by Lanny McDowell on May 23, 2009
All three of us had pretty much given up on getting to the Jersey shore during spring migration this year. It looked like our non-profit, Global Conservation Alliance, was going to be a blowout for 2009, which , if that did not concern Red Knots and other declining stocks of migrant shorebirds, might not be such a big deal in itself; but wasting a year would have been a real shame in this case.
In order to have a chance of carrying out work on the beaches of Delaware Bay that might result in healthier (and heavier) Red Knots leaving on the last northern leg of their annual journey up to the Arctic, certain scientific requirements need to be met. If anyone wants to access the restricted beaches where the birds feed, or if anyone wants to physically disturb the surface of those beaches, they have to apply for and receive permits from the state powers that be to do that work. You can’t just show up and start digging up the sand.
Norm Famous, one of our number who is a wetlands ecologist by profession, put together GCA’s application to New Jersey Fish & Wildlife to conduct two experiments [click to continue...]
by Lanny McDowell on May 14, 2009
Hot off the presses, straight from the fields of Chilmark to your monitor screen. The phone and email thread went from Keith to Whiting to Manter to McDowell to refinding with Whiting this very elegant and rather casual drop-in.
No frills, just bird photographs:
It is the Vineyard, after all:
I have a list of folks who get an emailed notice from me with a URL to click on when I have posted a new blog. There are also times when I just send out photos to the list without bothering to blog about them or post them to a listserve. Not on the list? Want to be? Just contact me (below right) saying you want to be on the list or, better yet, subscribe to Feedburner above, in the right side column for automatic blog feeds to your email. Getting off the list is just as simple.
These images and Avian Art fine art prints are available for purchase. Contact me or View my gallery.
Birds are cool! Lanny
by Lanny McDowell on April 21, 2009
There is something about a connection between bird feeders and a big glass sliding door that occasionally provides me with a handson experience involving accident-prone avian navigators, meaning a bird hits the glass every once in a blue moon. If I happen to notice, I pick it up and encourage it to reexamine the idea of leaving the living zone and suggest resuming life on earth and just above it.
Birders who have a sense of trends in the birding world this winter are aware of the not ordinary numbers of pine siskins that have frequented our area, including Martha’s Vineyard, that have stayed late into the springtime and which may be setting up little homesteads locally where they are very infrequent nesters. A couple of these tiny speedsters have been sharing my niger feeders with the goldfinch regulars. Yesterday I found one prone on the groundlevel deck under the feeders [click to continue...]
by Lanny McDowell on April 4, 2009
There were feeding birds of some sort almost wherever I stopped the car…
This third segment of my Florida birding sojourn involves parts of Merritt Island, a refuge east of Titusville, south of Daytona and within eyesight of Cape Canaveral.
After driving up from Wakodahatchee, I got a place to stay, dumped some gear and made it out for a couple of late afternoon hours to Merritt Island and chose one of the more commonly used (and paved) driving tours you can take around the managed impoundments of the preserve. Black Point I think it’s called. I stopped in at the park headquarters and store to purchase the Bill Pranty guide to Florida birding. The next morning at sunrise there was a thin layer of ice on the back window of my rental and I was eager to drive back to the island to run the less-travelled coral and dirt loops along the southern side of the preserve. [click to continue...]
