Sharp-eyed San Diego birders pulled an adult Purple Gallinule out of the dense cattails at Tucson’s Sweetwater Wetlands yesterday, and it was still there this morning, when I joined Rog and Janine for a good twenty minutes of great views of the bird as it perched, preened, and fed just a few feet away from us.
This […]

I was quite prepared to wax enthusiastic about this new photographic guide to this assembly of nine-primaried oscines: they’re pretty birds, many of them, and the authors have already done the birding community a great favor with their works on emberizid sparrows. But it turns out, surprisingly, that there is little to recommend this new […]

Looking for a birder in southeast Arizona? Head to Madera Canyon, where everybody, local and exotic alike, is spellbound by the spectacle of multiple Aztec Thrushes, still feeding in the cherry trees even on this rainy morning.
This morning Denis and I got to watch two individuals, both of them sitting stolid in the foliage at […]

A day off, doubly nice because I spent it in leisurely birding with Michael and John. And even better, it was cool and cloudy all day, a circumstance that let us visit not just the high elevations of Madera Canyon, but also the upper portions of Sycamore Canyon, usually oven-like this time of year but […]

Birders tend to look alike, but not in the way non-birders raised on Don Knotts and Miss Jane Hathaway expect: though we may on occasion find ourselves tennis-shod, most of us do without jodhpurs and safari helmets, opting instead for the typical outdoorsperson’s mix, equally evocative (whatever its true source) of LL Bean and Goodwill.
I […]