This site uses cookies to improve your experience. To help us insure we adhere to various privacy regulations, please select your country/region of residence. If you do not select a country, we will assume you are from the United States. Select your Cookie Settings or view our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Used for the proper function of the website
Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Strictly Necessary: Used for the proper function of the website
Performance/Analytics: Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
North America is home to many amazing bird species, including several which require a special effort to see and appreciate. These birds also invite one to sites that are unique within the United States – the climate, vegetation, and landscapes all add context and heighten the experience of seeing one’s first Elegant Trogon or Painted Bunting.
It actually makes a lot of sense, the geographic features of the isthmus between North America (including Mexico, because Mexico is part of North America) and South America cut across political lines, as do birds. It is the first bird field guide to every country of Central America (plus the islands governed by those countries).
Not surprisingly, ten of these 19 countries are in the Americas, but what does surprise me, there are just 4 in Africa and just 1 in Asia (2 if you count Indonesia). They would like to experience it, but have no sufficient knowledge of its birding possibilities to choose one, or a few, instead of a continent as a whole.
Feeding Wild Birds in America: Culture, Commerce & Conservation by Paul J. The growth of community bird feeding programs in the 1920’s, for example, is shown to be rooted in post-World War I America prosperity–more spending money, more time, and (this is the part I like) the availability of cheap grain. And conservation.
But hands-on bird experience has been a major gap in my knowledge to date and I’m astounded at how much more I’m discovering about birds. These are the largest nightjars in North America, significantly larger than Whip-poor-will or any of the nighthawks. In Florida, many birds remain year-round.
But my experience suggests there is a fair amount of geographical overlap between the two ranges in my area. southwest, but it is a permanent resident in western Mexico and parts of Central America. Yellow Warblers are altitudinal migrants within the state of Michoacán, wintering in the lowlands and summering in the highlands.
The result is always ugly (see example above) and the opposite of what we seek: personal experiences and thoughts related to birds and birding, not some ChatGPT-written blurb. Call it misleading advertising. If neither that nor that we do not pay anything does not put you off, please get in touch.
One of my favorite things about Central America are the bird feeders. They are species that breed in the US and then spend the winter in Central and South America, eating what’s avialable–especially fruit. Fruit is something that migratory birds could eat and worth trying in your yard in North America.
In this first installment, I will focus on my impressions and experiences in the highlands portion of our tour. Before finally connecting to the South American continent about three million years ago, Central America consisted of a series of volcanic islands. In short, the mountain birding in Honduras promised a slew of cool new birds.
Podilymbus podiceps is most certainly common in my experience, able to be seen consistently across varied habitats throughout nearly all of North America and much of South America. The Pied-billed Grebe , a most wondrous waterfowl, perfectly exemplify the distinction between common and mundane.
Corey’s Best Bird of the Weekend was a surprise American Golden-Plover at Big Egg Marsh in Queens, a very good bird for the east coast in spring, as they tend to migrate north through the center of North America. If you’ve blogged about your weekend experience, you should include a link in your comment. How about you?
These thirty-eight years of experience went fast but that is what happens when you have fun, right? Brazil has the largest number of endemics of South America. Please consider using the services described in this post or any of the other posts we are sharing this February. My name is Paulo Boute. The food is fantastic.
During a mild-by-adult-standards hike with the kids this weekend, I was charmed by the antics of singing Ruby-crowned Kinglets , harbingers of a wave of imminent warblers to this northern outpost of America. If you’ve blogged about your weekend experience, you should include a link in your comment. Birding best bird weekend'
The Durango Highway is arguably one of North America’s great birding roads due to the great variety of habitats, the spectacular mountain scenery of the Sierra Madre Occidental, and the numerous Mexican endemics one can target. Thus, I looked forward to this second portion of the trip with great anticipation.
Three similar subspecies are distributed regionally from the Caribbean to South America and the Galápagos Islands. Paradise Island in the Bahamas is, in my experience, a perfect place to spy these pintails.
This Chat winters along the coast of Mexico and throughout Central America. You may not know that Mexico is part of North, not Central, America.) Nevertheless, I have seen it often in my area, far from the coast, in every month from October through April, and even once in August.
What happens when you visit one of the best birdwatching sites in the region with the highest number of endemic bird species in the Americas in the world’s birdiest country? completed the experience. The experience, as magical as it was, feels far from complete. Trips Cerro Montezuma Choco Region Colombia South America'
Winter may not technically begin for another couple of weeks, but frigid temperatures and wicked snow are assailing various parts of North America. If you’ve blogged about your weekend experience, you should include a link in your comment. What was your best bird of the weekend? Birding best bird weekend'
I have taken refuge on the high ground as Irene batters the east coast of North America and Nanmadol swamps the Philipines, Taiwan and east China, but my thoughts and best wishes are with anyone who has been affected by the storms.
Corey’s Best Bird of the Weekend, on the other hand, was a relatively common diving duck in the Americas. If you’ve blogged about your weekend experience, you should include a link in your comment. I can’t say the same for Gray Treepie , so let’s go with that. One of those ravishing Redheads is pictured above.
This was one of those weekends where I was so busy writing about birds — in this case a presentation on my adventures in avitourism throughout Central America — that I couldn’t actually look at any new ones. If you’ve blogged about your weekend experience, you should include a link in your comment.
Grant McCreary of The Birder’s Library , who shared the experience with me, probably has pretty much the same problem. Purple Gallinules live in marshes in the southeastern United States, Central America, northern South America, and the Caribbean. What do you do with hundreds of picture of Purple Gallinules ?
