Any day now, American Tree Sparrows (Spizella arborea) will arrive to spend the winter. They share honors with Red-bellied Woodpeckers and Ring-necked Ducks in being comically misnamed. American Tree Sparrows (tree sparrows for short, although they should not be confused…
Birds
While we’re talking about swans… My mitten-state neighbor TroutGrrrl over at Science and Sarcasm posted on the Michigan DNR’s request for Trumpeter Swan sightings. She gave a little overview and history of the effort to “reintroduce” Trumpeter Swans to Michigan….
In a previous post, I wrote about the difficulty in using lethal control of White-tailed Deer because the public finds deer charismatic and engaging. Another problem species that has many fans in the general public, confounding management, is the Mute…
The New York Times reports that Richard Prum and Mark Robbins, two of the authors of a paper challenging the identification of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers on a video made by a team from Cornell, now feel the species does exist, based…
My constant companion in the garden is a male House Wren (Troglodytes aedon). Naturalist John Burroughs noted that “Probably we have no other familiar bird keyed up to the same degree of intensity as the house wren.” Indeed, as Burroughs…
The next forum for presentation of evidence on the IBWO will be at the meeting of the American Ornithologists’ Union in late August in Santa Barbara. Presenting papers at conferences of this type are a typical way for researchers to…
As noted in my original post, the New York Times Science section today confirmed the existence of the paper to be published questioning the sightings of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.
There have been recent rumors, on the Internet at the Arkansas and Tennessee birding listservs and at least one blog, regarding a paper by several researchers, including a well-known Ivory-billed Woodpecker (IBWO) expert, that will question the validity of the…
In part 1 of “invisible birds” I described one of the often-heard-but-rarely-seen species I’ve encountered during my breeding bird atlas work, the Yellow-billed Cuckoo. In keeping with the theme of yellow body parts, let me introduce the Yellow-breasted Chat (Icteria…
You rely a lot on your ears when doing bird surveys, especially in the summertime. Thick foliage obstructs views, females are tending nests or young, and unless they are singing from an exposed perch, males may be hard to locate…