The Experience of Birding
We’re off to a great start. Most important, everyone got here — a circumstance not to be taken for granted given how many of us were flying from the east coast. Following quick introductions, we hopped into our nimble little bus and drove the five minutes to Carter Lake. It took even less time to …
Continue reading “VENT Nebraska: Day One”
Ninety-five years ago today, a promising young birder notice several “different” birds in a flock of White-throated Sparrows in Jackson Park on Chicago’s lakefront. Closer inspection revealed that at least two of the outlanders were Harris’s Sparrows, a species considered rare then, and still scarce today, anywhere in Illinois. A nice find indeed for the seventeen-year-old birder. But …
Continue reading “A Rare Sparrow in Chicago”
Want to know what the nest and eggs of a North American breeding bird look like? Just google it. Full descriptions for almost every single species are at your keyboarding fingertips, and though I haven’t checked, I’m betting that there are photos of each one, too. But bird-nesting is like everything else: Somebody had to be …
It’s here, right on time, and birders around the world are scrutinizing every last densely printed word in this year’s supplement to the AOU Check-list. (That’s right: hyphen, small “l.”) There aren’t terribly many species-level splits or lumps this time, but there are some very significant changes at the higher levels of taxonomy, including some that …
Continue reading “The Fifty-sixth AOU Supplement”
Join me next year for some of the continent’s greatest birding spectacles. Who could have predicted that—in March! in Nebraska!—we’d be peeling layers as fast as we could in temperatures in the 60s and 70s? True to its changeable nature, though, by the end of this year’s tour, the Great Plains weather had us grateful for …
Continue reading “Nebraska Cranes and Prairie Grouse”