Taiga Fox Sparrow
Credit: Andrew Aldrich
I recently posted on the Maine Birding listserv a simple request for a Fox Sparrow photo I needed for a project and was amazed by the results. I received photos from 9 people from a variety of places around Maine. Rather than letting these offers go unused I thought I [...]

I just came across some relatively new papers I had not seen that shared some eye-opening new facts about migratory connectivity in some northern birds. A paper published in 2012 describes the results of a project that placed geo-locators (small devices that record day length information which can be used to calculate geographic location) on [...]

Evening Grosbeak
Credit: D. Faucher, Ducks Unlimited
Every other year on average, boreal breeding finches and sometimes other birds as well, push further south in late fall and winter into parts of the United States. This year is already shaping up to be a major “invasion” year for these birds in the eastern U.S. with some [...]

The following is a guest post by Christian Artuso of Bird Studies Canada. Over the past few years he has been helping to organize and develop the Manitoba Breeding Bird Atlas, a comprehensive outlook of which birds breed in Manitoba and where. As Christian mentions below Manitoba has an extremely low population density, making the extraordinary volunteering [...]

A few mornings ago I stepped out the front door of my house in Maine. It was 5 AM and still dark outside but the sky was echoing with the flight calls of migratory birds. Rainy, foggy weather was causing migrating birds arriving from further north to come down to land as their neared the [...]

Caspian Terns in Maine
Credit: Mike Fahay
A comical looking bird the size of a small gull with a black cap, gray back and a bill that looked like a carrot was spotted stopping off on a beach in mid-coast Maine last week on its way south. Staying close by its side and making regularly whistley-squawky [...]

In our last post we outlined the success of the terrific Whimbrel satellite tracking program led by the Center for Conservation Biology and partners. It has led to all sorts of new information about Whimbrels and their migration. Of particular note was the recent discovery of a new migration route being used by several Whimbrels [...]

Until recently, Whimbrels have proved to be somewhat of a mystery to scientists. Noting a decline among the long-distant migrants, which typically breed up in arctic Canada, scientists set out to better understand the everyday life of a Whimbrel and what might be leading to their decline.

Whimbrel
Credit: James Robinson
Part of the difficulty in understanding [...]

American Black Duck.
Credit: Jeff Nadler
Yesterday several prominent conservation and wildlife organizations published The State of Canada’s Birds, a comprehensive assessment of population fluxes among birds within each major ecoregion of Canada. Released by the North American Bird Conservation Initiative (NABCI-Canada), under the leadership of Environment Canada, Bird Studies Canada, Ducks Unlimited Canada, Nature Canada, [...]

Summer is just around the corner. The majority of migrants have already swung through our neighborhoods headed north for the summer to breed. But where exactly do they go after flying through our backyards each spring?
For many North American birds–as many as 300 species in fact–they are going to the boreal forest. Literally billions of migrants [...]