Wild Turkey with a “nasty wet rasp” coming from her chest?  Or chasing an American Goldfinch that refuses to leave a flight cage even though there is nothing wrong with him any more?  Easy, [...]

If you have any plans to bird Mesoamerica you need to purchase A Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Northern Central America posthaste.  The two who put the guide together, Steve Howell, who did the text, and Sophie Webb, who did the plates, spent over seven years on the project and the expertise that [...]

Of Parrots and People: The Sometimes Funny, Always Fascinating, and Often Catastrophic Collision of Two Intelligent Species, by Mira Tweti, is a wonderful source for those looking to understand the intersection of people and parrots.  The book progresses nicely from a brief overview of the current scientific understanding of the complexities of bird brains, focusing [...]

With the holidays coming, discerning shoppers have been stocking up on our classic I BRAKE FOR BIRDS bumper stickers. And why wouldn’t they? These beauties make truly thoughtful stocking stuffers for  birders, bird watchers, or even ironic nature haters… There are only 14 left in this classic design, the one carried over from the original [...]

The advent of advanced computing and the internet has been a incalculable boon to birders everywhere. However, the one area where birdwatchers have been slow to cross the digital divide has been in the realm of species identification. We birders just haven’t had good reason to leave our field guides on the shelf. But with [...]

I’m a New Yorker.  I was born in the Hudson Valley and grew up in the Catskills, went to school in the Southern Tier, lived in Albany, our capital city, explored the Adirondacks and the North Country, repeatedly visited western New York and now live in New York City, easily the best city in the [...]

Years ago, I wrote about the glaring homogeneity in North American birding circles and by glaring, I mean all that bright white skin. The lack of diversity in the ranks of enthusiasts has long been recognized as a deficiency at best and at worst the certain death knell of our nation’s natural resources. After all, [...]

When I am having anything larger than the mailbox in my apartment building shipped to me I specify that I need to have it shipped to my job because it is a pain to walk over to the local post office and pick up a package seeing as the hours that I work tend to [...]

Everyone knows who John James Audubon became: a renowned artist and naturalist whose inimitable style and spirit made him the paragon of American birding.  Many even know where he began and of the travails that tossed Jean Jacques Audubon from Haiti to France and then into the heart of a still wild America. Yet how [...]

You know your interest in birds has blossomed from passing to passion when you realize that you’re even enamored of avian artifacts from their abodes to their ovums. Yet, your aviphilia need not be avid for you to enjoy Egg & Nest, an absolutely gorgeous work by Rosamond Purcell, Linnea S. Hall,  and René Corado. [...]

Birds: The Art of Ornithology by Jonathan Elphick was originally published in an over-sized, luxury edition but is now available in a much smaller (about 6″ by 5.5″), more affordable, twenty-dollar edition.  Despite the small size there is a ton of content in the 336 page book.  It is gorgeously illustrated with 300 well-chosen images [...]

Living in a house with uncaged birds is not for everyone and that goes double for those brave enough to live with corvids.  Usually ranked up there as among the smartest of birds, corvids, which include jays, crows, magpies, and ravens, are fascinating creatures that have been mythologized, persecuted, deified, and hunted throughout human history.  [...]

You’d think that a person’s centennial, even a posthumous one, would be easier. The long-awaited newly revised Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America is released to the avid masses almost 100 years to the day after the Great Man himself was born and yet, the world did not spin off its axis. Humankind [...]

I just watched Opposable Chums: Guts and Glory at the World Series of Birding and it was a heck of a documentary.  Some of birding’s brightest stars provide commentary and the filmmaker, Jason Kessler, manages to capture the essence, not just of the World Series of Birding, but of birding more generally, in his 65-minute [...]

There are some absolutely gorgeous photos of birds in Scott Leslie’s Woodland Birds of North America. The book, which is billed on the cover as “A guide to observation, understanding, and conservation,” has at least two pictures of almost every one of the nearly 100 species described in it (nearly 200 pictures altogether). It is [...]

Kenn Kaufman is a birding celebrity. He is well-known not only for his field guides but also for his North American Big Year, famously described in his memoir, Kingbird Highway, in which he describes his hitchhiking, cat-food eating, country-criss-crossing attempt at breaking the Big Year record (he did, but another birder beat the record by [...]

Any author who attests that “birdwatching is the real national pastime,” American or otherwise, deserves attention. Jonathan Rosen, in actually making a compelling case for his electrifying assertion, demands respect. Too many books in the birding genre focus naturally on the innumerable hows of technique, craft, and field ornithology. Rosen’s mighty The Life of the [...]

That time of year has come when raptors are on the wing and a young man’s thoughts turn to… Osprey? It’s true. Come September, the denizens of Seattle aren’t the only ones watching seahawks. Nature lovers around the world turn out in hordes to observe the osprey’s southerly migration. However, none have pursued this peregrination [...]