The dichotomous republic of Trinidad and Tobago may be something of a cipher to anyone unfamiliar with the point where the Caribbean ends and South America begins. I’ve been privileged to travel somewhat extensively through the Americas, but I still pulled a ton of lifers from the veranda before my first breakfast.
He happily commented: “I am now well ahead of Noah’s pace, while I haven’t even started my journey through Africa and, last but not least, the most bird-rich continent of all, South America. My Big Year is such a succession of new experiences that there is simply no time to think of other things.
No, I haven’t lost track of the calendar — though that’s quickly becoming a more common experience in our new reality — but occasionally life gets in the way of blogging, which is what happened this week. I don’t have a proper post ready for you today, meaning there’s no customary Birds and Booze story and review for now.
North America is in the prime of raptor migration season, with millions of hawks, accipters, and buteos flying south for the winter. Calling all hawkeyes! Enter the Audubon Society. The organization has just released a map to the best raptor-watching sites in the United States.
Sure, this is my first trip to North America, but still, who could find fault with 20+ wood warblers in a day? And so when we heard that there were Woodcocks displaying in the Maumee Bay State Park, we naturally jumped on the opportunity to get out there and experience the action live in person. Unsatisfying.
My one sighting of the little-known Sinaloa Martin outside of summer had occurred on a 29th of February, and I hoped to repeat that experience. Three years of my experience shows that they most certainly do. (On That hope was, in fact, not be realized, but I did find a good number of other consolation prizes during my outing.
Anyone who has gone bird watching in North America, however, knows another kind of phoebe, a bold little genus that turns up with remarkable frequency from the arctic circle to the equator. This phoebe is a fixture in the American Southwest and Central America and can be spotted all the way down to Argentina.
You can get a sense of the breadth of my European birding experience by how many of my lifers have the word “Common” in their names. Oystercatchers are unquestionably cool birds, and, even in North America, a rare treat. (Question: Is it technically correct to speak of a lone bird “mobbing”?).
An Arctic Tern depicted by John James Audubon (1785-1851) in The Birds of America. For those of us who only experience one summer a year and are currently hibernating comfortably indoors for at least a few more weeks, Moon & Back is a perfectly decadent treat to keep you warm on the coldest of winter nights.
Teams were composed of experience birders in their respective countries, but levels of expertise among birders varied from those with plenty of experience in the Neotropics, including some of the authors of the book “The Birds of Peru” to those for whom coming to Peru was their first time in Latin America.
They packed up in June of 2013 and headed south from San Diego with the southern tip of South America as their destination. Spending days searching for an elusive bird you finally get to see, a bird that few others have seen, a bird about which very little is even known, and then seeing it is a tremendous and unforgettable experience.
Florida is perhaps the one place in the United States where you can rack up a pretty great list of birds, including some of North America’s most impressive species, simply by walking down the sidewalk for an hour or so. That was largely due to the vagaries of a single rental car and two young children, but it wasn’t so bad.
The latest from his pen is Birds of Prey , a hybrid between an identification guide and an essay collection, a book of lore that provides a comprehensive overview of the raptors of North America. Birds of Prey: Hawks, Eagles, Falcons, and Vultures of North America by Pete Dunne with Kevin T. Karlson, $26.00, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
However, if we’re being fair, one of the irrefutable elements that makes America great is our proliferation of Northern Cardinals. If you’ve blogged about your weekend experience, you should include a link in your comment. What was your best bird of the weekend? Birding best bird weekend'
It’s a rush any new birder experiences: that of every species being a lifer. Once you’ve been around the birding block a few years, your appreciation for the lifer experience deepens greatly. Which is why we all eventually turn to the one way to combine old-birder experience with new-birder opportunities: travel.
As I have mentioned repeatedly over the past months, life this spring has gone topsy-turvy in central Mexico, as we experience what has certainly been one of our driest years in history. Unlike the Purple Martin , however, it has a bright white belly, with males showing a sharp and elegant division between the two colors.
Each chapter focuses on a specific geographic area of penguin population: (1) Antarctica, (2) South Georgia, (3) Falkland Islands, (4) South Africa and Tristan de Cunha, (5) New Zealand and Australia, (6) South America and Galapagos. Sections and subsections are denoted with the types of outline numbers I used to use in high school.
After all, North America has no native hedgehogs and seeing something so outside of our normal experience was pretty exciting, even if the little guy quickly headed for cover and refused to show itself for Clay Taylor, who came upon the scene a minute too late. Fine, my best bird was a White-backed Woodpecker , alright? …
I birded savannas of Southern Africa, I birded India and Central America, and I always missed having a local mammal guide with me. Yes, field guides to other groups of organisms, as there’s hardly any room left in your baggage or the energy to carry it. Yet, those bird guides are hefty. Larger species, that is, excluding dolphins and whales.
Right now great flocks of wood-warblers are making their way north from the southern United States, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America to breed across the United States and Canada. Read about them here but also get out and experience them. You won’t regret it! ———————————————————————————————————————————————— a.
Seriously, cardinals are both gorgeous and interesting , but their familiarity across most of North America breeds indifference if not contempt. If you’ve blogged about your weekend experience, you should include a link in your comment. Corey’s Best Bird of the Weekend was an easy one to choose.
The many islands of the Caribbean Sea are as unique a place to experience the amazing potential for speciation and diversity as the more famous Galapagos and Hawaiian islands are. As a hanger-on of my wife’s family I find myself this week in Aruba, one of the ABC islands just off the coast of northern South America.
We organize all of the trending information in your field so you don't have to. Join 30+ users and stay up to date on the latest articles your peers are reading.
You know about us, now we want to get to know you!
Let's personalize your content
Let's get even more personalized
We recognize your account from another site in our network, please click 'Send Email' below to continue with verifying your account and setting a password.
Let's personalize your content