October 19, 2012 – 2:11 pm
Thirty-nine of the most gorgeous, outlandish animals in the world—the birds-of-paradise—live only in New Guinea, associated islands, and adjacent tropical Australia. Though they’ve been known for centuries from paintings and specimens, it’s only now that all 39 can be admired in glorious photographic detail, thanks to ground-breaking work by Cornell Lab biologist Ed Scholes and [...]
By Hugh
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Posted in Birds, conservation, ecology, education, science, travel, Uncategorized, video
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Also tagged birding, Birds, birds-of-paradise, birdwatching, Ed Scholes, New Guinea, photos, Tim Laman, tropical fieldwork, video
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I’m spending 10 days in Iceland to learn about research on Atlantic Puffins. My host is Erpur Hansen, an Icelandic biologist who has been studying puffins here since 2007. He visits most of the country´s large puffin colonies twice each year to assess their breeding success. And that’s no small task, as nearly half of [...]
By Hugh
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Posted in Birds, ecology, field reports, slideshow, travel
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Also tagged birding, Birds, birdwatching, Erpur Hansen, fieldwork, Iceland, puffins, travel
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This is Part Two of a post about searching for the 12 endemic birds of northeast Queensland’s Wet Tropics World Heritage Reserve, with the help of many of the region’s wonderful guides and lodges. Part One of the story is here. Part Two introduces six endemic species not mentioned in Part One: Grey-headed Robin, Bridled Honeyeater, Bower’s [...]
By Hugh
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Posted in Birds, field reports, slideshow, sounds, travel
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Also tagged Australia, birding, Birds, birdwatching, Del Richards, endemics, Kingfisher Park, photos, sound, travel, tropical fieldwork
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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. [...]
By Hugh
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Posted in Big Day, Birds, conservation, field reports, travel
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Also tagged Anti-Petrels, Big Day, birding, Birds, birdwatching, Redheads, World Series of Birding
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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 [...]
By Hugh
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Posted in Big Day, Birds, conservation, field reports, News, slideshow, travel, video
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Also tagged Andrew Farnsworth, Big Day, birding, Birds, birdwatching, Chris Wood, conservation, endangered species, Jessie Barry, Marshall Iliff, photos, Texas, Tim Lenz
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January 23, 2012 – 8:03 pm
We’re in the midst of creating a free, online bird ID tool that can answer everyone’s first birding question, “What is that bird I saw?”—and we need your help to train the system. The project, called Merlin™, combines artificial intelligence with input from everyday birders and bird occurrence data from eBird. By using observations from birders [...]
By admin
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Posted in Birds, News, what you can do, you tell us
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Also tagged All About Birds, birding, Birds, birdwatching, identification, labs, Mark My Bird, Merlin, photos
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December 19, 2011 – 11:44 pm
All through our lives we draw inspiration from our elders, but there comes a point when we can turn around and start drawing inspiration from the young people coming up behind us. At a recent meeting of the Ohio Young Birders Club, we had a chance to hear from Rachael Butek, a recent high-school graduate [...]
By admin
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Posted in Birds, you tell us
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Also tagged birding, Birds, birdwatching, Blue Jay, fieldwork, Margaret Morse Nice, Rachael Butek, Song Sparrow, Sora, young birders
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It may not feel like the end of summer where you are, but in arctic Russia, where Gerrit Vyn has been watching endangered Spoon-billed Sandpipers, birds are already headed south. Here’s Gerrit’s description of the closing of the season, complete with a late, surprise encounter with a Spoon-billed Sandpiper and its newly hatched chicks: From [...]
By admin
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Posted in Birds, conservation, field reports, slideshow, travel
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Also tagged arctic, birding, Birds, birdwatching, endangered species, fieldwork, Gerrit Vyn, photos, Russia, shorebirds, Spoon-billed Sandpiper, travel, tundra
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Gerrit Vyn, a producer in our Multimedia program, has been spending the summer in remote eastern Russia filming one of the world’s most endangered birds, the Spoon-billed Sandpiper. In the last post he sent us, he described the plight of this species as well as his first sighting of a Spoon-billed Sandpiper. Here’s his next [...]
By admin
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Posted in Birds, conservation, field reports, slideshow, travel
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Also tagged birding, Birds, birdwatching, conservation, endangered species, fieldwork, Gerrit Vyn, photos, shorebirds, Spoon-billed Sandpiper, travel, Wildfowl Wetlands Trust
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In the arctic tundra of eastern Russia, a sparrow-sized shorebird with a one-of-a-kind beak is facing extinction—and a few scientists are doing all they can to save it. In recent years the Spoon-billed Sandpiper‘s population has dropped by a staggering 25 percent per year. Fewer than 200 pairs now remain. So this year, shorebird experts [...]
By admin
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Posted in Birds, conservation, field reports, slideshow, travel
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Also tagged arctic, birding, Birds, birdwatching, conservation, endangered species, fieldwork, Gerrit Vyn, Russia, shorebirds, Spoon-billed Sandpiper, travel
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