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Disbelief probably seems like the proper response to the idea that there are woodpeckers in NewYorkCity. But even birders might be surprised to learn that eight species of woodpecker have graced NewYorkCity’s five boroughs with their presence! Read on curious picophile, read on!
A NewYorkCity Parks Department contractor just wiped out a breeding population of sparrows in tons of trouble already, on land owned by the parks department that was supposed to be protected as “Forever Wild.” Still, I think we NewYork birders need to push for it. Another is in the works. .
Every spring they totally steal the show in the northeast and you really can’t blame birders for abandoning their jobs, their families, and their sanity as they rush to NewYorkCity’s abundant and amazing parks to see the show live and in technicolor. … Birds migration NewYorkCity wood-warblers'
Everyone is looking back on their best birds of 2019, so I thought it would be a good idea to look at a book that looks back a little further: Urban Ornithology: 150 Years of Birds in NewYorkCity , by P. The book is divided into three parts: “Introduction,” “Avifaunal Overview,” and “Species Accounts.”
Spotting 57 species of birds in the couple of hours we put in to seeking out birds was never so ho-hum in my life. Though I will grudgingly admit that a few of the birds we saw were alright, like the Northern Gannets in the bay and the Horned Grebes in breeding plumage. So-so looks at a brown swallow. How exciting. Of course it did.
But for some poorly (or not-at-all) understood reason, its spread across North America has shown a very northwesterly orientation, so while birders as far away from the epicenter of the North American introduction in Florida as British Columbia get to see Eurasian Collared-Doves regularly we New Yorkers and other northeasterners are deprived.
Seth Ausubel is one of the best birders in Queens, NewYork, and Corey is ever-so-thankful that Seth does not use eBird because that way Corey can pretend that he is the top lister in the borough. One of the least known stories of NewYork birding is the tale of the wild Mitred Parakeets. Are they breeding?
On Saturday I awakened at 3:30 AM, tiptoed out of the house as quietly as I could, and headed north and west to Sullivan County, the first of three counties I planned to visit in a series of surgical birding strikes to see (or hear) the birds I had thus far missed this year as they migrated through NewYorkCity.
All we do is complain about the lack of migrating birds so far and in NewYorkCity if southeast winds are blowing we are nearly despondent because southeast winds mean that the birds are moving north but the easterly component of the winds keep usually keep the bulk of birds to our west.
In the NewYorkCity area the number and variety of sparrows a birder can see in mid-April is astounding. I was lucky in that most of the wintering species hadn’t left yet but a bunch of species that spend the cold months further south had already arrived. I won’t even get into the Ammodramus sparrows.
The Yellow-throated Warbler is a wood-warbler that breeds almost exclusively in the southeastern United States. In NewYorkCity we get them as migratory overshoots though they do stick around and attempt to find a mate on occasion (and there has been documented breeding of the species in the state).
By the time urban and suburban sprawl started to reach New Jersey’s pine barrens they were largely protected and today over 1.1 millions acres are protected as the Pinelands National Reserve where development is controlled by an agency called the New Jersey Pinelands Commission.
Every place has a different dawn chorus and the gradual crescendo as the sky lightens and more species join their voices to the earliest singers is an experience that every single person should experience at least once. All of the birds are breed in Queens and I look forward to seeing them until they leave again in the fall.
When I woke up, discombobulated and confused, I saw that I had a voicemail on my phone from Isaac Grant, a Staten Island birder doing a NewYorkCity big year. Just like that I had reached 299 species in Queens! Then, having not managed to sleep much at all while I was on the plane, I fell asleep for several hours.
Still, the bill passed in 1970 with only one voice in opposition: Assemblyman Posner of the Bronx, who pointed out that most NewYorkCity inhabitants had never seen an Eastern Bluebird, and probably never will. Today, there are over 22 million breeding Eastern Bluebirds, and they are an IUCN species of Least Concern!
Corey had an absurd array of avians to choose from as his Best Bird of the Weekend considering that between Friday and Sunday he saw 148 species in his journeys around Queens, the Bronx, and Sullivan, Ulster, and Orange Counties.
We here in NewYorkCity (and in much of the northeastern United States) are dealing with a pretty major cold snap for late May, with temperatures last night falling down to 46 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius). Strong wind and lots of rain has only added to the misery.
NewYorkCity in July provides limited opportunities for birders to see birds. I saw a Willow Flycatcher , several Northern Mockingbirds , and a bunch of Yellow Warblers.
It’s among a handful of species — American Robin, Black-capped Chickadee , the unholy trinity of House Sparrow – Rock Pigeon – European Starling , a few others — that have been everywhere I’ve ever lived. We never would have gotten all those extra species of Red Crossbill that way.
A surprise was a Common Merganser , a bird we don’t see much in NewYorkCity and especially not flying over the coast in Brooklyn. The best birds we came up with on our circuit of each island was Great Cormorants in breeding plumage, very nice birds to see but not the rare gulls for which we were hoping.
We took a family outing up to that same Storm King Art Center, which is located about an hour north of NewYorkCity in Mountainville, Orange County, last weekend and had an absolute blast. We also observed some evidence of other speciesbreeding.
The old runway in particular is excellent shorebird habitat, and the open wet woodlands growing up from, for lack of a better word, fields, elsewhere on the property shelter nesting Warbling Vireos , Orchard and Baltimore Orioles , Yellow Warblers , Common Yellowthroats , Tree Swallows , Song Sparrows , and other species.
