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This past Wednesday, 11 November, I was in my office in midtown Manhattan when I was dismayed to see an email on the state listserv from Seth Ausabel saying that he had found a Cackling Goose Branta hutchinsii in Flushing Meadows Park, Queens.  Why was I dismayed that a good birder, who 10,000 Birds readers [...]

Yesterday, Sunday, three days before I was scheduled to be a dad (still not yet!) I was out and about in Nassau County with five other birders on the Queens County Bird Club’s “South Shore Potpourri” trip, a yearly search for waterfowl both rare and common in the assorted small parks and ponds that are [...]

One tends to think of birding as an idyllic pastime.  One goes into the field, sees gorgeous creatures, identifies them, and then brags to one’s birding friends about what wonderful creatures one saw.  Sometimes one sees one of the gorgeous creatures do something interesting and one tells one’s birding friends about it but with less [...]

My original plan was to put up a blog post today about the trip to Copan from the Lago de Yojoa region of Honduras but as I started looking through the pictures I hadn’t used yet from the first part of the Honduras trip I realized that I had quite a few shots of Pied-billed [...]

On both the day of and the day after the Superbowl of Birding I was amazed at how the ducks, loons, and gulls (way maybe not so much with the gulls) were willing to go about their lives so close to people.  Some of the shots I got digiscoping with my Swarovski equipment have already [...]

Some months ago we here at 10,000 Birds learnt about Charleen Turner, and her amazingly patient (and loving) documentation of a pair of Mute Swans and their cygnets that she’d been watching through the summer. Charleen had a gift for telling a story and had taken hundreds of photos too - a combination that seemed [...]

Though we don’t get the sheer volume of Snow Geese (Chen caerulescens) that one might find in more westerly regions of North America we here in New York are often blessed with decently-sized flocks of the marvelous white geese with black wing tips.  They are a welcome departure from the wildly honking Canada Geese and [...]

When the sun is shining and it is in the fifties on the Fahrenheit scale on a Sunday  in November I’ll be birding.  Of course.  Jamaica Bay was where I wanted to be, mostly because I wanted to get some shots of the waterfowl flying from the West Pond to the bay with the sun [...]

During my most recent trip to California, I had a chance to drop in on Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area in Los Angeles. The waterfowl there were mighty tame, with wild ducks, geese, and cormorants practically posing for portraits. But the bird that really captured my eye was not purebred but rather poultry.

This fine fellow [...]

Birding the Cape: the west coast
May 29, 2008

For my second trip to South Africa in just three weeks, this time to Cape Town (the first was to Johannesburg), I decided to hire a professional guide for the two (actually, one-and-a-half) days I would be there. Normally I’m happy just to hire a car and wander [...]

On a weekend that is, at least around here, cold, gray, and dreary, it’s entirely possible that not everyone is exercising their avian observation muscles to the fullest. Here’s a waterfowl workout for you weekend warriors… aficionados from either side of the Atlantic can and should play along:

Easy, right? I’m sure you don’t need it, [...]

Just two short years ago, I first beheld the the wondrous waterfowl that I’d come to regard as my favorite duck, bar none - the White-cheeked Pintail.

The White cheeked Pintail (Anas bahamensis), also known as the Bahama Pintail, is a dabbling duck that plies brackish waterways throughout its range. Three similar subspecies are distributed regionally [...]

One of the sweetest subsections of the duck family has to be the sawbills, formally known as mergansers. Mergansers are a family of diving waterfowl in Merginae, the seaduck subfamily of Anatidae. Ironically, only one of these seaducks is truly a seafarer, the others favoring rivers and lakes. The name ‘merganser’ is said to have [...]

One of my favorite ducks is the Northern Shoveler (Anas clypeata). Something about their namesake, absurdly long, shovel-like bills, elegant plumage, and cool vocalizations make me want to see them on every birding excursion. Or maybe it is their clever methods of eating, whether straining the water with their bills or swimming in [...]

Diabolical. Truly diabolical. That’s how I felt, anyway, when I made up the Diabolical Female Waterfowl Quiz. But, once again, some dedicated birders have proven themselves up to the challenge by managing to correctly identify all five partial pictures of female waterfowl, truly a magnificent accomplishment. To see for yourself the [...]

If previous incarnations of the Diabolical ID Quiz left you scratching your head this one might leave you wanting to cut it right off your shoulders.  Female waterfowl, also called hens, are usually drab colors, the better to hide themselves when they are incubating their eggs.  They are still beautiful, but in muted tones that [...]

The Diabolical Waterfowl ID Quiz was both more and less diabolical than I had intended.  It’s surprising how drake ducks, with their bright colors, can still be so difficult to identify if one only has a small chunk of the bird to use for one’s identifying attempt.  Nonetheless, correct answers were, eventually, given for each [...]

Yes, it is time for another diabolical ID quiz. This one is all about ducks, and, to make it a bit easier, just drakes. The rules are the same as the last one: put your guesses in the comments, making sure to indicate which picture each guess applies to. And use the FULL common names [...]

Pink-footed Goose. Barnacle Goose. Western Kingbird. After seeing those three birds in the first thirty seconds of actually birding on Sunday it would be difficult to do any better for the rest of the day but Jory and I were sure as heck going to try. First, we headed out to [...]

Yesterday was the day I would break 300 birds for the year in New York State. A plethora of rare-for-New York birds had been spotted way out east on Long Island, birds I had been too lazy to chase the previous weekend. This past weekend, however, fueled by fine Thanksgiving food, I knew [...]