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 [...]
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 [...]
NOTE: More news and resources are being compiled here UPDATE: Mississippi Audubon to host volunteer bird monitoring training Mon., June 7, at Moss Point The worst aspect of the oil spill for many of us is the sense of powerlessness it leaves. Donating is one way to help, at least a little (in particular, donations [...]
For Tim Gallagher, editor of Living Bird magazine, the Deepwater Horizon oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico brought back sad memories of a spill cleanup he became involved in 20 years ago, in Bolsa Chica, California. He had arrived on the scene as a writer and photographer to document cleanup efforts—but the oiled birds [...]
Two days ago, the folks at eBird put out a call-to-action to birders who live near the Gulf Coast and want to help with the oil spill response. Today eBird launched a Google gadget that anyone can use on their website, blog, or Google homepage to explore recent sightings of 10 vulnerable species along the [...]
Here’s Nate Senner to tell you how the last two stops in the survey of Peru’s coastline went. And we hope you’ll enjoy the slideshow, above, from eBird project leader Marshall Iliff, another member of the survey team. Here’s Nate: We were expecting great things—spectacular desert scenery and thousands of shorebirds—from our workshops around Lima, [...]
Last time we heard from Nate Senner, he was herding godwits in Chile. Since then he’s been to Peru for a three-week stint of shorebird-identification workshops with an incredible goal: to survey the entire coastline of the country. Here’s Nate with his first installment of how things went: Twenty-five years ago, two Canadian biologists undertook [...]
On paper, last week’s AOU meetings were a solid wall of plenary talks, 15-minute research talks, and evening poster sessions. But cracks in the full schedule—coffee breaks, field trips, dinners and drinks—left plenty of room for impromptu conversations and unscheduled idea-sharing. Dr. Alan Poole, editor of the Birds of North America Online, ran across two [...]
Cornell graduate student Nate Senner has been writing from Chiloé Island, Chile, where he’s studying Hudsonian Godwits on their wintering grounds. He wrote yesterday with a puzzling situation on his hands: Where have all the godwits gone? A funny thing began to happen five days ago—the godwits began to disappear. We first noticed that something [...]
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 [...]
