New York

 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 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 […]

It’s one of the great ironies of American history that the construction of a network of canals in the northeast happened to coincide so closely with the arrival of the railroad–the very mode of transport that would make many of the canals obsolete as soon as they were finished. Most of those old […]

An adult Ross’s Gull was seen yesterday and today below Niagara Falls. For birders of my generation, this species will always be mega no matter where it shows up!