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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 make the [...]

I have never in my life been more glad not to be a bug. … If you liked this post and want to see more great images of birds make sure to check out 10,000 Clicks, our big (and growing) page of galleries here at 10,000 Birds. … This post originally ran on 12 April 2008 [...]

Any day of birding in New York State that includes a sighting of a Vesper Sparrow is a better-then-average day. Between the two breeding bird atlases in the state – one done in the early ’80s and one in the early ’00s – the number of atlas blocks with Vesper Sparrows declined 49%, a decline [...]

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 [...]

One of the things I do to earn a living is bird surveys, some for the federal government, some for private companies that want to assess an area for construction (like a wind turbine). I absolutely hate the job when my alarm goes off at 4:30 am and every cell in my body is trying [...]

Savannah Sparrows have been very kind to me over the last couple of years, whether at Brigantine, Breezy Point, or Lake Perris.  Passerculus sandwichensis just seems willing to be confiding, a trait about which I certainly can’t imagine complaining.  My recent outing with Seth and Mary when we found probable breeding Bobolinks in Queens was [...]

I never would have thought that a film that focused entirely on North American sparrows could be so delightful.  But the new second edition of Watching Sparrows* by Michael Male and Judy Fieth, who have a whole series of bird films already produced or in production, not only kept me staring at the screen but drew [...]

“Drab, but with yellow on face” is how the Yellow-browed Sparrow is described in The Birds of Ecuador.  While that is a fair, if maybe a bit harsh, description of Ammodramus aurifrons, I prefer to describe the lovely sparrow with slightly different words.  Words indicative of devotion and desirability.  Words like awesome, astounding, and amazing.  [...]

Autumn in New England.  Just those four little words can evoke so much.  I am sure that anybody who has spent any time in the northeast during the season immediately begins to think of Mother Nature’s own fireworks display of color as trees turn various shades of amber and gold, reds, oranges, and yellows, contrasted [...]

Despite being sidetracked and distracted by the best Clapper Rails ever Shane and I did manage to focus our binoculars, scopes, and camera lenses on several Nelson’s Sparrows.  Nelson’s Sparrow is the sparrow formerly known as Nelson’s Sharp-tailed Sparrow, which is one-half of the sparrow formerly known as Sharp-tailed Sparrow.*  Whatever one chooses to use [...]

The Marine Nature Study Area in Oceanside, New York, is, as I have repeatedly stated, a great place to see birds.  The boardwalks through the saltmarsh get you into the habitat in a way that is usually difficult to do without wearing boots and trampling plants, and the constant presence of people there means that [...]

The Savannah Sparrow Passerculus sandwichensis, the only species of the genus Passerculus, is the Rodney Dangerfield of sparrows in that it gets no respect.  Though it has a nice yellow supercilium, this field mark, at least in the northeastern United States, is neither as impressive as the yellow at the front of the White-throated Sparrow‘s [...]

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 Cedar [...]

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 in [...]

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. [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Chipping Sparrow, macro-style On Friday, at my Aunt Bonnie and Uncle Paul’s house in Saugerties, NY, I enjoyed myself watching their feeders and photographing the freeloaders. Their two clear-plastic feeders suction-cupped to their living room window had a steady stream of visitors but only titmice, chickadees and Chipping Sparrows would let me get close enough [...]

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 [...]

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 from [...]