This year, 2010, has been officially declared to be the International Year for Biodiversity by the United Nations. After thousands of years of agriculture and development (including the resource boom following the industrial revolution), humans have pushed increasing numbers of species to the brink of extinction, and unfortunately, many past the brink. It is estimated [...]

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 [...]

We spent Thanksgiving in Florida visiting family and, as I am every time I visit there in fall or winter, I was astonished by the abundance of a Boreal dependent bird, the Palm Warbler. Not only could you find clouds of Palm Warblers in just about every piece of natural habitat at least in north-central Florida, [...]

In Maine, people don’t eat puffins any more.  Instead, thousands shell out good money for the chance to see one of the clown-faced birds from the rocking deck of a tour boat.  But there was a time when people took the puffins so systematically that by the early 1900’s many of their nesting colonies on [...]

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, [...]

Tuesday, October 27
Merrymeeting Audubon Presents
The Ivory-billed and the Boreal – Lessons and Legacies
Curtis Memorial Library,
Morrell Room, Brunswick, Maine 7:00 pm
Ornithologist Jeff Wells was a member of Cornell’s first top-secret search team that descended on the Arkansas swamps soon after the now-famous report of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in February, 2004. Dr. Wells’ search for the thought-to-be-extinct [...]

 
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, [...]

Along with comments left on my blog (read them here), I received some excellent e-mail and listserv feedback on the Yellowknife Yellow Warbler’s story I wrote about last week (click here to read the original story). I wanted to share these comments with you below. Thanks to all who took the time to comment and [...]

I was walking down the sidewalk in downtown Yellowknife in June when I heard this song (Audio)–a sweet “Please-please-please-ta-meetcha”. To a birder skilled in identifying eastern North American birds by their songs, this could normally mean only one thing… the presence of a male Chestnut-sided Warbler.

Chestnut-sided Warbler
Credit: John Kormendy
That’s what I would have thought if [...]