Innehållsförteckning för January/February 2022 från BirdWatching

GEAR Brian Moscatello, an expert in birding optics from the Cape May Bird Observatory, offers tips for binocular shoppers and recommendations for the best models at numerous price points. CONSERVATION The team from John Oliver’s weekly show on HBO commissioned five spoof paintings for the most recent federal Duck Stamp contest. They auctioned off the originals in October, raising $100,000 for conservation. Follow, like, and share! FACEBOOK: BirdWatchingMagazine INSTAGRAM: @birdwatchingmagazine TWITTER: @BirdWatchDaily FLICKR: BirdWatching group photo pool…

ON OCTOBER 24, our magazine’s founder, Eldon Greij, passed away quietly at a Wisconsin hospital. He broke his hip in a fall a few weeks earlier and then had a series of complications that left him in declining health. He was 84 years old. In 1980, at the age of 43, when he was a professor of biology at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, he had the sudden idea to launch a magazine for birdwatchers, and that eventually became Birder’s World (and then BirdWatching in 2011). The first issue was published in 1987, and Eldon ran the publication for 11 years from an office down the street from the college, where he remained on the faculty part-time. After selling the magazine to a Wisconsin-based publisher in the late 1990s, Eldon…

NO DOUBT, YOU have heard of the birding institution known as the Big Sit (aka Big Stay), where observers indenture themselves for a 24-hour period, counting only the birds seen while seated within a 17-foot circle. The birds can be anywhere, but the observer must remain within the circle. Why 17 feet? I dunno. But this diameter may have been fixed by the same Roman bureaucrat who established the width of railroad tracks long before the invention of the steam engine. Anyway, I do a mini-Big Sit every morning. It lasts only as long as it takes to consume one or two mugs of coffee, but it gets every day off to a good start. No two mornings are alike. Ma Nature deals me a new hand every a.m. In…

As with several other owl species, Short-eared Owls tend to attract lots of birders and photographers, and unfortunately, poor behavior toward the birds sometimes follows. A few years ago at the Washington County Grasslands, a surge in complaints about people following owls into fields caused the New York Department of Environmental Conservation to issue warnings. “DEC strongly encourages all visitors to the Washington County Grasslands Wildlife Management Area to safely observe birds and other wildlife from a distance and to not approach roosting raptors,” the agency said a few winters ago. “Trespassing and harassing wildlife is illegal, is harmful to the birds, and DEC environmental conservation police officers and forest rangers will be patrolling the area and enforcing these laws.” DEC closes part of the Grasslands area each winter to…

Savannah Sparrow, adult June in Kidder County, North Dakota WHEN I WAS learning to identify birds, I spent hours puzzling over sparrows that, in retrospect, were probably all of the same species. It was frustrating, but later I turned the experience into ID advice. If you see a compact, streaky sparrow in an open habitat, start by asking yourself: Is this a Savannah Sparrow? Often, the answer will be: Yes. The Savannah Sparrow is one of the most widespread native sparrows in North America. Its breeding range extends from the shores of the Arctic Ocean in northern Alaska and Canada south to highlands of southern Mexico, with an isolated population in high mountains of Guatemala. In winter, it leaves northern areas, but it still can be found coast to coast…

Wednesday morning. I lay in bed with a 103-degree temperature, a casualty no doubt of my trans-Atlantic journey a few days before. I hadn’t had the flu for 15 years and confess I was feeling mighty sorry for myself. Little did I know that at that very moment, COVID-19 was quietly preparing to sweep the globe in the worst pandemic in a century. Still blissfully ignorant, however, I languished in my room wondering if I would have to alter our travel plans when my 16-year-old son, Braden, burst into the room. “Dad!” he said. “I know you feel bad, but you have to come! Syrian Woodpeckers — right down the street!” “Uuuungh,” I groaned, but what choice did I have? I raised myself to a sitting position, tugged on my…

Steam swirls up off the Yukon River like it’s on the verge of boiling. That’s an illusion. It’s early January and almost 40 below. The sun crests above the mountains for only about five hours each day. Shards of frost coat the tree branches, and shelves of ice lean out over the river. A charcoal-colored songbird appears on the edge of the ice. It bobs up and down for a moment, then plunges headfirst into the frigid water. It’s an American Dipper, one of the handful of hardy birds that overwinters in Canada’s Yukon Territory, next to Alaska. After six or seven seconds, the dipper pops back to the surface. It paddles along, then springs from the water and back onto the ice. It swallows the invertebrate it retrieved from…

