Tag: Birding
It’s A Sin To Kill A Spark Bird
Birders are fond of talking about their “spark bird,” the bird or birding moment that hooked them into the passion of birding. Oddly enough, I remained sans spark bird for quite some time. That is, until a memory was triggered by opening an old photo album. A little back story: I grew up with nature in [...]
BirdsEye: iPhone App for Bird Watching/eBird Users
BirdsEye is the first mobile eBird application that helps you easily find birds and locate directions to nearby birding hotspots. BirdsEye was released from the iTunes store on December 2, 2009.
A New Birding Tradition: First Annual Turkey “Hunt”
Life is too easy these days. Used to be you’d wake up Thanksgiving morning, hunt for a bird, and return home only when you had enough game to feed the children and nearby kinsfolk. I love the feeling of having earned a meal. Too bad that feeling normally resides in the foggy chambers of my [...]
Buff-bellied Hummingbird at RGV
I have exactly ten seconds to post something before festivities continue, so here is an image of Buff-bellied Hummingbird seen at Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. More soon!
Revved up for RGV!
In two days I’ll be escaping the chill of upstate New York and plunking myself down in the sun-drenched land of southeastern Texas for the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) Birding Festival (held in Harlingen, Texas). It looks like festival attendees are in for some good weather, as long as Hurricane Ida behaves. Already, early reports say [...]
Rio Grande Valley Festival Coming Soon!
Apparently, the Scissor-tailed Flycatcher that showed up in central NY last week had a message for me: Get to the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival! And quick! “You REALLY ought to get the Rio Grande Valley Birding festival, Laura,” said a friend a few years back. “It’s one of the biggest festivals of the year, [...]
Approaches to Bird Identification & A Kirtland’s Warbler
I recall an interesting conversation I had at the Midwest Birding Symposium on approaches to bird identification. To set the stage, I also dug up a few more decent shots of the Kirtland’s Warbler at East Harbor State Park, western Lake Erie in Ohio (September 18, 2009). At lunch I had the pleasure of sitting [...]
Revisiting The Kirtland’s Warbler
The hour of 3 am and I are becoming intimate bedfellows. That being the case, I may as well prop up my eyelids with toothpicks, wince from the glare of my screen in this darkened room, and report on my trip to the Midwest Birding Symposium. I went into the symposium believing that I was [...]
My Life Kirtland’s Warbler (i.e., Life Is Good At MBS)
My $75 registration fee was just returned in spades. During one of the early morning talks at MBS today, my cell phone vibrated with a very curious message: “Kirtland’s Warbler at East Harbor State Park, Meadow Trail.” At that point, I had to bail on the fine and illustrious speaker, Jim McCormac, because I knew [...]
The Art of Listing: A Big Year Quest in NY
What does a birder do when he (or she) has graduated from little brown jobs to peeps and age-classing juvenile gulls? In New York, he sets about a big year where he attempts to see 300 species.
