The Experience of Birding
There are but few things I miss from those long-ago years in Urbana, and this clown-faced calcariid is one of them. Like clockwork, end of March every year we would get out and walk the foxtail-choked stubble of last year’s corn, and there they were — the first northbound Smith longspurs of the spring. There was an …
Continue reading “Smith’s Painted Buntling”
This is Montclair State University’s copy of John Francis McDermott‘s edition of the 1843 journal of Edward Harris, friend, patron, and frequent field companion of John James Audubon. Like most of that library’s general natural history titles from mid-century, this book was a gift from J. D’Arcy and Anne Ardrey Northwood, familiar names indeed in …
Continue reading “Other People’s Bird Books: A New Jersey Family”
What a day, full of birds and beautiful landscapes. We started at Fort Kearny, where the numbers of sandhill cranes and snow geese were once again beyond belief, vast clouds rising from the water and the fields every time a bald eagle looked cross-eyed at the flocks. We could have stayed all day, entranced by …
Continue reading “VENT Nebraska: Day Four”
We woke up to wind, light snow, and icy sidewalks, all made more annoying (for me at least) by the disorientation of having reset the clocks. Rather than go out and stand in it, I decided that we should use the first hour of the day to drive west to Wahoo, where I knew we …
Continue reading “VENT Nebraska: Day Two”
One hundred seventy-five years ago today, John James Audubon boarded a train in New York City and began an eight-month journey that would take him up the Missouri River as far as what is now the Montana state line. The party also included the painter Isaac Sprague, the taxidermist John G. Bell, and Audubon’s friend …
Continue reading “Up the Missouri”