Imagine you walk into the neighborhood coffee house for your morning cup of joe, and on the counter is a tip jar with a sign reading, “$ for wintering warblers” with a photo of a Chestnut-sided Warbler in a tropical forest. You’d drop your change in, right? Any proud bird watcher would do their part [...]
On the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, twin spotlights once again shot into the night sky above Manhattan to offer a tribute to the men and women we lost during the 2001 attacks. It was a clear and cool night, almost calm and with a hint of a southerly breeze. In another long-repeated annual event, thousands [...]
A migrating Whimbrel named Machi has been shot on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, French West Indies. The bird (pictured at left) had likely landed to rest up after detouring around Tropical Storm Maria. Machi became one of thousands of shorebirds that are hunted for sport each fall—but she stood out from the flock because [...]
A Common Grackle released after a banding demonstration at last year’s Migration Celebration. This coming Saturday is International Migratory Bird Day, and people all over the Western Hemisphere will be celebrating the miracle of bird migration. So on the same day our two World Series of Birding teams (the Redheads and Anti-Petrels) spend 24 hours [...]
A quick update on the status of eBird’s supercomputing collaboration and their production of these cool animated occurrence maps. The team just released their latest five range maps, bringing the total now online to 15, and launched a dedicated page about the occurrence maps on their site. A recent post on our Facebook page really [...]
A few weeks ago, Wesley Hochachka was at the International Ornithological Congress in Brazil, learning about using satellites to do fieldwork more economically. Now he’s on an island in the North Sea called Helgoland, just off Germany and Denmark. Like places such as Cape May, New Jersey, the barrier islands of the northern Gulf of [...]
This week we were encouraged to see that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has begun posting counts of bird species that have been recovered in the Gulf of Mexico during the oil spill. The first such report lists 4,676 individuals representing some 85 species, plus another 19 categories for incompletely identified birds. The new [...]
Cornell Ph.D. student Nathan Senner is back on Chiloé Island, Chile, this month to study shorebirds he last saw in his home state of Alaska. As you may remember from stories he posted last year, he’s trying to learn how Hudsonian Godwits and Whimbrels survive their 8,000-mile migrations from the top of the world to [...]
[viddler id=61f4db30&w=545&h=424] We’ve been hearing reports from all over lately about newly returning migrants: a Pine Warbler heard over New York City late one night; Louisiana Waterthrushes in Philadelphia, a Prothonotary Warbler seen over a North Florida beach. Here’s another post about listening to migration, from Lab researchers Mike Powers and Lewis Grove. Here’s Mike: [...]
