Great egret and even greater egret (Photo credit: Gus Keri)

Three months into my biggish birding year, I’ve seen 128 species in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx. (I’ll get to Staten Island eventually, but the transportation logistics are daunting for someone without a car.) Within Brooklyn, I’ve ventured far beyond my well-trodden Prospect Park birding paths, to Coney Island (beach and creek), Floyd Bennett Field, Dead Horse Bay, Plumb Beach, the Salt Marsh Nature Center at Marine Park, Calvert Vaux Park, Highland Park, Green-Wood Cemetery, Canarsie Pier, Fresh Creek Park, Spring Creek Park, the strip of green between Hendrix Creek and the Gateway shopping center, the middle parking lot off the Shore Parkway, the back of the BJ’s Wholesale Club, and other hot spots I’m surely forgetting.

I’ve learned at lot about birds, and I’ve also learned a lot about buses. Continue reading →

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Folk wisdom celebrates the American robin as the harbinger of spring – but folk wisdom would benefit from pulling up its window shades, venturing outdoors, and paying closer attention to its surroundings. In fact, a significant robin population hangs around the north all winter. Adaptable and omnivorous, robins do well in urban and suburban landscapes. When the ground is frozen and snow-covered (which was true for approximately 5 days in Brooklyn this winter) and they can’t slurp up worms, they flock to all those decorative trees and bushes that bloom in the spring and remain attractively fruit-covered through the winter.

Many robins do head south for the winter, and will soon be converging on lawns in a frenzy of worm-eating before continuing farther north, but their return is a gradual process, not a clear-cut event.

Still, the appeal of designating some bird as the “harbinger of spring” endures.

Continue reading →

Woodcock are easier to flush than to spot. (Photo credit: National Park Service)

Here are some of the folk names bestowed on week 10’s Bird of the Week: mud bat, mud snipe, brush snipe, bog snipe, bogsucker, night partridge, big-eye, Labrador twister, sky dancer, pop-eyed shot dodger, woody and timberdoodle.

And here, with a hat tip to the City Birder, are some of the words used to describe a group of them: covey, cord, fall, flight, plump and rush. (“Fall” seems to be the most commonly used, although “plump” and “rush” strike me as the most evocative.) Continue reading →

Birding conditions this weekend were less than ideal.

Saturday’s blizzard pretty much precluded birding over the weekend, and a blizzard-induced food and TV coma (not to mention an aversion to ankle-deep slush and torrents of slush-melt) wiped out Monday as well. I did manage a loop of Prospect Park on Tuesday, binoculars in hand. I was hoping the winds might have blown in some new birds, and that the snow might have pushed them to the Breeze Hill feeders, but no such luck. It was the same familiar crowd of downy woodpeckers, white-breasted nuthatches, tufted titmice and goldfinches. Continue reading →