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On my last visit to Bryant Park I not only spent time photographing the wintering birds there but also carefully watching them, trying to figure out how such a small urban park with so little proper habitat could possibly be providing enough food for birds that aren’t used to a diet of bread crumbs and [...]

At 10:45 AM my phone beeped with a text message.  The message was only four words long. Within a minute I had let Daisy know that I would be gone for a couple of hours, grabbed my microwaving beef pattie out of the microwave, kissed Desi goodbye, grabbed my gear, and gotten out the door. [...]

We light the oven so that everyone might bake bread in it. -José Martí For the second time in three years there is an Ovenbird hanging around in Bryant Park well into December. I am convinced that, like José Martí, the Ovenbird seeks to nourish the masses.  But instead of feeding the Cuban masses hungry [...]

We birders birders on the eastern half of the continent are quite familiar with the ubiquitous Northern Parula, whose buzzy song is often one of the very first new birders learn because of its pervasiveness at nearly every spot in the east from mid-April on.  Before the callous lumping of all those warblers into the [...]

I think most of us in North America have come to the somewhat disappointing conclusion that fall migration is pretty much finished for the year. I mean, once the Dark-eyed Juncos start showing up there’s really no denying it, is there?  You’re done.  You might as well hang it up and learn to enjoy the [...]

Last week I was doing a birding tour of the east and west slopes of Ecuador and encountered some warblers that have already made it to Ecuador.  It is really amazing how far and how fast they can fly to improve the living conditions that assure their millenarian survival.  Here are a couple of pictures [...]

Though it was pretty warm for an October morning when I spotted this bird at Fort Tilden, Queens, it was fluffed up as if it was suffering from extreme cold.  Maybe it was trying to be a big tough guy considering the volume of sparrows in the vicinity of where it was foraging?  Somehow, I [...]

One of my greatest joys is photographing birds out my big studio windows. I have lots of plants that attract birds; clumps of gray birches, mulberry trees; a hummingbird garden lousy with salvias and fuchsias. Fuchsia “Gartenmeister Bonstedt” is one plant that’s a must-have for me, so much so that I save it over the [...]

The Tennessee Warbler is a poster child for the boreal forests of Canada and the far northern United States.  Its population actually fluctuates in response to the availability of Spruce Budworm and though it nests on the ground it is entirely inseparable from the forests of the north during breeding season.  As autumn arrives and the days [...]

Every spring the wood-warblers come north bedecked in breeding finery and every autumn they head back south again in more muted colors. The trickle of migrants becomes a flood and then slows to a trickle again, leaving us New Yorkers with a host of Butterbutts and few other wood-warblers to tide us over until spring. [...]

On 6 October I came across an American Redstart in Edgewater, New Jersey, that seemed perfectly normal at first, when I was only viewing the bird’s left side.  It was foraging and even flycatching like any other redstart would.  When I saw the bird’s right profile I realized something was wrong but it took me [...]

Yesterday evening I returned to Kissena Corridor Park, site of an amazing array of rare and difficult-to-see birds over the weekend, and enjoyed birding with some fellow Queens birders.  We refound several of the birds that had been seen earlier in the day and on Saturday.  But the wood-warbler in these images caused a disagreement [...]

There were 1,805 pairs of Kirtland’s Warblers found in Michigan this year, second only to 2009′s 1,813.  The population has stabilized with neither increases nor decreases of greater than five percent since 2007.  A couple dozen pairs also nest in neighboring states and provinces.  Of course, Kirtland’s Warbler isn’t out of danger and won’t be [...]

It is not every day that one gets a taste of Cape May while at Magee Marsh.  In fact, this might be the beginning of some kind of birding black hole that sucks all of the birding world into a single spot (though it feels that way right now with nearly 1,000 birders having gathered [...]

I have taken refuge on the high ground as Irene batters the east coast of North America and Nanmadol swamps the Philipines, Taiwan and east China, but my thoughts and best wishes are with anyone who has been affected by the storms. If Mexico City itself was not high enough, the mountains to the south rise above [...]

On the same day that I tracked down and digiscoped Cerulean Warblers at Doodletown Road I had the genius plan of also getting over to Sterling Forest State Park and digiscoping some of the Golden-winged Warblers that breed there.*  Now those who bird in New York State regularly are probably shaking their heads right now [...]

There are many reasons to visit Doodletown Road in Bear Mountain State Park, a jewel of a park in Rockland County, New York.  Perhaps it is the history of Doodletown that interests you?  Maybe you are hoping for an encounter with Crotalus horridus, otherwise known as the Timber Rattlesnake?  Or could the steep uphill climb [...]

Lumpers, rejoice!  Splitters and armchair tickers, cry into your beer.  The Yellow-rumped Warbler will remain the Yellow-rumped Warbler, at least for the foreseeable future, and will not be split into two, three, or even four species.  That is, if you believe in the authority of the American Ornithologists Union, which voted down a proposal to [...]

You’ve no doubt heard the famous expression, “If the mountain will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the mountain.” The pithy lesson contained herein reminds us that we control our own destinies, that if someone will not come to us, we must perforce go to them. But what if the mountain had come to [...]

Note: This is an account, originally published in June 2006, of my quest to remove a jinx bird from my bird-watching soul. I am sharing it again here, at the request of Corey Finger, who takes some sort of sick pleasure in seeing other birders squirm and suffer under the weight of their obsession with [...]