10,000 Birds

DECEMBER 16, 2016

Last week many birders were shocked and saddened by the deaths of thousands of Snow Geese who, trapped by adverse weather conditions, landed at the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana. As an Explainer of Montana, I am here to help. You may be curious about what exactly is the deal with that.

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Montana Geese Collecting Species 141

10,000 Birds

JUNE 20, 2014

The species that calls western Montana home is the black cottonwood, while plains and narrowleaf cottonwood call the rest of the state home. They can grow large and magnificent, providing trunks large enough for dug-out canoes and building materials along with medicine and other practical uses from their buds and bark.

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Montana Cattle Deer Shelters 158

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 12, 2021

There is also a research institute dedicated to wilderness: the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute is an interagency facility located at the University of Montana. For example, hunting is not permitted in most NPS wilderness areas, but it is often allowed in wilderness areas managed by the other agencies.

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Puerto Rico Alaska Protection Montana 234

10,000 Birds

MAY 19, 2015

If you’ve ever wanted to understand why warning calls by one bird species seem to spread rapidly, like an avian version of the Wave , to birds of other species, Professor Erick Greene from the University of Montana is your man. (From the film version of Doctor Dolittle ).

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Montana New York Times Science New York 154

10,000 Birds

SEPTEMBER 20, 2013

I also ran into a local birder who was unimpressed when I gushed about how much I was enjoying my morning — until I explained that I was from Montana. Well, I am sort of am from Montana now, I guess. My last species in the park was Wood Duck , which we have in Montana too but which is always fun to see.

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Montana New York City New York Nashville 160

10,000 Birds

MAY 24, 2013

When you move on to Montana, you discover that there are worse things that one species of tiny screaming mammal tricking you each year as you try to cope with an influx of songbirds and a winterized memory bank that contains only Black-capped Chickadees and Dark-eyed Juncos (and only about half their calls at that.)

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Chipmunks Squirrels Rodents Montana 176

10,000 Birds

JUNE 23, 2017

A long trip to a distant hot spot, a targeted species, the careful working of a patch, a heady plunge into the whirlpool of migration or a determined sifting of shorebirds, gulls, distant raptors – all these varieties of birding have their own pleasures and proponents. It’s one thing to go birding.

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Montana Birds Fish Groups 133

10,000 Birds

JANUARY 20, 2017

Last night I lay awake from 4 am til almost 5, worrying about the black-footed ferrets I met in Montana and the humans who had devoted their lives to helping them. As my fellow blogger Meredith Mann pointed out last summer, the Endangered Species Act in particular has been a massive success for birds.

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Endangered Species Ferrets Montana United States 100

10,000 Birds

DECEMBER 14, 2018

This year, a few months after my fortieth birthday, when I saw a Blue Jay in West Glacier Montana I felt only a small bit of surprise – it was an uncommon bird but no longer really extralimital as a wintering species. 1978, for reference, was the year of my birth.

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Montana Oregon New York Times Deer 140

10,000 Birds

DECEMBER 2, 2016

Sandhill Cranes , ancient and currently abundant – the most abundant species of crane in the world – are nevertheless almost miraculous to me every time I see them. The five subspecies – Greater, Lesser, Mississippi, Florida, Cuban – show the genetic marks of what the species has had to do to survive.

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California Condor Mississippi Florida Montana 153

10,000 Birds

AUGUST 16, 2013

Still, it was an occasion worthy of more note than it has received, and true to tradition I have seen the species again several times since then, mostly notably during my float down the North Fork of the Flathead River in July. I’ve also failed to designate a new nemesis.

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Montana Blackbirds Birds Eagles 156

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 13, 2018

As of mid-October 2018, the Collaborative had submitted more than 1,700 checklists and observed 618 species in the United States. The heat map is revealing: Unsurprisingly for a site founded and run by two New Yorkers (one of whom literally wrote the book on birding New York), the Empire State boasts the highest number of species (316).

