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
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
LeConte’s Sparrow. There, I said it. It finally happened. We found, heard, saw, and photographed an actual LeConte’s Sparrow. Today, up at Sax-Zim Bog, a charmed birding hotspot that has given us (and many other birders) plenty of life birds. It delivers again. LeConte’s Sparrows actually exist. The spell was broken. Was it the poem? … More On Vanquishing a Nemesis Bird
Last May I felt compelled to put together some heroic couplets in honor(?) of my (our) nemesis bird. I do not say its name or write its name. But one can glean from the poem what it is. This “bird” supposedly “breeds” in parts of our adopted home state of Minnesota. We have lived here … More A Poem For My Nemesis Bird
During our recent Peru disaster I managed to lose an eyecup from my beloved, beat-up 8×42 B3-X Mojave bins from Leupold. When we got home I called them about getting a replacement part. They told me instead to just send the bins back to them, so I did. Today I got a package from Beaverton, … More Why I Will Always Use Leupold Binoculars
Not the expected kind of mammal. I have never seen them do this before; maybe they have been doing it at night? Last year I tried to deal with the squirrels by first adding some cayenne pepper to the seed mix. It worked… for about ten minutes. The first mammal visitors took one sniff and … More Another Mammal Robbing Our Feeders
This is the third in a series. Hoping to compile a total of 100 original trivia questions related to bird names. Part 1: Numbers Part 2: People Good bird names are descriptive. Yellow-bellied Flycatcher is a wonderful name; it describes a feature, and a behavior. It includes a color, and that is even better; an … More Bird Name Trivia Quiz, Part 3: Colors
We continue looking at the 10,721 species names from the updated Clements taxonomy. Well, not all of them at once, but various interesting subsets. Previously, we looked at the number of words in bird names, comparing their structure with human names and “surnames.” A natural step from here is to look at an even more … More Bird Name Trivia Quiz, Part 2: Honorifics
I find bird names fascinating – almost as much as with the birds themselves. I’m also interested in the statistical distributions of bird names: What percentage of birds are named for a color? What are the shortest and longest names? How many are named after people? Or after specific physical features? Or where they occur? … More Bird Name Trivia Quiz, Part 1: Numbers
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 Unreported Species in eBird – Updated
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 Cumulative eBird Species Over Time
Imagine a birding trip that would allow you to record at least one species from every taxonomic order – and that the trip included the least number of sites and required the least amount of time to complete. Clearly, certain countries will have to be in the itinerary (e.g., New Zealand, Madagascar) and the timing … More Minimal Number of Birding Sites Needed to Record Every Order?
Today in Petchaburi Province of Thailand, we unwittingly waded into the taxonomic nightmare of Lophura nycthemera crawfurdi vs. Lophura leucomelanos crawfurdi. Let’s start with a photo, taken at a blind referred to by our guide as Bo Lung Sin: Our guide called this a Kalij Pheasant. This surprised us, as we had been studying ahead of time … More Confusing Birds: Kalij or Silver Pheasant?
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 eBird Cartograms for US Counties
