When I was a small child, long before The Waltons was on television, I used to pretend that I belonged to a happy little family that lived in my neighborhood. Every evening at bedtime, as it grew dark outside, I’d listen to them sharing their stories about their day’s adventures and saying good night to […]
Tag: house sparrow
Wreath of Sparrows
Wow — a bunch of European house sparrows, Passer domesticus, gathering grain. Are they in a wheat field? Nope. They are systematically taking apart an autumn wreath on the door of a Brooklyn brownstone. Looks a bit bare on the lower left, doesn’t it? A dozen more sparrows sat the on the steps below, waiting […]
Spanish Sparrow breeding and much more – Haradh
Whilst birding the area of Haradh recently where we concentrated on looking in the pivot irrigation fields we also saw a few other good birds around the filed edges and surrounding areas. The first good birds we saw were just outside the main entrance to the huge HADEC farm complex where a nesting colony of […]
Two vagrants still at Khawr Rori
I visited Khawr Rori on Tuesday afternoon for the first time in two weeks. There are two distinct birding areas and I went to both. One is the north west off-shoot of the main Khawr and which contains a large reed bed. It is approached from the main road. On arrival there I immediately came […]
Bird News!
There is big news in the bird world this week. For the last four years, hundreds of scientists in an international group called the Avian Phylogenomics Consortium have been sequencing bird genomes. They sequenced the DNA of 45 extant birds and a few crocodilians, and combined that with three previously sequenced bird genomes and then […]
Polar Vortex Winter Birds
It was a cold week in New York. As I sat writing at my desk by the window I saw the neighborhood birds in another light. One of the ways birds keep warm is by fluffing up their insulating feathers; they looked like puffballs all week. They have other ways to keep warm. Their feet […]
Rubʿ al-Khali; The Empty Quarter
At the start of this year I visited the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and was fortunate to spend a few days at Shaybah in the northeastern edge of this, the world’s largest desert. This region is classified as ‘hyper-arid’ with typical rainfall of less than 30mm per year and is one of the driest regions […]
Purple Martins Building a Nest in a Woodpecker Hole in a Dead Snag
The Purple Martin (Progne subis) is a well known and popular bird in eastern North America where it breeds almost entirely in human-made martin houses. Only a few records of natural nestings east of the Rocky Mountains have been reported during the twentieth century1. Here in western North America however, where Purple Martins are less […]