I always enjoy studying Herring Gulls, just looking at variation and trying to categorize the birds into age, sex, and regional groups. Last winter I was watching the gull flock at Turners Falls, MA, paying special attention to when the adults molted into breeding plumage. My thought was that the early-molting birds would be from …
The head shape of Herring Gulls seems to change seasonally Read More »
I’m very excited to be able to announce the long-awaited launch of a new app – Song Sleuth – created by Wildlife Acoustics, Inc. It’s a bird song identification assistant, just a couple of taps and your iPhone will suggest what species of bird is singing. It covers nearly 200 of the most frequently heard …
Song Sleuth main page Song Sleuth is a new bird song identification app, created by Wildlife Acoustics. Watch the detailed walk-through video You can find the app now in the iTunes app store. The Song Sleuth app can be very accurate, but it is also easily confused by extraneous sounds, and that can lead …
In early December 2016, David Pierce of Wildwood, Missouri, noticed an odd woodpecker at his feeder and took some really nice photos. I always marvel at the path these kinds of stories follow: Dave had to be looking carefully enough to notice the slight differences in this bird, make the effort to take some good …
I wrote about white Great Blue Herons in 2007, and thanks to a recent comment there by David Ammerman alerting me to a whitish Great Blue Heron chick in a nest, I made the short trip to Bolton, MA yesterday (July 7, 2016). It was not hard to find the nest, and I was able …
This beautiful and striking bird is a partial albino Northern Flicker, photographed in Massachusetts in Sep 2015 by Michael Beagan. A second, very similar, bird had been photographed nearby in 2012 by John Harrison, and – besides being very attractive birds – the two provide a good opportunity to discuss some of the details …
If you keep up on the news of subspecies, you will have heard of Scopoli’s Shearwater. It’s the Mediterranean breeding population of Cory’s Shearwater, overlapping very little with populations nesting on Atlantic Islands, and many authorities have split the two into separate species recently. Both populations occur off the Atlantic coast of North America, although Cory’s in …
This image is for sale in an auction here Identification of downy young sandpipers can be a real challenge in the arctic, where multiple species occur, but I saw and sketched this one on Great Gull Island, New York, last weekend. At that latitude only a few other species are possible, and most are easily eliminated …
The artwork shown here is available for sale, click here to view current auctions Birds are busy this time of year, trying to raise a family (or two or three) and then get ready for fall migration, and it all goes so fast. The young birds are full-grown just a few weeks after they hatch, …
On my usual birding circuit on the morning of 26 May 2015, along the Assabet River in Concord, MA, I heard the distinctive song of a Mourning Warbler. This species is a rare but regular migrant through the area, so finding one is a highlight any day, and I set to work to try to …