Denis and I ventured to Green Valley today, itching for some of the rare Calidris reported there these past few days. It was not to be: though we found more Western Sandpipers (>11) and Wilson’s Phalaropes (>25) than have been there on other recent visits, none of our targets appeared. Clearly, as in so many [...]

No, I didn’t mean “middle age.”
Cleaning out a long-disused e-mail account this morning, I ran across a note headed, intriguingly, “Italian Birds, circa 1425.” Generally, that would be spam, but it was from a colleague at the Metropolitan, so I opened it to find images of a fifteenth-century plate, ornamented with a painted pastoral scene and the [...]

So it’s finally happened: one of the most charming birds in the world has arrived in the ABA area!
Paul Lehman and Gary Rosenberg discovered North America’s first Pallas’s Leaf-Warbler at Gambell this afternoon. Photos are promised at surfbirds.com within a few hours; meanwhile, Paul’s account of the last weeks’ wonders is at ebird.org.

Scrabbling sounds in the ceiling the last few nights have got me worried that our friends the packrats have become too friendly; they’re fine in the yard, where the elegance of their pelage combines with a pronounced intelligence of face to make them welcome guests indeed, but in the house? No thanks.
So, having a heart, [...]

I used to think of Whitewater Draw as a vast muddy plain with a puddle or two out in the middle. No more!
The water stretches forever out there right now, and there are a few appealing shorebird spots on the edges of the smaller ponds. Appealing, at least, to shorebirders, though the birds seemed to [...]