With breeding season in full swing, birds are in a flurry of nesting—that means it’s time for another Funky Nests in Funky Places contest held by our Celebrate Urban Birds project—and you could win prizes for yours. Birds don’t always build in the places you might expect. People have discovered bird nests in boots, grills, flower pots, [...]
Posted in Birds, citizen science, Uncategorized, what you can do
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Tagged Birds, birdwatching, Celebrate Urban Birds, citizen science, Funky Nests in Funky Places, nesting, nests, photos
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With hordes of migrant songbirds fluttering in the bushes of southern New Jersey on Saturday, two Cornell teams posted strong finishes in the 29th annual World Series of Birding. The student Redheads team scored 168 species with their new lineup, enough to take second place in the Cape May County division. And the bicycle-powered Anti-Petrels [...]
Posted in Big Day, Birds, conservation, Uncategorized
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Tagged Big Day, birding, Birds, birdwatching, conservation, photos, video, World Series of Birding
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Here in New Jersey, the Anti-Petrels spent the morning refining our route for the dawn hours of the World Series of Birding on Saturday. The students of Team Redhead scouted saltmarshes, then headed inland to Belleplain State Forest’s warblers, tanagers, and woodpeckers before hitting Cape May to look for shorebirds and a rare Mississippi Kite. [...]
Posted in Big Day, Birds, conservation, field reports, travel
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Tagged Anti-Petrels, Big Day, birding, Birds, birdwatching, Redheads, sightings, World Series of Birding
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Lots of bird watchers are obsessive about their hobby, but we still usually regard it as an optional pursuit: when it rains, we’re allowed to stay indoors. But with the World Series of Birding just three days away, our teams—the student Redheads and the bike-powered Anti-Petrels—didn’t really have that option today. Starting at 12:01 a.m. [...]
This week, some 62 teams are converging on Cape May, New Jersey, for the World Series of Birding, now in its 29th year. Starting at 12:00 a.m. Saturday morning, those birders will cup a hand to their ears and start counting birds. And they won’t stop until the following midnight. Our own student team, the [...]
Posted in Big Day, Birds, conservation
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Tagged Anti-Petrels, Ben Barkley, birding, Birds, birdwatching, Brendan Fogarty, Eric Gulson, Hope Batcheller, Jack Hruska, Redheads, students, World Series of Birding
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This is Part 1 of an account—for any of you who love tales of unusual birds in unusual places—of a recent trip to Australia’s Wet Tropics region near Cairns, Queensland. In this Part we will discuss: Macleay’s Honeyeater, Victoria’s Riflebird, Pied Monarch, Golden Bowerbird, Tooth-billed Bowerbird, and the abominable Fernwren. Birders love endemics—species you can see [...]
Posted in Birds, field reports, slideshow, sounds, travel, Uncategorized
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Tagged Australia, birding, Birds, birdwatching, Far Northern Queensland, Fernwren, Golden Bowerbird, Macleay's Honeyeater, photos, Pied Monarch, sound, Tooth-billed Bowerbird, travel, tropics, Victoria's Riflebird, Wet Tropics
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The concept of a Big Day is a bold one—a midnight-to-midnight sleepless birding blitz to see or hear as many species as humanly possible. Team Sapsucker—Chris Wood, Jessie Barry, Andrew Farnsworth, Marshall Iliff, and Tim Lenz—took on that challenge in Texas last year, setting the North American record at 264, and then they doubled-down for [...]
Posted in Big Day, Birds, conservation, field reports, News, slideshow, travel, video
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Tagged Andrew Farnsworth, Big Day, birding, Birds, birdwatching, Chris Wood, conservation, endangered species, Jessie Barry, Marshall Iliff, photos, sightings, Texas, Tim Lenz
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The Great Blue Herons in the nest outside our office have been sitting on five eggs for the last month. Over the weekend, the first pips appeared in two eggs, soon followed by the wavering heads of two fuzzy chicks. Thousands of people watched live on our Great Blue Heron cam, and by this morning [...]
April 12, 2012 – 10:37 am
Twice in the last week a large owl has made nighttime attacks on the incubating Great Blue Heron at the nest outside our office. The female heron does not seem to have been injured by the attacks, which included strikes by the owl very close to the bird’s head. The attacks were caught by our [...]
It’s coming up on a month since Big Red started laying eggs at our Red-tailed Hawk cam on the Cornell University campus. With an incubation time of 28-35 days, that means the first egg could hatch anytime starting this weekend—so we’re having a contest to see who can guess the time that the first chick [...]
