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After birding all day on Friday with Mike and Charlie I dropped Charlie off at his hotel and Mike off at his house and then what did I do? Well, I went birding, of course! It really wasn’t my plan to continue birding but Daisy was working late and I didn’t have keys with me [...]

Forgive me for throwing this story of a birding adventure out onto the internets before the tale of the three 10,000 Birds bloggers getting together on Friday for the first time, which you will all get to read about soon enough, but I saw some pretty darn cool birds today and I couldn’t wait to [...]

My contribution to the Great Backyard Bird Count this year, the first year I have participated, consisted of me sitting at the windows of both my aunt and uncle’s house and my parents’ house watching the feeders.  Of course I am aware that the Great Backyard Bird Count can include birds counted anywhere but I [...]

Saturday was a day for birding. After looking for winter gulls along the Mohawk River upstream from its confluence with the Hudson and not finding any except a single Iceland Gull just west of where Route 9 goes over the Mohawk. I decided to try Fort Edward, not for the Short-eared Owls that were so [...]

After successfully finding an apartment on Saturday afternoon Daisy realized that suddenly Sunday was open for studying which meant that for me Sunday was open for birding. Sweet! A quick call to Mike confirmed that he could bird Van Cortlandt Park, which is conveniently located along the Major Deegan Expressway, the route I take through [...]

Chrissy Guarino is a birder’s birder. In using that term I mean that not only does she have the requisite skills in terms of identifying avians but that she also brings a certain joy to birding that sometimes is in short supply on those long hard slogs that may or may not have a really [...]

When I woke up Saturday morning I didn’t see my shadow, a good sign on Groundhog’s Day. Even better was the fact that I was on my way to Union Square Park to see the Scott’s Oriole again and this time, because I had taken the train from Albany and not stepped foot in a [...]

On Friday my job required me to be in Manhattan for meetings all afternoon. Seeing as I still live in Albany, didn’t relish the idea of driving into Manhattan and finding parking, and then driving to Daisy’s apartment in Queens, I took an Amtrak train on the Adirondack line. This choice of transportation had the [...]

One of the nice things about taking a long vacation somewhere that involved lots of birding is that even after being back for a week one still has plenty to blog about from the vacation. Not only that, but by blogging about the birding experiences one gets the chance to relive the experiences one had [...]

Monday morning, after driving Daisy to the Amtrak station to catch the train back to the city I decided to take a walk around my neighborhood looking for birds.  Surprisingly, this is something I had never done before.  I’ve walked around my neighborhood and I’ve looked for birds but somehow had never combined the two.  [...]

On Friday the weather forecasters said rain. We (Daisy, some assorted family members, and I) decided to ignore said forecasters and head down to La Jolla, the famous northern coastal suburb of San Diego, for the heck of it. Previous visits there had netted me some pretty good looks at a variety of gulls, Brown Pelicans, shorebirds that like [...]

When one thinks of great birding locations one typically doesn’t think of a zoo. Sure, one can see cool birds at a zoo but they’re in cages and birders can’t count caged birds. Southern California, however, has a gem of a zoo you might have heard of: the San Diego Zoo. And further north, just [...]

When Daisy and I visit her sister Julia and her brother-in-law Andrew there is a certain unwritten rule that we put into effect. Whenever the women want to go shopping Andrew and I go and do something else. The afternoon of New Year’s Eve was the perfect example. While the gals went off to buy [...]

Saturday the 29th was the last day of my New York State Big Year seeing as Sunday saw me on a plane bound for sunny southern California. Because we were flying out of LaGuardia Airport Daisy and I were in Queens, the perfect base of operations for finding the vagrant and reliable Townsend’s Solitaire that [...]

Tuesday was the day for me to use my third-to-last day off of the year for, what else, birding! The Catskill-Coxsackie Christmas Bird Count, in its forty-seventh year, is always held on the first Tuesday of the count period. It also manages to attract some top birders as the habitat is good and varied, the [...]

This year, for the second year in a row, Sector C of the Saratoga Christmas Bird Count was mine. Last year, Will, Tom, Bruce and I managed to track down 39 species but none of them were spectacular (though our four Red-winged Blackbirds set a new count high). This year, only Will joined me in [...]

Long-eared Owls have long eluded me. Two winters ago Will found some roosting at Five Rivers, one of my favorite local birding spots, while I was in California. When I came home I scoured Five Rivers in the freezing cold and snow three times and never found a single owl but later found out that [...]

Niagara Falls is a world-renowned tourist destination because of, well, the really freaking big waterfalls there. Because of the monstrous falls a host of tourist traps, from casinos to mini-golf, have sprung up, to say nothing of industrial projects (mostly on the American side) that take advantage of the hydro-electric power generated by the mighty [...]

When one is doing a Big Year in New York one must go on pelagic trips. As many as possible. Because I wasn’t doing a Big Year at the beginning of the year I didn’t go on the February trip out of Freeport so I had a giant hole in my year lists where wonderful [...]

Saturday I was down in New York City once again and because Daisy has law school finals to study for I had plenty of free time so I went shopping at the mall. Ha! Of course I didn’t go shopping: I went birding. Because I had promised Daisy a ride to her group study session [...]