SORTING OUT THE sparrows is a perennial challenge, and while there are plenty of helpful resources available, one species — House Sparrow — often goes unmentioned. Native to Eurasia, the species is naturalized and common around human settlements worldwide thanks to an adaptation about 11,000 years ago that allowed it to digest the complex carbohydrates in grains grown by humans. House Sparrows essentially evolved along with human agriculture. The species is not closely related to the native sparrows of North America. Our sparrows were named by early naturalists because of their superficial similarity to the sparrows of Britain, but they are now classified in a separate family (New World Sparrows) and show many fundamental differences from the Old World Sparrows like House Sparrow. House Sparrow is most common in urban…

BIRDS IN FLIGHT PHOTO CONTEST Last summer, we conducted our first photo contest focused solely on images of flying birds, the 2021 Birds in Flight contest. We received more than 825 entries — images of Bald Eagles, Ospreys, Blue Jays, Burrowing Owls, hummingbirds, among others — from hundreds of photographers. Thanks to everyone who entered! The selection of images was outstanding, as all our previous contests have been. The judges had a challenging task. We announced the finalists, honorable mention images, and the winners on our website in late October and early November, and we’re presenting the top three winners on the following pages. FIRST PLACE Stan Bysshe SANDHILL CRANE Stan Bysshe of Marshall, Virginia, won first place with this amazing photo of a Sandhill Crane in which the head…

New tanager species described from Bolivia, Peru A newly described songbird in South America — first spotted by ornithologists guiding a birding tour in Peru more than 20 years ago — represents not just a new species but also a new genus. A team of scientists led by researchers from the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science and a natural history museum in Bolivia described the bird, which they named Inti Tanager (Heliothraupis oneilli), in a recent paper in the journal Ornithology. Daniel Lane, an LSU Museum research associate, and Gary H. Rosenberg, a tour leader from Arizona who has a master’s in ornithology from LSU, first saw the bird in October 2000. Lane heard the bird’s song, thinking it was likely a more common species, but when he…

IN OCTOBER 2020, I set a trail-cam on a tray feeder in hopes of documenting a flying squirrel, but instead, I recorded a Great Horned Owl using the feeder as a hunting perch. Without the cam, I wouldn’t have suspected it had visited. The more natural habitat in your neighborhood, the more likely owls will visit. Big old trees provide safe roosting and sometimes nesting spots, and native trees, shrubs, and other plants produce seeds and foster insects that feed the small animals owls prey upon. Most backyard owls go undetected, but screech-owls can be easy to notice in nest boxes — they spend part of most days peeking out. (Plans from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology are at https://nestwatch.org/learn/all-about-birdhouses.) Screech-owls are rare where I live, in Duluth, Minnesota, but…

I cross oceans, from the Northumberland Coast of England to North Africa, then farther south and east to Australia. Some of my kind depart western North America and traverse the Pacific, then head south, the destination being the Weddell Sea, in the Antarctic. Following the sun, we fly from Arctic summer to Antarctic summer, completing a 44,000- to 56,000-mile round trip each year and experiencing more daylight than any other bird species on the planet. The architecture of my aerodynamic form was conceived by nature. My long, slender, muscular frame allows me to log 300-mile days routinely. I am an anomaly in my genus, shattering all distance records for migratory flight. We are called the Great Wanderers, but this is not a journey of choice. It is the quest for…

BY ITS VERY nature, a bird is a work of art, right? Surely all we need to do to wow people is portray that avian beauty in the standard way: unobscured, with a clean background, evenly illuminated from the front, and filling the frame. What’s wrong with that? Nothing, except that the world is already swamped with great bird portraits, thanks to today’s amazing cameras and the ease of sharing on the internet. How can you create something unique and attention-grabbing? The answer is to do things differently. Here are a few ideas. 1. Shoot toward the sun for drama A surefire way to create unique and dramatic bird images is to shoot toward the sun so that your subject is illuminated from behind. Termed “backlighting,” this technique is ideal…

Snowy Owls garner lots of attention from birders when they come south in the winter, but far fewer of us get a chance to encounter them in summer. In July 2018, award-winning photographer Melissa Groo had the opportunity to observe a nest in Utqiagvik, Alaska, the northernmost point in the United States. In this portrait, a female Snowy keeps her gray nestling warm in their nest on the grassy tundra. “Though it was July, it was very cold there on the arctic tundra, and I spent hours every day in a pop-up blind hoping for a view of the chicks,” Groo says. Scientist Denver Holt of the Owl Research Institute has studied nesting Snowy Owls for the last 30 years. He placed the blind that Groo used weeks before she…