Wednesday, July 21, 2021

Of Nighthawks and Kind People

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Yesterday, I got an email from someone named Dan who was in the middle of a nighthawk emergency. I virtually never give out my home phone nu...
Sunday, July 18, 2021

Of Heat, Rain, and Particles in the Air

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I’m writing this on July 18, 2021, at my place in Duluth, Minnesota. There’s not a cloud in the sky, but the sky isn’t blue—more of a murky ...
Thursday, July 15, 2021

Winter Wren

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Of the thousands of bird songs in the world, if I were pressed to choose one favorite, I’m pretty sure it would be the Winter Wren's. Th...
Wednesday, July 14, 2021

Chukar!

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  In 2013, when I did my Big Year, I focused on species of conservation interest and other native species. I certainly didn’t close my eyes ...
Monday, July 12, 2021

Acadian Flycatchers at Rib Mountain State Park in Wausau, Wisconsin

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Acadian Flycatcher photo from Wikipedia, public domain.  I was in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, for the Fourth of July weekend, and got up early t...
Monday, June 28, 2021

If you read this For the Birds blog via email…

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 Email subscriptions for this blog have been managed by Google’s app Feedburner, but Google is ending the service in July (no date has been ...

The Lost Weekend

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When I wrote about the Black-billed Cuckoo last week, I started reminiscing about my lifer Black-billed Cuckoo and how, for one brief, shini...
Sunday, June 27, 2021

How do woodpeckers learn to slam their faces into trees?

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"Gepetto," a woodpecker I raised, figuring out that food grows in trees. Last week I got an email from a good friend of mine named...
Thursday, June 24, 2021

New Technology for Citizen Scientists

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This week I talked about good and bad news about birds. There’s also a bit of current news about flying squirrels which I read about in an a...
Monday, June 21, 2021

Cuckoos

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Long before I ever became a birder, the word cuckoo conjured two things: the Three Stooges and cuckoo clocks. I had no idea that the distinc...