A few evenings ago my kids and I were exploring Walden Ponds, a bucolic birding spot in Boulder County, Colorado. We were in the buggy back end of this sprawling complex of marshes and woodlots, listening to the sounds of early summer in the foothills of the Rockies: twittering Violet-green Swallows and chattering Bullock’s Orioles; [read more…]
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Whew! It’s over! The month of May is finally and fully in the rear view mirror. In a great post to The ABA Blog, Laura Kammermeier set the tone for this most glorious month of the birding year. The thirty-one days of May are the high holy days of birding. If you’re a birder, there’s [read more…] Back on May 8th of this year, Tim Davis and Andrew Davis found a remarkable bird in the mountain hamlet of Georgetown, Clear Creek County, Colorado: a Rufous-collared Sparrow, Zonotrichia capensis. At this writing, the bird is still in Georgetown, still singing sweetly, still delighting birders from all over Colorado and beyond.
Rufous-collared Sparrow [read more…]
I’ve now heard from a variety of folks who have opinions about the identities of the birds depicted in the New Photo Quiz on p. 80 of the May 2011 issue of Birding. Let’s take a look! First things first. The images below are high-resolution jpegs of the three quiz photos. As I understand [read more…]
The other day, I was perusing the “Birding Pipeline,” a top-secret (well…), internal document (it’s pretty “leaky,” actually) with planned content for Birding magazine for the next year or so. Of particular interest to me are several articles—all in various stages of extreme incompleteness at the present time—on bird identification. In the next year, I’m [read more…] As fans of The ABA Blog well know, the birding community in North America has been experiencing something of an identity crisis. Ted Eubanks, Jeff Gordon, and others have blogged about the essence of being a birder. And a great many of you—thoughtful folks who follow The ABA Blog—have chimed in with comments on [read more…] One of the highlights of the year for many birders is the arrival of the July issue of The Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union. The July Auk is “the checklist issue,” presenting a detailed accounting of all the latest “splits” (yay!), “lumps” (boo…), and revisions to linear sequence (aaargh). The AOU Checklist [read more…]
Here at The ABA Blog, much of our focus has been on the future—the future of the ABA in particular, and the future of birding more generally. That’s great, and that’s the way it ought to be. And that said, I’d like to do a complete 180. I’d like go waaay back into ancient [read more…] No, this is not spam from a Nigerian prince with Britney Spears' nude photographs looking for an agent in the U.S. if you will just forward him his percentage of the royalties from the National Enquirer in advance. This article is about birding gender, not procreation. However, since most of my readers are male (a [read more…] The future of capital-B Birding, the magazine, that is. (We’ll take up the matter of little-b birding—the whole hobby, the whole way of life—at some later point.) First things first. It might not be a bad idea to review the history of Birding. If you have the time and interest, please check out my six-part [read more…] |
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