The Nemesis Bird

The crew at 10000birds.com has started an effort to raise money for a survey of an endangered and endemic bird in Kenya; the Sharpe’s Longclaw. The longclaws belong to the same family (Motacillidae) as the American Pipit and wagtails. According to BirdLife International, there are only between 10,000 and 20,000 Sharpe’s Longclaws remaining.

The Sharpe’s Longclaw [...]

I spent an afternoon on the Conejohela Flats on the Susquehanna River yesterday. The water behind the dam was amazingly low, resulting in acres of mud. This benefited the birds by giving them more foraging habitat but made it a bit more difficult to get close looks at the birds. Least Sandpipers and Dunlin outnumbered [...]

This past February, the Hawk Migration Association of North America (HMANA) initiated the Winter Raptor Survey, a volunteer effort to determine winter abundances of raptors. The purpose according to the association’s website “is to get birders/raptor enthusiasts out in the field during the winter looking for diurnal raptors, and to provide those surveyors with a [...]

female Northern Saw-whet Owl

A few nights ago I had the opportunity to help band saw-whet owls at a Girl Scout camp close to Halifax, PA. This excited me because, although saw-whet owls are one of the commonest owls in Canada and the northern US, I have rarely seen them. These owls are tiny, with the [...]

Gypsy Moth Lymantria dispar
It’s particularly bad this year. At least I don’t remember noticing the large swathes of mountainside that were nearly absent of any green. While the gypsy moth caterpillar can be a real boon to birds such as cuckoos which feast on the insects, they can also cause tremendous damage to their hosts [...]

The National Aviary in Pittsburgh and Powdermill Avian Research Center are both working on satellite tracking several Golden Eagles that were trapped this fall near the Allegheny Front Hawk Watch near Bedford, PA. I was lucky enough to be in the trapping blind for a day when 39 Golden Eagles and 1 Bald Eagle [...]

In the somber news category, the fourth edition of the Wetlands International report on waterbird species around the world has been released. It’s based on annual field surveys by 15,000 voluntary expert observers across hundreds of sites worldwide, including many IBA’s. Of the 878 species that they present estimates and trends for, 44% [...]

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

Snow Geese flock, originally uploaded by topherous.

Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird site has just posted Bird Counting 101. For anyone who spends time out in the field watching large flocks, whether they [...]