Birds

Belle Isle Park, Detroit New York’s Central Park was not the only magnificent city park designed by Fredrick Law Olmstead. The largest city-owned park in America, Detroit’s own Belle Isle, was also an Olmstead work. Located in the Detroit River…

Legions of tiny black and white birds are moving south from Canada in droves. Consider these reports (keyed on the map): Banders in Toronto, at Tommy Thompson Park along Lake Ontario (A on map), band over 200 of these birds…

Does Hurricane Wilma signal the end of the Cozumel Thrasher?

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…

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…