Birding

We love to travel to find new birds and participate in a lot of bird counts. We also created a Guide to Birding Field Guides and host a collection of over 300 birding links from all over the globe.

Conservation

While our main focus continues to be birds, we promote other areas of conservation as well. Conserving land not only benefits wildlife, but is hugely beneficial to people as well.

Outdoors

We love all sorts of outdoor activities, especially hiking and spend a lot of time outside with dogs and horses. We are working to produce more articles on all sorts of outdoor fun!

Photography

Every week we bring you Bird Photography Weekly. We periodically talk about our adventures in digiscoping. Feel free to browse our photo lifelist.

Bird Photography Weekly #17

December 22, 2008
Article in: Bird Photography Weekly

Bird Photography Weekly #16 tallied 17 species with one double-up. Another fun week!!

Last Week’s list:

  1. Crested Screamer
  2. Brown Pelican
  3. Steller’s Jay
  4. Scarlet Macaw
  5. Blue-grey Gnatcatcher
  6. Hamerkop
  7. Chipping Sparrow
  8. Anna’s Hummingbird
  9. Opsrey
  10. Red-crested Pochard
  11. American Bittern
  12. Golden-crowned Kinglet
  13. Eastern Screech-Owl
  14. Royal Tern
  15. Rock Dove/Pigeon
  16. Dark-eyed Junco (Oregon race) | Dark-eyed Junco [They are everywhere!!]
  17. Mexican Jay

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South Padre Island Birding and Nature Center Logo Contest Submission

December 21, 2008
Article in: Updates

Thanks to Birdchick and her post about the logo contest for South Padre Island Birding and Nature Center, we decided to test out Adobe Illustrator CS3 and see if we could make a decent logo from scratch.

We started out with a drawing done by Jennie (Veery) of a Royal Tern.
Royal Tern Drawing

We scanned the image and tried a few different things. We used an auto-tracing feature which was cool but not workable enough. Next, we fiddled with various ways of outlining the drawing, coloring, etc. After finding some cool looking brush strokes and adding text, we got our finished product.

So the logo has been submitted and we hope to win. But regardless we are thrilled with how this worked – taking a drawing and turning it into a usable image of a bird.

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Phriday Photo – Snowy Yellowstone

December 19, 2008
Article in: Photography

In honor of the big snowstorm we are having today, here is a photo from a few years back at Yellowstone National Park. However, this was taken in MAY.

Canada Goose and Elk at Yellowstone National Park

Yellowstone National Park

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Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s new BirdSleuth Curriculum

December 19, 2008
Article in: Bird Conservation

BirdSleuth (formerly Classroom BirdWatch) was funded with a grant from the National Science Foundation. It is an additional science curriculum with a goal to get kids outside to study the local environment and learn to ask and answer questions. They also learn to become actual citizen scientists. Now they have revised one of their modules to include even more lessons and resources:

December 19,2008

Revised teaching unit is released from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Ithaca, NY–Why is that crow chasing a hawk? Do birds fly away from noisy places? How long will an American Robin spend pulling a worm from the ground? The BirdSleuth curriculum from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is all about tapping into a child’s natural curiosity to answer scientific questions in a fun way. The just-released revision of the Exploring Bird Behavior module offers educators even more lessons, posters, and multimedia resources. The new student toolkit comes with two important tools for collecting behavioral information about birds: a BirdSleuth stopwatch and tally counter.
“Kids love to work with gadgets,” says Birdsleuth project leader Jennifer Fee. “Give them a stopwatch or put them in a lab coat, and they transform into little scientists. And then it becomes easier to explain tricky concepts, such as the difference between a behavioral event and a behavioral state.” (An event can be counted; a state can be timed.)
This module also comes with a DVD showing bird behaviors most students have never seen, including stunning slow-motion video of the exotic courtship dance of the Greater Sage-Grouse. A 32-page teacher’s guide includes step-by-step instructions for completing all six lessons, or “investigations.”
The Exploring Bird Behavior module, like the others in the BirdSleuth series, engages students in inquiry by building lessons and activities around citizen-science projects from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. This module uses the Crows Count project. Students count crows and their relatives (ravens, magpies, and jays), observe their behaviors, and report what they see to the Cornell Lab where scientists are studying the dynamics of group behavior in crows.
“BirdSleuth gets kids interested in nature, gets them outside, and teaches them to think more critically,” says Fee. “They ask questions, collect data, look for patterns and evidence, test ideas, make conclusions, and share results.”
To learn more about the new Exploring Bird Behavior module and about the entire BirdSleuth curriculum, visit www.birds.cornell.edu/BirdSleuth.edu. The staff is happy to answer any questions about how to make Birdsleuth a welcome supplement to your existing science curriculum.

