Category: Birding
-
Birding in Baja
I spent the last week on vacation in Cabo San Lucas, Baja California Sur, Mexico. This wasn’t one of my usual birding trips. As my first real vacation since Belize and Guatemala in 2012, I really needed a chance to relax and unwind. We were invited guests of one of my wife’s insurance associates at…
-
Adventures in Central America, Part 5
Note: The following is a reproduction of the field journal I kept from my first summer in Costa Rica in June and July 1996, when I was a student at La Suerte Biological Station. This was the first time I’d ever left the United States for a country other than Canada. I’ve typed out the…
-
Adventures in Central America, Part 4
Note: The following is a reproduction of the field journal I kept from my first summer in Costa Rica in June and July 1996, when I was a student at La Suerte Biological Station. This was the first time I’d ever left the United States for a country other than Canada. I’ve typed out the…
-
Adventures in Central America, Part 3
Note: The following is a reproduction of the field journal I kept from my first summer in Costa Rica in June and July 1996, when I was a student at La Suerte Biological Station. This was the first time I’d ever left the United States for a country other than Canada. I’ve typed out the…
-
Adventures in Central America (Part 2)
Note: The following is a reproduction of the field journal I kept from my first summer in Costa Rica in June and July 1996, when I was a student at La Suerte Biological Station. This was the first time I’d ever left the United States for a country other than Canada. I’ve typed out the…
-
Adventures in Central America (Part 1)
Note: The following is a reproduction of the field journal I kept from my first summer in Costa Rica in June and July 1996, when I was a student at La Suerte Biological Station. This was the first time I’d ever left the United States for a country other than Canada. I’ve typed out the…
-
Dancing for Sex in the Rainforest
Though advertising for sex often results in a jail sentence in most areas of the United States, these advertisements are highly conspicuous and visible daily in the animal world. You may not often think about it, but sexual innuendo is all around you. If you are one of many who glance up from the morning…
-
Antbird Aggregations: The Dynamics of Foraging Formicarids
Note: The following is a write-up I did for the February 1998 Song Sparrow, a publication of Columbus Audubon, as part of a series I authored on tropical ecology. It is based on a term paper I wrote for an animal behavior class at Ohio State. The original term paper (“Dominance Hierarchies in Foraging Antbirds”),…
-
On Jinx Birds and the Great Snowy Owl and Bighorn Sheep Conspiracy
Most birders are familiar with the concept of a “jinx bird”. A jinx bird is a species that you have made repeated efforts, often over many years, to see. It is one where you have shown up repeatedly at locations where the species has been reported, and it has always just left the area right…
-
A Sense of Place: Ohio and the Mohican 100
As I write this, I am sitting on Southwest flight 4472, returning from a week in my home state of Ohio. While I have gone back to Ohio one or two times per year since I moved to California in 2003, this is my longest return visit, and the first where I’ve spent most of…