South Texas, as always was SO much fun. Even if you choose to do some casual birding you can still hit all the specialties. I took a mini break down there over the weekend to hang with a girlfriend and since we had both been there, each day we slept in and let our bodies [ Read More ]
I almost peed my pants watching this video this morning. It is HIGHlarious! Stick with it, things get interesting at the 20 second mark and end up amazing at the end. Herons are awesome and kudos to my buddy Clay Taylor for an excellent capture of this behavior. And that’s a young heron finessing its [ Read More ]
Okay, here is someone using YouTube for the powers of good. They digivideoed a Dr. Seuss looking bird called a spoon-billed sandpiper doing its mating display. Incidentally, this was done via digiscoping, the bird was filmed using a Swarovski AT80 HD scope and a Canon EOS 500D–and it was handheld. Awesome video of an awesome [ Read More ]
One of the things we get to do at my park as a ranger is “roving.” Essentially, we pick a part of the park and rove around to answer questions or interpret wildlife. It reminds me a bit of doing improv work– you rely on the audience to guide where the sketch will go. In [ Read More ]
I headed out yesterday with Lorraine to do some serious wildflower walking (what the heck has happened to me, I’m interested in wildflowers now) near our beeyard. Before Lorraine arrived, I headed down in the woods to see if I could figure out what birds were setting up territory where–I like to get know the [ Read More ]
This is the type of morning a birder lives for. The shift in bird species from migration is palpable. Everywhere I walk I hear an old friend from summers past who are newly arrived. Overhead I have a small and steady stream of northward broad-winged hawks (which really has me excited for my digiscoping workshop [ Read More ]
It’s an oddly exciting day at the National Park I work for (Mississippi National River and Recreation Area)–the river is flooding and it’s odd to be excited by the flood and watch what the water will do. Since our visitor center is based in the Science Museum lobbby, we’re right on the Mississippi River in [ Read More ]
This week has been fun for watching returning migrants. One morning there’s the usual winter birds and then the next morning you hear a robin on territory (had our first one singing outside of the apartment today). I went to Carver Park this morning before work and a flock of red-winged blackbird males were lurking [ Read More ]
There are some birds who are celebrities to me–one would be the potoo. I was into birds as a kid, I had a ton of books and I remember sitting in my room looking at bird books and there were certain birds that were iconic that I hoped to see one day when I got [ Read More ]