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Review of Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Nevada

December 18, 2008
Article in: Book Reviews

Cover Illustrations by David Allen Sibley

Nevada is a fast-growing state that can boast more public land than any other state with the exception of Alaska. It is much richer and more diverse than many realize. The founder of The Great Basin Bird Observatory, Graham Chisholm created the Nevada Breeding Bird Atlas project with goal to learn about bird populations in Nevada which will help with future environmental projects to continue preserving these species.

Atlas Of The Breeding Birds Of Nevada collected field data from 1997 to 2000 and uses digital spatial modeling for some of the survey. The size of the study site is so great that they had to use statistical modeling and make some assumptions, which increased the likelihood of errors. Nevada has many rugged unattainable areas in addition to large areas of inaccessible military land that makes a full survey very difficult.

The forwards to Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Nevada are written by Senator Harry Reid and C. Richard Tracy. Ted Floyd, editor of Birding magazine, was the project coordinator and Ray Nelson was the Atlas illustrator. Instead of photos, illustrations for each bird are used and each has a unique pose or habitat differing from what is commonly found in field guides.

One of the very cool illustrations: Ladder-backed Woodpecker

The Atlas includes a chapter on the habitats of Nevada with photos and descriptions of each. Details on the methods to obtain data and the overview of the results are interesting and each species has its own page that includes information on its distribution, conservation status, and a detailed map of its location with probability of occurrence. There are 275 species included in this detailed book and near the end are 28 species that either previously occurred in Nevada or have not yet been officially confirmed.

Inside view of the Atlas: Violet-green Swallow

The acknowledgments and resources take up quite a few pages and it is hard to imagine the phenomenal amount of work that was put into this atlas. Any bird lover would be encouraged to possess this atlas and it could be used as a model to any other state or area yet without one.

Rating: 10 of 10 feathers

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Review of Shorebirds: Beautiful Beachcombers

December 17, 2008
Article in: Book Reviews

Any birder who has spent any time at all at a mud flat or coastal area knows how wonderful it is to observe the antics of shorebirds. Despite lacking boisterous colors, shorebirds-in their shades of mostly brown, rufous, white, gray, and black-are some of the most eye-catching and interesting birds.

Shorebirds: Beautiful Beachcombers is an informative and appealing work by Arthur Morris. Known as one of the nation’s top bird photographers, Arthur Morris is one of our all-time favorites. His photographs, found throughout the book, hold a special quality to them: they are artistic without being over-the-top “artsy”.

The text that accompanies the jaw-dropping photos is well worth reading. While this book wouldn’t qualify as a “field guide” it has a lot of wonderful tips about how to identify and better enjoy shorebirds. Plumages, aging, migration, and behavior are all discussed as well as a small section on shorebird conservation. There are individual species accounts for 50 species of shorebirds found in North America.

Shorebirds: Beautiful Beachcombers does a perfect job showing just how interesting and inspiring shorebirds are, and thus is a good tool for grabbing new interest in birds in general. No matter your shorebirding experience, this book provides a ton of useful information (especially to those like us who are still learning).

Rating: 9.5 of 10 feathers

Stackpole Books
February 2003
160pp
$19.95

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C-Notes #9 – Restoring the Everglades and South American Grasslands

December 16, 2008
Article in: Bird Conservation

Everglade Restoration – The state of Florida will be buying 187,000 acres of the Everglades owned by the U.S. Sugar Corporation. The Everglades is a World Heritage Site, an International Biosphere Reserve and an American Bird Conservancy-designated Globally Important Bird Area.

“Governor [Charlie] Crist deserves an enormous amount of praise…for this announcement,” said Kirk Fordham, CEO of the Everglades Foundation. “Today, he cemented his legacy as the Everglades Governor…a policy maker who saved an ecosystem for generations to come.”

Saving South American Grasslands- A conservation initiative was launched to help protect the Pampas, South American Grasslands, an area important for birds including Upland Sandpiper, Swainson’s Hawk, Buff-breasted Sandpiper and Bobolink. Conservation organizations from four South American countries have teamed up to protect the Southern Cone of the continent; Aves Argentinas, Aves Uraguay, SAVE Brazil and Guyra Paraguay. For more information on this national conservation effort (which also includes the National Audubon Society, the U.S. Forest Service, the Northern Prairies Action Plan and Pronatura) see Alliance for the Grasslands

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Bird Photography Weekly #16

December 15, 2008
Article in: Bird Photography Weekly

Bird Photography Weekly #15 had 17 species submitted bringing the total number for 15 weeks to: 172 species!! Of these there were 35 species represented in more than one week.

Last Week’s list:

  1. Lapwing
  2. White-tailed Kite
  3. Sooty Oystercatcher
  4. Tufted Titmouse
  5. Snowy Egret
  6. Purple Gallinule
  7. Great Egret
  8. Mourning Dove
  9. Northern Shoveler
  10. Bobolink
  11. Whooping Crane
  12. American Kestrel
  13. Common Goldeneye
  14. European Starling
  15. White Stork
  16. Belted Kingfisher
  17. Lapland Longspur

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