Page 35 – Birding New Jersey

November 14, 2016November 15, 2016

Why You Should Bird Tuscany With VENT

Panama. Ecuador. Kenya.

Central Italy?

Of all the places around the world I’ve been lucky enough to bird, none combines so many different and so many wonderful activities as Tuscany, that gentle landscape of hills and sea in the center of the Italian peninsula.

Food? Outstanding. Wine? Excellent. Architecture? Stunning.

And oh yes, there are birds.

Lots and lots of birds, including colorful European Bee-eaters and Hoopoes, Rollers and Woodchat Shrikes, Black-winged Stilts and implausibly shaped, impossibly colored Greater Flamingos.

We experience all this and more from just two hotels, one nestled between the Apuan Alps and the Apennines in the lovely Garfagnana Valley:

and the other tucked into the hills above the Mediterranean and beneath the medieval city of Manciano.

What could be more perfect? Only one thing: having you along. Our next tour is scheduled for May 2017.

At first, you’ll think it’s the trip of a lifetime — and then, if you’re like me, you’ll decide you want to go again. And again.

November 12, 2016November 9, 2016

A Central Park Birder

Marcus Charles Rich died seventy-five years ago today, on November 12, 1941.

I did not know him, and I doubt that anyone living now did, at least not well. I have never heard his name in conversation, and as far as I know there are no memorial bird walks, no annually awarded prizes, no commemorative park bench plaques in his honor.

And I find that comforting.

Rich, a securities broker in New York City, was a prominent figure in the Central Park birding scene in the 1930s, eventually becoming “the unofficial compiler” of records from that famous site. His eulogist, Eugene Eisenmann, praised him for the ardor with which he approached his role, the encouragement he and his wife offered young birders, and his efforts to make city officials more aware of the park’s value to migrants and their watchers.

His passing was a great loss to his many friends.

And now, just a lifetime later, he is forgotten. That circumstance could be a source of introspection, even regret; but Rich’s life, his death, and our oblivion remind me instead that all of us are links in a chain of tradition and transmission, and that though history may not remember and posterity not much care, each of us makes a contribution that is essential to the way the future will be.

November 11, 2016November 11, 2016

Armistice

Captain Sydney Edward Brock succumbed on this date in 1918 to wounds sustained a month earlier at Courtrai. He was thirty-five years old.

According to his contemporaries, Brock had ahead of him an important career as an amateur ornithologist, entomologist, and ecologist. He was one of that class that Robert Shufeldt, warning a few years earlier of the likely effects of the war on science, had described as “of exceptional and unique value and actively at work upon scientific researches” in their field.

Brock died on the very day that the First World War came to its official close.

October 31, 2016October 31, 2016

A Halloween Spook

Scary movies are supposed to terrify. Most of them, I find, merely horrify. But this one just might do the trick.

Released just before Halloween 1915, “The Spirit of Audubon” was a two-reeler produced by the Thanhouser Company and shot in Florida and New York by Herbert K. Job. Teddy Roosevelt himself makes a cameo appearance as Protector of the great wader colonies, but the real stars of the show were Laurence Swinburne as Audubon and two apparently once-famous child actors, Leland Benham and Helen Badgley, the “Thanhouser Kidlet.”

Bird-Lore called the film “interesting and highly educational,” but it also sounds more than a little creepy:

Audubon comes at night and takes two little children from their beds…. at the end the children, standing at the Audubon monument in Trinity Cemetery, pledge loyalty to the birds and to the Audubon idea.

The stuff of nightmares, even 101 years on — and I thought so even before I saw the photo of Badgley.

October 22, 2016

Tiny Cormorants, Tinier Kingfishers

Am I the only one who wakes up on the plane at the end of a transoceanic flight completely, entirely, thoroughly, almost irretrievably discombobulated?

I stumbled out of the Venice airport this morning fully disoriented. Happily, the time it took me to walk the ever-widening circles required to find the car rental area was also the opportunity for the first of the day’s many score pygmy cormorants to fly over — and with that I was on my ornitho-feet again, reminded that I hadn’t landed just anywhere in Old Europe, but was on, indeed in, the Adriatic Sea.

I spent the day re-familiarizing myself with the area and the birds, and even got to witness two common kingfisher behaviors I never had before. I suspect that neither is rare, but it’s unusual that I get to linger over this bird, so often just an electric-blue flash and a nails-on-the-chalkboard squeak as it darts past on its way to one end or the other of its necessarily linear territory.

Today, though, I watched two different individuals hunting the “lagoon” at Lio Piccolo, a tiny insular peninsula or peninsular island with a single road so narrow that I could swear a time or two I was propelled merely by the rotation of the axles.

In any event, my slow progress was a chance to watch one kingfisher actually hovering over the water for a couple of seconds; it was less skilled than so many of the larger aquatic alcedinids are, but I was still impressed, especially since this was the first time I think I’d ever seen the species treading air at all.

Not long thereafter, I was more surprised to see a blue dot on a distant telephone wire: a common kingfisher, hunting from a perch far higher and far more exposed than I would ever have expected. Twice the little blue dart flicked its way down to the water, but twice it came up empty, no doubt to the amusement of the great cormorants hulking on the wires and poles around it.

A nice start to what is sure to be an exciting tour!