On my last morning in Hamilton–a cold one!–I took Margie and Rich up on their generous invitation to drop by for a little feeder watching. The air was thin and the wind strong, but an Eastern Phoebe was singing on the nearby creek, and Common Grackles were singing and dancing from the tops of the [...]

A male Scott’s Oriole is visiting a feeder in Iowa (Iowa!).
Just a year ago this would have been a mega-mega, but with scattered records throughout the east in recent months, this way-out bird may be part of an emerging pattern of “regular” vagrancy. What was once a southwestern specialty may be turning into a low-density [...]

Now really, who wouldn’t fall in love with someone whose reading pile looks like this?

A large part of the allure of many North American emberizids is their restricted range: who hasn’t spent time on the southern Great Plains for Harris’s Sparrow, in the piney woods of the southeast for Bachman’s Sparrow, in trashy southwestern washes looking for Abert’s Towhee?
But for each of these local specialties, there are sparrows whose [...]

We think of passerines when we think of migrants, little lisping calls drifting down from the midnight sky as warblers and thrushes make their way north. But other groups of birds are on the move right now, too, including Northern Saw-whet Owls, one of which had left us a sign at Leland Pond on Sunday.

A [...]