My eyes are terrible, and I rely on ear-birding to make up for it. I’ve always thought of my hearing as being good, other than having some obnoxious tinnitus resulting from decades of loud music. But today I got a clear demonstration that my ears are not what I thought they were. I’d walked over … More Recording What You Don’t Hear
When I was much younger and had normal eyesight, I worked as a line cook. I enjoyed the mental and physical challenge of handling dozens of orders at once. You had to constantly think about your next actions, and your hands, eyes, and feet were obliged to move quickly. Mistakes and inefficiency were cumulative; if … More Why I Go Further Away, Not Closer
This weekend we drove from the Twin Cities up to the eastern end of the U.P. of Michigan. To go look for a life bird that is rather hit-or-miss in northern Minnesota, but per eBird, very consistent along a particular dirt road near Paradise, MI. The bird in question was the Spruce Grouse, distributed through … More A Good Bird and a Dumb Birding Idea
A North Carolina birder and programmer, Michael Fogleman, has created a slick tool that utilizes eBird data in a novel way. It is located at https://www.michaelfogleman.com/birds/. You simply need to enter a location (you can even use zip code), a radius, and a month, and then the program will query eBird data and build a … More A Very Useful Bird Locator
The cost, in New Zealand currency, was $75 each. For my wife Claire and I, that would make it just over $100 in terms of US dollars. A fair price for a top life bird, if we could get it. Especially one as unique and rare as the Okarito Kiwi. It was January of 2019, … More Okarito Kiwi: A Most Unorthodox Birding Strategy
I only wish I would have done this years ago. We pulled the trigger last fall to install solar panels on our house. We have a roof that stands well above most of our trees, with a big south-facing expanse as well as good east and west exposures. We put a total of 49 panels … More Harvesting Sunlight: Walking the Walk on Renewable Energy
We are fortunate: we have the means to own a home. We bought it some fifteen years ago as it checked all the boxes for what our family needed at the time. It also had a feature that we were ambivalent about, something both enchanting and terrible: an east-facing living room wall, two stories high, … More How to Make Windows Safe for Birds
If you like electric guitars as well as birds, you know that the insanely playable Paul Reed Smith guitars provide a lovely intersection of these two things. Many of the instruments produced by this company, named for the master luthier that founded it, use bird images for the fretboard markings. We bought our son a … More The Birds On Paul Reed Smith Guitars
Edit: I used to be a huge supporter of eBird, both in terms of promoting it and through financial support of Cornell. This is no longer the case. I think eBird has had bad effects on birding, as detailed here. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has also thrown their support behind this misguided decisions of … More A Year of Tracking The 100th Highest All-time World Species Count on eBird
For years I have ruminated over a certain stark reality of birding: not only it is extremely improbable that any one person will ever be able record all 10,700 plus species, but if anyone ever does do it, it certainly won’t be me! When a quest is essentially too difficult to actually do, it has … More Join The WF248 Club
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service started a 20-day public comment period regarding the MBTA. This window will end on March 1. If you would like to have your views submitted on the proposed rollback of protections for birds, you may do so as follows… Start at http://www.regulations.gov. Using the search field, search for “FWS-HQ-MB-2018-0090”. In … More Public Comment Period Still Open For US Migratory Bird Treaty Act
Here’s a huge loss for birding, resulting from the COVID-19 lockdowns: one of the world’s finest eco-lodges has shuttered itself up and let all of its staff go. The Asa Wright Nature Centre used to advertise with a tagline to the effect of “30 species before breakfast.” This in part was due to their prime … More Trinidad’s Asa Wright Nature Centre Ceases Operations
After completing the São Paulo leg, we arrived in Fortaleza at 2:30 AM. We started mid-day on the following day with ornithologist Ciro Albano. We are getting quite spoiled with these outstanding guides from Brazil Birding Experts. We’ve had great guides here and there around the world, but not three like this on the same … More Pandemic Birding in Brazil, Part III: The Breathtaking Northeast
During the first leg of the trip, while we were still in Manuas, birding with Gabriel, we got a message from our São Paulo guide, Caio Brito; it turns out there would be a COVID-related impact to the trip after all. The state of São Paulo had just decided to shut down Intervales State Park, … More Pandemic Birding in Brazil, Part II: São Paulo
Claire and I started our 14-day home self-quarantine yesterday, after a month in Brazil. I hope that will be enough time to finish parsing the 1,500 photos and several hundred audio recordings that we brought back. This was our single most-productive birding trip: 672 species and 284 lifers over the course of 25 days in … More Pandemic Birding in Brazil, Part I: Abundance in Amazonas
Sun Country airlines, based out of our home city of Minneapolis, was recently offering $300 round-trip, direct flights to Cancún, Mexico (some of their domestic direct flights have been as low as $8 one way). It was too hard to pass up a cost-effective chance to go on a Mopping-Up Mission for a few of … More Quintana Roo & Yucatán, September 2020
On September 4, I birded my planned route, with only minor changes, in an effort to cover the distance of a full marathon on foot while birding the entire time. I left the house just before 6 AM while it was still dark enough that I got lost in my own neighborhood. I got back … More I Did a Full Marathon of Birding: It Was Not Pretty
Merriam-Webster provides the following defintions for “marathon”: 1: a footrace run on an open course usually of 26 miles 385 yards (42.2 kilometers) broadly : a long-distance race2a: an endurance contest2b: something (such as an event, activity, or session) characterized by great length or concentrated effort When the term is used in connection with birding, it is almost always the … More Some Speak of “Marathon” Birding: How About a Real One?
Edit: I used to be a huge supporter of eBird, both in terms of promoting it and through financial support of Cornell. This is no longer the case. I think eBird has had bad effects on birding, as detailed here. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has also thrown their support behind this misguided decisions of … More You Will Now Need 5,000 or More Birds To Make the Top 100 (World/All-time) Page on eBird
Before I dropped out of high school, I took a shop class where we learned how to solder and do electronics troubleshooting. At the end, everyone had to build a functional device, utilizing a kit selected from a vendor’s catalog of various projects; each kit had all the components you’d need to put it together. … More The Librarian Tormentor and the Cuckoo