I’d seen nine warbler species, Baltimore Orioles , a brilliant Scarlet Tanager , and what seemed like dozens of catbirds when an odd warbler caught my eye. The mystery bird looked something like a male Blackpoll Warbler in alternate (breeding) plumage, but it was yellow and black instead of black and white.
Yes, sure, Rock Pigeons are not a vulnerable species, unless you count the number of times they have been mocked, scorned, and shooed away. They’re apparently not a sensitive species either, because this derision doesn’t seem to bother them at all! I will watch the pigeons of NewYorkCity.
I missed some very common species. Some were glaring misses since I started the year with a goal of 600 species (while working). Bicknell’s Thrush is a bird that is important to me because I grew up in NewYork’s Catskill Mountains, one of the places that it breeds. Washington in New Hampshire in July.
Part 2 You learn that swallows are hard in a place like NewYorkCity. I had discovered a newbreedingspecies — or a newbreedingspecies had discovered me. The Cliff Swallows are easy, very distinctive from above, with their white foreheads and pale rumps and metallic blue backs.
I decided to spend my day Friday birding the heck out of my home borough to see how many species I could track down for the day. Nonetheless, I ended up with 124 species of birds in Queens in the just-over-twelve-hours I spent birding. Still, any day in NewYorkCity with 124 species is a day well worth experiencing!
The New Jersey Bird Records Committee (NJBRC) documents 465 species of natural origin. This places New Jersey in the top third of our 52 states, which isn’t bad at all when you realize that New Jersey is one of the smallest states geographically. There are, sadly, entries for extinct species.
Now that I can travel, I have perversely discovered the charms of really working over one spot of habitat across the seasons and the years; as such I’m on a mission to find 100 species of bird in Socrates Sculpture Park, a bit of Queens between the East River and Vernon Boulevard where artists create open-air displays. Why an asterisk?
In "Council Bozos Want to Ban Circus Animals in City" Ellis Henican ridicules the NewYorkCity Council for introducing a bill to ban the "display of wild or exotic animals for public entertainment or amusement." The elitist “animal-rights” zealots hate to admit this.
192) from the timing of seasons to the ferocity of weather to the shape of breeding, wintering, and stopover habitat to even the size of birds themselves. It is early April as I write this, and migration is beginning to trickle through to NewYorkCity. It is often hard to be positive.
NewYorkCity apartments don’t allow feeders to be hung from fire escapes (though I know certain birders that skirt that rule), and it wasn’t until I had already been birding for four-and-a-half years that I obtained a small yard in central New Jersey in which I could place a feeder or two or three.
NewYorkCity makes it clear that this isn’t quite correct. According to the data the authors gathered from banded and recovered Blue Jays , the species shows both a northward post-breeding dispersal (which we’re probably seeing right now, in September) and a southward migration.
Third, Kirtland’s Warbler has only recently made the NewYork State checklist with two sightings in 2014. ( Fifth, Kirtland’s Warbler is an amazing conservation success story, having come back from the brink of extinction to the point where it is now proposed for delisting as an Endangered Species.
So we set to scanning, adding species and birders at a roughly two-to-one ratio. After the celebration we took a short drive to where the Prothonotary Warbler was reported and picked that species up for the year as well, to say nothing of a singing Cerulean Warbler and a Black-billed Cuckoo.
There is another area of the Queens County CBC where a team will also likely see Monk Parakeets , Myipsitta monachus , but I am seriously determined to count that bird for my area, Coastal Flushing, a section of northeast Queens, NewYork, that includes Whitestone, home of one of the loudest invasive bird species in the U.S.
When you are a NewYorkCity-based birder that is pretty pleased with the amount of boxes ticked off on your NewYork State checklist you would normally want a rarity that you have not seen in the state to show up within an hour drive of your home. And I even got to work on time! … a.
we learn) that are home to coveted boreal species, breeding wood-warblers, and two species of Grouse. There are 461 species on the Maine checklist. This field guide covers 265 species, the ones most likely to be seen–residential and migratory, almost all nesting birds, many wintering birds.
Queens, NewYork, May 2009 May is the month of migration in North America. My spring has been pretty amazing so far with 146 species spotted since April 1 and Cerulean , Worm-eating , and Yellow-throated Warblers and a host of other species spotted before May even arrived, but the first couple of days in May have been even better.
The guide covers 520 species of birds regularly found in the eastern United States and southeastern Canada, including, interestingly, a number of exotic species. There is also a traditional index to bird species, by common and scientific name. Species Accounts are arranged taxonomically, grouped by family.
It also makes sense, what with the black-on-yellow stripes and its pugnacious personality when it comes to defending both feeding areas and its breeding turf. Fortunately for birders, the Cape May Warbler is considered a Species of Least Concern by Birdlife International because of its large range and large and stable population.
July in NewYorkCity is generally an unpleasant experience. This is why New Yorkers in summer have fled the city for the mountains upstate, the beaches on Long Island, or, really, anywhere, for as long as NewYork has been a metropolis. Sandhill Crane , species number 330 in Queens!
There are 35 raptor species that have a presence in the United States and Canada, 56 (more or less) if you count by subspecies, and they are all covered in admirable, exhausting, unbelievable detail in B irds of Prey of the East: A Field Guide and Birds of Prey of the West: A Field Guide by Brian K. Species Accounts.
Now that I live in NewYorkCity I rarely manage to make it that far north and when I do it tends to be winter, which is kind of odd. Montreal, while far to the north of NewYorkCity, is in Canada, which is certainly not the Adirondacks. Shows what I know about when birds breed. Wait, what?
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