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When you are a New York City-based birder that is pretty pleased with the amount of boxes ticked off on your New York State checklist you would normally want a rarity that you have not seen in the state to show up within an hour drive of your home.  But you do not want this [...]

After dipping on an extremely rare bird twice in two days I decided to further punish myself yesterday morning by once again braving New York City traffic on the trip from Forest Hills in Queens to Brooklyn’s famed Coney Island.  To add an extra level of difficulty I brought Desi along with me for the [...]

When Doug Gochfeld posted a belated report he had received of a Gray-hooded Gull* in Coney Island on the New York State birding listserv I was fascinated.  Here was a bird that had only been confirmed in the ABA area once before** and it seemed as if this bird was destined to be a single-observer [...]

It was only just a few days ago that I was poking fun of twitchers in Alan’s post about White-throated Robins and such. The Gods of Birding, being both capricious and wrathful, decided to punish my insolence by washing up an Emperor Penguin on the coasts of the island upon which I make my home. [...]

When I first saw the post on the New York State listserv about the Hooded Crow on Staten Island I wasn’t going to twitch it.  Why?  It had to be an escaped bird or at least one that didn’t make it to the southernmost borough in New York City under its own power but by [...]

I have only maybe ever seen one Green-tailed Towhee.  It was back at the end of 2005, the year that I had started birding.  I was at Meadows Park in Temecula, California, and the newness of all of the birds was kind of overwhelming and lifers were all around me.  I wrote down Green-tailed Towhee [...]

As I have probably already mentioned, I was in southern California over the holidays.  Before I headed out there from my home in New York I was monitoring the local listservs in California for birds I had never seen in the hopes of adding some birds to my life list during my time in the [...]

Back in 2007 when I was doing my New York State big year I dipped on a Tufted Duck way up in the northeasternmost part of the state when Jory, Will, and I couldn’t find the bird on Lake Champlain.  Perhaps the same Tufted Duck was on Lake Champlain again last winter but with a [...]

With 2010 receding in the rear view mirror I had a great morning out birding on the first day of 2011.  The undisputed highlight of the morning’s outing, which netted eighty-something species of bird, was the one lifer I tracked down almost as an afterthought.  A Vermilion Flycatcher had been reported from El Modena Park [...]

Bohemian Waxwing. Just the name makes me feel all… Jack Kerouacky. It’s a life bird that would make me get “On the Road.” What’s so compelling about this potential life bird when there are others that are more rare and exotic? I’m not sure, but thinking about it, here are a few hypotheses: the Bohemian [...]

Pretty much the last thing I expected to do today was see a first state record of a wood-warbler.  You see, tomorrow I am going to North Carolina for several days and had set aside today as a non-birding day (a strategy which, of late, hasn’t worked out too well).  Then we found out that [...]

This morning dawned clear and sunny, not the weather one wants when one has committed to not birding for the day.  When local listservs and phone lines start humming about a Varied Thrush, normally found in the Pacific Northwest, being seen in Central Park and a Northern Lapwing, a bird of Eurasia, being seen in [...]

Until today I had never seen a Fork-tailed Flycatcher.  It seems somehow fitting that a mere week after returning from my first visit to South America that a South American species of flycatcher should cross my field of view in the northeastern United States, because, well, that seems to be how things work.  Tyrannus savana [...]

On October 21, a White-tailed Kite was found in part of the Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in Barnegat Township along the NJ coast. Interestingly, this was one week after the Connecticut White-tailed Kite was last seen. The bird was not seen again until last week. Since then, it’s been enjoyed by many observers. I’ve seen [...]

It is not every day that you get a phone call alerting you to a bird in your state that has never been in your state before.  But today just that happened when I received a phone call from Jean, a fellow Queens birder, about a Common Ground-Dove being seen well at Captree State Park [...]

One advantage of being unemployed is that you have more free time.  This is key when an email goes out to the listservs about a Prothonotary Warbler being seen next to the famous lions outside the “main branch” of the New York City Library, which is next to Bryant Park.  As quickly as I could [...]

On Tuesday morning, after being a New York-based birder for five years and several months, I finally saw a Yellow-breasted Chat in New York State.*  It was the 353rd bird checked off my New York State checklist and one of the few regularly occurring and expected birds left for me to see in the Empire [...]

One full week ago, a White-tailed Kite Elanus leucurus, was discovered on Stratford Point, on Connecticut’s Long Island Sound shore.  Considering that the bird’s normal range is the western United States, south Texas, the southern tip of Florida, and portions of Central America and South America, birders were understandably excited about chasing down the rarity.  [...]

When one is grocery shopping with the family on a Saturday afternoon and the phone rings, and it is a birder, odds are a rarity has been discovered. This happened to me yesterday and, well, the rarity was not only an impressive bird but it was in Queens, at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. As Daisy [...]

There is nothing more cruel to a birder than being at work when the report of a rarity flashes across the listservs.  Such was my fate on Wednesday when back-to-back reports from Jamaica Bay were posted and I could do nothing but toil for my paycheck.  To be stuck breathing artificial air under artificial light [...]