At the crack of dawn we’re walking the north bushes at Minsmere only to find a few Brambling and a Bullfinch for our effort. An Otter and four Red Deer showed as we walked the north wall and lot’s of Beardies pinged all around but despite the calm didn’t show that well. On the wader […]
Tag: Swift
Another Harns Marsh Preserve Fail
Having missed the Everglade Snail Kite at Harns Marsh Preserve last week, I was compelled to make a follow up trip on 26 July to attempt to observe the species. I was much more observant to find Apple Snail eggs as well. The clutch of eggs above I questimate to contain 500, well within the […]
Tree Swallows
Tree swallows spend most of their day flying in pursuit of small aerial insects, gliding swiftly through the air and twisting and turning artistically as their blue feathers flash in the sunlight. This haiku written in 1818 by Issa, one of Japan’s foremost poets, recognizes the aerial exploits of swallow-kind: Gliding through the cloudburst so […]
Review: Bird Sense: What it’s Like to be a Bird, by Tim Birkhead
Who’d be a bird anyway? Chickens have bi-focal vision: one eye for the close-up work of pecking seed; one for the fox on the horizon or the hawk in the sky. Peregrine falcons don’t swoop directly on prey – as the crow flies, to coin a phrase – but in a wide arc, using the […]
Summer time
Shachar Shalev (ourKiwi representative) has gone birding over the weekend and the following report shows that it is neverboringaround here. When there are few migrants, there is plenty of time to enjoy some of the region’s very interesting species… I Went out 5:30 in the morning not seriously expecting to find anything. I Started at […]
Long winter’s nap
Grab forty winks. Saw logs. For a species that’s habitually short on shut-eye, we humans sure have come up with myriad ways to talk about it. We also spend a lot of time and money studying sleep, or the lack thereof. Yet, in spite of decades of inquiry, researchers still don’t have a good fix […]