This past week in birding news was nothing if not exciting.
Almost 16,000 birders, participating in the second annual Global Big Day on May 14th, ticked some 6,284 species worldwide. (Let’s see Noah Strycker do that!)
Unfortunately, those numbers may dip in the future, if the North American Bird Conservation Initiative is right and one-third of the continent’s birds are threatened.
For now, though, score one in the positive side of the ledger as a long-lost species—the Blue-eyed Ground Dove—has been rediscovered in Brazil. (Photo above by Rafael Bessa, BirdLife International)
The lowly Red-winged Blackbirds in suburban New York triggered Meredith Mann's interest in birds. Five years later, she's explored some of the the USA's coolest hotspots, from Plum Island in Massachusetts to the Magic Hedge in Chicago to the deserts of Fallon, Nevada. She recently migrated from the Windy City (where she proudly served as a Chicago Bird Collision Monitor, rescuing migrants from skyscrapers and sidewalks) to Philadelphia, where she plans to find new editing and writing gigs; keep up her cool-finds chronicle, Blog5B; and discover which cheesesteak really is the best. And she will accept any and all invitations to bird Cape May, NJ.
Fantastic! Now is wait for the species conservation plan.