March. To much of the country it’s a massive basketball tournament, but to bird watchers it’s an equally frenzied run-up to spring. Right now, the first birds are dribbling back in to their summer ranges—grackles, blackbirds, phoebes, and swallows—but soon it’ll be a full court press of warblers, thrushes, shorebirds, orioles, and more. We think [...]
Whether in a shrub, a tree, or a nest box, bird nests are all around us. Each spring and summer, volunteers across the country visit nests and report their findings to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s NestWatch project at www.nestwatch.org. NestWatchers keep track of how many eggs are laid and how many hatch. As the [...]
We’re still reeling from the news of the huge earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on Friday and whose aftereffects continue to threaten Japan’s people. As if the human catastrophe weren’t enough, the tsunami that crossed the Pacific Ocean has swept over most of Midway Atoll, where it has washed away tens of thousands of [...]
Victoria Jostes of Indiana says this American Robin laid four beautiful blue eggs in her floral door wreath and all of them hatched Are you ready for spring? The folks in our Celebrate Urban Birds project certainly are—they’re bringing back their popular “Funky Nests in Funky Places” challenge just in time for nesting season. They want to [...]
In a talk last night that began with a song and ended with a poem, Richard Crossley described how the innovative format in his new identification guide coalesced from pieces of a lifetime spent birding. Crossley’s new guide has been called revolutionary and overwhelming (its pros and cons have been reviewed extensively). Each page bombards [...]
