I am reading the The First Frontier by Scott Weidensaul, prolific nature writer and eminent ornithologist. A synopsis of the book reads: “Frontier: the word carries the inevitable scent of the West. But before Lewis and Clark, … it was the East that marked the frontier—the boundary between Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans- […]
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Just returned from East Texas a short while ago. Did some birdwatching of course but saw nothing exotic or unexpected, but I was struck by the difference in coloration in East Texas birds compared to those at my home in Northern California. The Blue Jays were a striking blue and black and white, making our
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I received another email yesterday about birds falling out of their nests. The emailer didn’t say where he lived but indicated that he was picking up several young birds that he assumed fell from their nests. Well, as I have said so many times in so many places, young birds rarely fall from their nests;
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I don’t always think about the environmental issues surrounding food purchases, mainly because it’s too complicated. When I buy a head of cabbage, I don’t think about where it is grown and how much diesel fuel it took to get to the grocery store or how much pesticide or fertilizer was used to grow it.
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You often hear the word “research” related to someone looking up new information – researching a new car, researching a term paper, researching a recipe, etc. Here is example of what real field research is in ornithology, based on one of my research subjects, Yellow-headed Blackbirds. At a field station site in the northeastern part
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The British naturalist James Fisher wrote that the first person recorded as feeding wild birds was the 6th-century monk Saint Serf of Fife who tamed a pigeon by feeding it, but the first indication of bird feeding in United States came from Henry David Thoreau who fed birds on Walden Pond in 1845. The first
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A little lesson on ratites. A ratite is any bird whose sternum (breastbone) is smooth, or raftlike, because it lacks a keel which is required for the anchorage of the main flight muscles, so these are flightless birds The ratites include some of the largest birds of all time, such as the moa and the
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The reasons birds sing is to declare or defend a territory and to attract a mate as part of courtship. They don’t sing because they are happy, although some philosopher and nature guru types might disaagree. Singing attracts attention, which is fine if you want to declare that you are the owner of a particular
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Ever hear the myth about not throwing rice at weddings because the birds that eat the grains will blow up when the rice expands? That would come as a real surprise to rice farmers who spend a lot of time and effort to keep birds from eating their crop. The other carbohydrate-related story is that
West of the Mississippi from Canada to Central America lives the Burrowing Owl. These small, brownish tan-colored owls with bright yellow eyes are the only raptors in North America that live underground in burrows they dig themselves or usurp from a ground squirrel or tortoise. In open habitats like grasslands and deserts, they eat rodents
