Well, all right, I suppose by some standards it wasn’t that bad, but 23 degrees Fahrenheit is cold for Tucson! It had warmed up nicely, approaching 60, by the time we hit Casa Grande at 3:00 this afternoon. But Katie, David, Graham, and I hardly noticed the weather all day: there were too many birds [...]

I don’t like the term and I certainly don’t like the idea: there really are no “trash birds” if you’re a real birder. But in Guyana in November, Great Kiskadee, hardly a trash bird by any reckoning here in the US, nearly attained that status: not by virtue of its abundance, but by virtue of [...]

Alison had to catch a plane from Phoenix this noon, so Darlene and Michael joined me for the drive up and a little bit of birding after we dropped Alison off at Sky Harbor.
It was cold even at noon, and windy enough at Gilbert Water Ranch that even the Abert’s Towhees and White-crowned Sparrows were [...]

One of my favorite spots on our Guyana tour was the Atta Canopy Walkway, a series of sturdy platforms connected by stable walkways 100 feet above the forest floor. The view down was dizzying,

but the whole structure is supported by some tremendous rainforest giants. The duct tape inspired confidence, too.

But we weren’t there to be [...]

Here in the northern hemisphere, we tend sometimes to think of the icterids as a rather uniform group of black and blackish birds, the monotony relieved in most parts of the US and Canada by one or at best two species of orioles and a meadowlark.
This exclusively New World family really comes into its own [...]