Winter Wren
Credit: Tom Vezo
(David posting again on behalf of Jeff) I was waiting for the bus today outside my neighborhood coffee shop in Seattle when something caught my eye. Typically arriving a few minutes early to ensure I don’t miss my bus, I usually scan the headlines on the front pages of USA Today and [...]

(This is David again posting on behalf of Jeff, who is out for a few weeks…)
You may have already seen this already, but there’s an awesome new bird networking site called We Love Birds, which was a joint collaboration between the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
If you haven’t checked it [...]

Birding in Quebec
Credit: Garth Lenz
I thought I’d send a reminder to you all that the 13th annual Great Backyard Bird Count starts tomorrow (the 12th) and goes to the 15th. It’s a great opportunity for local birders to contribute their sightings to a larger database where researchers and experts can better understand bird behavior and [...]

 
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 [...]