There are pros and cons to being the coordinator for a big field project. The upside is that I get to spend a lot of time in the field myself. The downside is that it is often in places that…
Field work
Recently we returned to the urban prairie, with camera, to check up on the birds. Here’s the same neighborhood by City Airport shown in the previous post, from Google Maps
I’ve written before about doing bird survey work in the midst of some of Detroit’s most decaying neighborhoods. Early Sunday morning, husband and I set out to once again see what breeding birds we could find by driving routes through…
With the arrival of spring, I am again working on documenting breeding birds for our state breeding bird atlas. In my highly urban county, it seems reasonable that House Sparrow, European Starling, and Rock Pigeon are nesting in every quarter-township…
Nearly every field guide to trees that I’ve seen lists carvings on the trunks of American Beech trees (Fagus grandifolia) as a field mark. In my urban area, virtually every beech tree is inscribed with carved initials and declarations of…
The other day I posted on reporting neck-collared Canada Geese. Since then, I’ve come across another group of geese near home, of which ten had collars. Remarkably (or not, site fidelity is one thing we learn from these types of…
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…
As I mentioned, on Saturday I participated in the North American Migration Count, in which individual counties are scoured by teams of birders each year on the second Saturday in May to produce a “snapshot” of spring bird migration. I…
I wish I could talk more about birds in this space, but what with the snow (we ended up with “only” 4.5 inches) and cold, migration is pretty much at a standstill.