Rusty Blackbird Blitz 2015
Rusty Blackbirds: Looking Forward, Looking Back Authors: Judith Scarl, International Coordinator, Rusty Blackbird Spring Migration Blitz (www.rustyblackbird.org) Scott Kruitbosch, Conservation & Outreach Coordinator, Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History (www.rtpi.org) Connecticut Coordinator, Rusty Blackbird Spring Migration Blitz A female Rusty Blackbird huddles on a Minnesota rooftop during a blizzard, fluffing herself into a ball to keep warm. A male flips leaves in a roadside ditch in Maryland, navigating partially frozen mud to hunt for spring’s first invertebrates. A...
Read MoreFind Winter Raptors in Chautauqua County
If you are one of our friends in Chautuauqa County please remember that we at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History are assisting the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation for a second season of wintering raptor surveys in 2014-2015 and need your continuing help! The primary focus of these surveys is to determine where Short-eared Owls (Asio flammeus), ‘endangered’ in New York, and Northern Harriers (Circus cyaneus), ‘threatened’ in New York, are spending the winter season to roost and feed. Western New York’s NYSDEC Region 9 is a large geographical area and...
Read MoreeBird the New Year
If you have yet to join our partners at eBird as a citizen scientist please do so in 2015! This free global database will forever store your bird sightings for you and your friends to enjoy and researchers and conservationists to use to protect and save the very species you are seeing. It is a mutually beneficial contribution to science and our feathered friends. Can you imagine how high Roger Tory Peterson’s life list would have been? He would have had hundreds of thousands of checklists from every corner of the Earth. Please make eBird one of your New Year’s Resolutions!
Read MoreCommon Redpoll Irruption Update
This is a companion blog entry to the Winter Bird Forecast by Audubon Connecticut and the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History. The first two forecasts were published recently: “Cloudy with a Chance of Snowys” and “Expect the Unexpected”. The third will be coming soon! The Common Redpoll (Acanthis flammea) was predicted to make a “moderate to good flight” this fall and winter due to “variably poor to average” birch seed crops in the boreal forest according to Ron Pittaway’s 2014-15 winter finch forecast. Nearly a month ago I started to notice more reports...
Read MoreSnowy Egret in December
I photographed this Snowy Egret last weekend in Stratford, Connecticut, as part of a Christmas Bird Count. It is one of only several recorded anywhere in the state in the last few decades during a CBC period. Climate change certainly has helped many new species pop up on these late autumn/early winter December days when they would normally be long gone to our south. I cannot blame the climate fully when accounting for this long-legged wader because while it appears to be perched at the edge of a coastal river or stream any waterbird would love, the water here is actually the outflow from a...
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