The sharp-eyed will have noticed the alternate-plumaged Black Tern in one of the images from my last ‘post’; there were two there, perching on the mud like little skimmers and skimming the water like giant moths. And they were joined by what counts in southeast Arizona as a gull flock: a single Franklin’s Gull and [...]

Shorebirds in the desert!
Just when it seems like it will never happen, the monsoon rains begin, and the adult shorebirds begin to trickle down from their northern breeding grounds.
I’m only half-teasing when I tell people that southeast Arizona is the best shorebirding on the continent; we don’t get a huge variety and we don’t get [...]

Just what is the relationship between birding and bird photography? I know people who won’t ‘count’ a bird unless they’ve got a good image of it, and I know, alas, many people who leave the identifying of their photos to the sometimes dubious expertise offered by one or another of the internet “forums.”
I’ve ranted before about [...]

For a while in the 1980s, birders were playing a new and slightly perverse listing game: the Christmas Card Bird Count. If rightly I remember, Birding even published a few of the more impressive tallies. What struck me most at the time was how few Nearctic species made those lists. Once you’d ticked Northern Cardinal, Cedar [...]

The new issue of Winging It, the newsletter of the American Birding Association, is on its way to the printer, and it’s a good one. Michael Schwitters has an exciting article on birding Shemya, in the outer Aleutians. ABA news includes member milestones, reports from the ABA/Leica Tropicbirds youth big-day teams, photos of the 2007 [...]