10,000 Birds

You are browsing the archives of sparrows.

April, while not as exciting a migratory month as May is in the northeastern United States, is still a great time of year to see migrating birds. Wood-warblers, those brightly-colored attention-whores of spring, have most birders swooning, but their numbers don’t really pick up until May. Sparrows, on the other hand, seem to […]

After my trip to Van Cortlandt Park early Sunday morning I decided to hit up Central Park on my way home in the hopes of checking a couple more birds off of my Anti-Global Warming Big Year list. I was successful in doing so, spotting both a Fox Sparrow and a small flock of […]

Ah, the deep thinking that goes into making a successful Big Year when the rostering decisions determining your destinations are made by someone else. Suppose for a moment that your scheduling department had sent you to Los Angeles for the first time in 2008. Would you go flat-out for the common species first (which almost […]

North America’s archetypal “little brown job” the almost omnipresent Song Sparrow occupies much the same birding-niche in the Nearctic as the Dunnock does in the UK: if you’re birding here in the UK and a bird is seen only briefly or poorly as it disappears into vegetation and it ‘just has to be a rarity‘, […]

Rather than reliving the rather boring experience of not finding an Orange-crowned Warbler at Alley Pond Park I figured I would (finally) wrap up blogging about my birding this past Saturday. Long story short: Alley Pond Park had some good birds like an Ovenbird and a juvenile Mourning Warbler but no Orange-crowned Warbler appeared […]

Sunday morning saw me up and out of the house before 4 AM for a big trip with two of the other Big Year birders from the Albany area, Rich and Jory. Our destination? Jones Beach and Jamaica Bay, two exquisite birding destinations with which regular readers of this blog are probably altogether too familiar. […]

Ah, California. Oranges, the Beach Boys, surfing dudes, wetlands, mountains, and deserts, great birds and great birding of course - and, what was that other thing I keep forgetting about? Oh, yes, FOG! Huge great sky-darkening, end-of-the-world-resembling, camera-messing banks of never-ending FOG. Take a look at the two photos below: both were taken from my […]

A story in pictures…roll over the images for pop-up captions.

Once the female House Sparrow was driven off the males turned to fighting each other:

Too bad for the House Sparrows that a European Starling was waiting in the wings:

All of the pictures were taken in Kissena Park in Queens last weekend. And, no, I […]

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 […]

One endearing, some might say redeeming trait of sparrows is how the mix of species transforms dramatically based on geography and ecosystem. Sparrows,at least in North America, may always be there to bedevil you, but they won’t always be the devils you know. Travel widely enough and you may find a place where every sparrow […]

White-browed Sparrow-weaver Plocepasser mahali
Uhuru Park, Nairobi, Kenya, November 2006

A large, chunky and aptly-named sparrow-like weaver, the White-browed Sparrow-weaver is an African endemic found in dry, acacia habitat from Somalia to South Africa. The birds usually occur in noisy groups, building very ragged, untidy roosting and breeding nests that typically look like they’ve been half-destroyed […]

When the Core Team went birding this past weekend, we weren’t just looking for warblers. Rumor had it that sparrows beyond the typical House and White-throated varieties could be found lurking about Central Park. Like 99.99% of the population, we have trouble distinguishing one little brown job from another, but that doesn’t stop us […]

Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary, 16 April 2005

Illinois, apparently, is recognized as the 6th most popular state and Chicago is the 9th most visited U.S. city by overseas visitors (which I guess includes me). Chicago - with a population of about 3 million - is located on the shores of Lake Michigan in the heart of […]