Here’s a somewhat more revealing view of the Chipping Sparrow frequenting our feeders the last couple of days. In my original photo of the partial bird, the bird’s small size (easily deduced by anyone who’s ever held a handful of black oil sunflower seed!) and long, narrow tail pretty much narrowed it down to Spizella. [...]

Our Sunday walk to the brushy swamps of Madison Street was close to perfect: clear, bright, and a little cool–Indian summer giving way to fall.

As those blue skies suggest, it was a good day for raptors, and we were delighted to see a juvenile Golden Eagle and a Merlin, neither of them terribly common in [...]

I didn’t know Roger Peterson, and the closest I can recall having come to meeting The Great Man was a damp morning in Princeton, when there were so many reporters and television cameras in the Institute Woods that we turned around in a righteous huff and went elsewhere.
Or rather: Of course I know Roger Tory [...]

Well, I’ll be!
Strikes me as unlikely that he’ll go to prison or pay (much of) a fine, but it’s good to see somebody’s day ruined after destroying all those Cliff Swallow nests.

Sunday morning was chilly and dark when Robert picked Tamie and me up at our hotel, but the reward for early rising was the sight of sunrise over Xalapa, with forested Macuiltepetl rising up out of the heart of the city.

By the time we reached the oak and pine forests of La Joya, it had [...]