Chenango Bird Club member Rick Wright has prepared a report on his April 2008 tour of Provence, "Chirps and Churches." To receive a copy by e-mail, leave a comment at any of the entries listed here: http://birdaz.com/blog/category/france-2008/ .
Woodchat Shrike, Pont du Gard, April 2008
The Chenango Bird Club invites YOU to enjoy the natural wonders of Chenango County and surrounding areas!
The Chenango Bird Club is featured in a new article celebrating our silver anniversary–read it here!
The Chenango Bird Club welcomes YOU to enjoy the natural wonders of Chenango County and surrounding areas!
This internet age has its pluses and its minuses for the birding world, but a project like the Cornell Lab’s ebird.org is only positive. Among the great new features is the ability to check out arrival and departure dates for any given geographic area, from a single birding site to a county to a state or region.
Wondering what we have to look forward to in the next few weeks? Check it out here.
The Chenango Bird Club invites YOU to enjoy the natural wonders of Chenango County and surrounding areas!
Bill Thompson III is well known in North American birding circles, both as the Editor of Bird Watcher’s Digest and as a fine field companion. He is also admirably dedicated, as is his wife, the artist and author Julie Zickefoose, to educating all Americans about their natural heritage. This newest volume in Houghton Mifflin’s venerable Peterson series provides the most impressive testimony yet to the couple’s devotion to education and conservation.
This slim and handsomely produced volume is sure to capture the attention of not just young birders but new birders and potential birders of any age. It covers some 200 species of common eastern birds, each account illustrated with 1 or 2 almost invariably good-quality photographs, supplemented with charming drawings by Julie Zickefoose showing a characteristic behavior of each species.
Given the book’s pocket format, the photos are necessarily small, but well chosen and attractive; a very few have suffered in the printing–no Gray Catbird is as green as the image on page 192 suggests. A first run-through finds very few apparent errors of identification: the White-crowned Sparrow on page 219 is a first-winter bird, not a juvenile; the green Scarlet Tanager on page 212 may well be a male rather than a female, while the Red-breasted Nuthatch on page 179 strikes me as more likely a female than a male; and the foreshortened female Picoides on page 150 is a Downy Woodpecker. None of these apparent slips affects the enormous usefulness of the book as a whole.
The species accounts are arranged in roughly taxonomic order, with some inexplicable departures that may make it harder for the new birder "graduating" to more complete guides. Each begins with a summary of field marks, both visual and behavioral, followed by a description of the most frequently heard vocalizations; I was delighted to find echoes of Peterson’s own guides in those sections. Miscellaneous, more "subjective" hints are provided under the rubric "Remember," while a fun fact or behavioral oddity is set apart in an oval headed "Wow!" The book’s design makes it easy for the author to pack a lot of information onto a small page–and easy for the reader to get to the important facts without delay. Habitat and range data are at the bottom of each species account, accompanied by clear maps; though the book is intended for use in the eastern half of the US and Canada, the maps depict each species’ entire nearctic range north of Mexico, making them useful even for traveling young birders.
As too few of us understand, the most important part of any field guide is the front matter, and The Young Birder’s Guide does an outstanding job of introducing its subject. Tips on techniques, ethical behavior, and identification criteria are carefully and simply presented. Any birder, young or old, who who takes these few pages to heart will be a better birder.
This is a great book, one highly recommended to young or beginning birders as a starter guide. And if you’re an experienced birder yourself, it is even more highly recommended: buy a few and pass them around to the children in your neighborhood and your life. Thanks, Bill; thanks, Julie!
The familiar Northern Cardinal is a relatively recent addition to our area’s avifauna.
Well into the middle of the twentieth century, this fiery feeder bird was a classic "southern species," but its range has moved north along with such other southerners as Red-bellied Woodpecker, Tufted Titmouse, and Northern Mockingbird, all of them now found in our area.
Click HERE for a recent article about our club and its activities!
New York is blessed with a great diversity of woodpecker species, including such fancy ones as Pileated and Black-backed Woodpeckers–the latter, a boreal forest specialist, will be one of the "target birds" on our May 29 field trip to Ferd’s Bog.
Our area’s most abundant woodpecker is also the smallest in North America, the Downy Woodpecker.
Here’s a fact to make you a success at your next cocktail party: Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers are named for the texture of their back feathers, which are finer and softer in Downy and coarser and stiffer in its larger cousin.
It’s a wonderful time of year to watch American Goldfinches, a widespread and lovely little finch that happens to be the emblem of the Chenango Bird Club.
The males are fast molting into their breeding plumage, showing odd patches of gray and black where in just a few weeks they’ll be as bright as a summer day.
Welcome to the new Chenango Bird Club blog!
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