Short-billed Dowitcher
Credit: Jeff Nadler
A few nights ago after putting the car in the garage, I stepped outside to the sounds of ray guns overhead. Those ray gun sounds were the calls of a flock of migrating Short-billed Dowitchers flying north from a Maine coast saltmarsh where they had probably spent the day feeding on small [...]

OK, I admit that I didn’t make it for the full 24 hours of our Boothbay (Maine) peninsula birding marathon on Saturday. But we did start at midnight and bird until about 9 PM for a significant 21 hours all within an area that would fit into a rectangle about 8 miles long and 4 [...]

A new report out today from the International Boreal Conservation Campaign and the Canadian Boreal Initiative demonstrates vividly why Canada’s 150 year-old mining laws are putting birds, wildlife, and people at risk. It’s hard to believe but virtually all of the Boreal is still open for anyone to stake a mineral claim and arrive at [...]

They only made one mistake. After a winter spent perhaps in a wetland in
Texas or Florida or Missouri; after a journey of thousands of aching miles; after surviving thunderstorms and blazing sun and blinding snowstorms in their struggle to find the clear shrub-lined pond that they imagined raising their young.
After all that, 750 exhausted birds [...]