This past September I had the opportunity and pleasure to spend time with some of my Boreal colleagues (and I mean humans not birds) in Victoria, British Columbia.

To get there we took the Victoria Clipper, a high-speed ferry, from Seattle. Although it was tough to look for birds because of the speed of the boat and the [...]

This fall I have had the opportunity to visit two different Maine islands to look for Boreal migrant birds – Monhegan Island and Damariscove Island.  Interestingly, these two islands were probably the first ones in North America inhabited, at least seasonally, by Europeans who came for the vastly abundant fish that are sadly now largely [...]

I recently recieved these photos of a group of Bohemian Waxwings from my colleage Larry Innes of the Canadian Boreal Initiative. You might recall some photos I posted last month that he took of the Boreal in the fall over Labrador.
The most suprising thing about these photos is that he took them in his backyard, [...]

 
Common Nighthawk
Credit: Tom Vezo
Every year as the hot and humid days of summer ease into the dry warm days of early fall, the nighthawks appear.   In the eastern U.S. at that point in the evening when the setting sun lights up the landscape, there appears in the sky dozens sometimes even hundreds of large silent, [...]

Last week CBC news reported that surveys of the Bathurst migratory barren-ground caribou herd had dropped from 128,000 in 2006 to 31,900 this year. The herd now has to cross an ice road on its migratory path and there are a number of mines within its traditional range. Caribou are known to be very sensitive [...]

Late last month the government of Peru announced that it would be protecting over 1 million acres of tropical Amazonian rainforest near the Brazilian border. The newly-formed Matsés National Reserve is named after the native Matsés people, who were only first contacted by the outside world in 1969. They have continued to live largely as [...]

 
Doppler Radar
Taken from the NOAA Public Image Library
For most birders a pair of binoculars or a scope can be the best way to spot birds, if not just the naked eye. But there’s another very interesting way to see them from a different perspective: radar.
Most migratory birds do their travelling at night. Calmer atmospheric conditions, [...]

Adult Whooping Crane
Credit: Bates Littlehales
It appears to be bad year for the last natural migrating flock of whooping cranes.
For those of you unfamiliar the whooping crane, there are 3 total migratory flocks, but two of them require human assistance to guide them in their migration – this wild flock flies annually between Wood Buffalo National [...]

Map of St. Croix, Virgin Islands
Location “A” is Great Pond – click for larger map
Here’s another update on Hope, the Whimbrel with the satellite tracker I blogged about in my previous post –
After an exhausting 100 hour, 3,500 mile flight over the open ocean, she has temporarily settled in at Great Pond, a listed Bird [...]

Whimbrel
Credit: James H. Robinson
Recently I received a note about a Whimbrel named Hope.
Hope is equipped with a satellite transmitter and is on a remarkable journey. She was fitted with a transmitter on Virginia’s Delmarva Peninsula in the spring. From there she flew north and spent the summer in or near the Boreal regions of Quebec, Ontario and [...]