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I’ve already shared some pictures from this past Saturday’s trip out along the south shore of Suffolk County looking for shorebirds.  The guy I traveled and birded with, Andrew, has already posted his account of the day on Birding Dude.  So why am I writing another post about the time we spent searching for birds?  [...]

When the birding day starts with a frantic search through a backpack for a digiscoping adapter at the first birding stop one would think that the day was doomed.  That is kind of how I felt when Andrew Baksh and I arrived at Jones Beach early on Saturday morning and I realized that I had [...]

Shai Mitra is a birder-extraordinaire, a wonderfully patient teacher, a member of the New York State Avian Records Committee, and editor of The Kingbird, the peer-reviewed publication of the New York State Ornithological Association.  He was also nice enough to give directions to good birds in Suffolk County when a pair of bird bloggers headed [...]

This past Sunday I mounted a full expedition out to Suffolk County on Long Island with Andrew Baksh, otherwise known as Birding Dude.  We saw a bunch of great birds (a full post on the day is in the hopper) but an Arctic Tern (Sterna paradisaea) was easily the best bird of the day, at [...]

After having a blast touring the Swarovski headquarters and trying my hand at digiscoping last Thursday, we bird bloggers visiting New England for the Swarovski bird blogging summit headed to the beach on Friday.  No, we weren’t going to improve our suntans and our swimming strokes: we were going for the birds!  And we had high [...]

Caspian Tern Hydroprogne caspia
Discovery Park, (north of) Seattle, Washington. August.

As large and as bulky as many gulls, the Caspian Tern is the largest tern in the world. Its thick coral red bill and very ‘front-heavy’/short-tailed appearance makes an adult Caspian one of the most easily identified terns throughout its worldwide range (despite its extensive range, [...]

Terns have it tough.  Everyone in the world seems to know about gulls, but unless you’ve spent time in the company of seabirds or seabirders, you’ve probably missed out on the more lithe and lovely larids!
Terns are mostly medium-sized flying seabirds in the family Sternidae or subfamily Sterninae depending on your taxonomy.  Relatives of gulls [...]

I’ve been in Hong Kong for three days and it hasn’t stopped raining until today. And rain in HK (as us lazy types like to type it) is not for the faint-hearted. The world turns a slate-grey, the view from the hotel window disappears in a cloud of drizzlymist (that’s just for you Corey!), and [...]

There is a perversity in going after shorebirds at the peak of spring migration, that point in time when virtually any American songbird imaginable might turn up in a treetop near you, in full breeding regalia no less. But when an elusive species like Gull-billed Tern elects to abide in one spot long enough for [...]