Rhode Island 114

Rhode Island United States West Virginia Puerto Rico 114

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 1, 2013

A week ago today, the federal government proposed a “threatened” listing for the Greater Sage Grouse in Nevada and California , as part of a larger study considering whether the species as a whole should be listed. Conservation Endangered Species Act Greater Sage Grouse sage-grouse'

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Nevada Endangered Species Montana Humane 159

10,000 Birds

MARCH 21, 2014

And yet, perhaps ironically, the biggest sign of spring in a Montana March is when the skies fill with white. Snow Geese overgrazing their breeding grounds, displacing other Arctic-breeding species and setting themselves up for a fall. The result?

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Geese Montana Pelicans Breeding 175

10,000 Birds

AUGUST 13, 2019

Critically, NWRs preserve habitat and wildlife, often for endangered species. Lee Metcalf NWR (Montana): 178,000; $4.5 Of course, the study does not purport to rank refuges based on visitation-based economic output, as that is just one metric. John Heinz NWR (Pennsylvania): 358,000; $4.6 million; 35 jobs. million; 293 jobs.

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Wildlife Maryland San Francisco Minnesota 232

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 2, 2012

With all my traipsing about this year I’ve actually been shamefully lax on birding Montana. Montana offers little in the way of flamingos, generally speaking. No Snow Geese or swans yet, and no Sandhill Cranes , but it did renew my taste for some of the simpler, homier pleasures of birding.

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Bald Eagle Montana Italy Owls 105

10,000 Birds

JULY 26, 2013

The swallows here in Montana have an admirable ability to assort themselves into nesting niches. I had always seen them well over my head, in rocky canyons, and given that they are an exclusively Western species, I assumed this is why. Bank Swallows live in our many sandy banks. Tree Swallows live in trees — and nest boxes.

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Montana Woodpeckers Eggs Raised 156

10,000 Birds

APRIL 2, 2024

Osborn, a passionate field biologist who participates to the core of her being three re-introduction projects aimed at saving three very different, endangered species: Peregrine Falcon, Hawaiian Crow (‘Alala)*, and California Condor. Sophie Osborn’s stories are personal and inspiring, but this is more than a personal memoir.

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California Condor Falcons California Coyotes 163

10,000 Birds

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

The landscape known as the Crown of the Continent extends from northern Idaho and Wyoming through Montana to the Canadian border, linking the Greater Yellowstone and Salmon-Selway ecosystems and including Grand Teton, Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks.

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Legislation Montana Wyoming Idaho 172

10,000 Birds

JUNE 7, 2013

Since I moved to Montana I’ve been updating it sporadically at best, and over the past year or so, not at all. Perhaps, too, it doesn’t hurt that the number of lists from Montana is large enough to create meaningful pictures in the data, but small enough that I feel like I’m really contributing in some way.

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Montana 2007 Game Birds 162

10,000 Birds

OCTOBER 5, 2012

I just chalked this up to my friends being weird, until I took the Master Naturalist Class at the Montana Natural History this fall. And apparently, non-birders are more apt to divide birds into general kinds than species lists. Way, way back, during our inuagural game of Gone Birding , my friend Molly developed a theory of birds.

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Montana Bald Eagle Owls Ducks 159

10,000 Birds

MARCH 24, 2017

Only a little for Ezra, whose suffering was quickly ended, and certainly not for Red-tailed Hawks as a whole – the species is numerous, widespread, adaptable, and not in a position to be devastated by the loss of a single breeding individual.

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Feral Cats Montana Suffering 2006 104

10,000 Birds

JANUARY 24, 2014

Though hardly common, Great Gray sightings are a yearly occurrence in Western Montana, and it is one of the twelve species of owl known to breed in the state. As a result, its territory in the Rocky Mountains extends far south of the bulk of its range. Photos courtesy of Asta So. *I Birding Great Gray Owl owls'

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Owls Minnesota Montana 2014 212

10,000 Birds

APRIL 12, 2013

” Not because there’s anything wrong with common or confiding species, but because depending on where you live and what you do with your habitat, darn near anything can be a backyard bird. Here in Montana I use an expansive definition of “yard” to put Barrow’s Goldeneye on my yard-list.

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Atlanta Ohio Montana Jamaica 133

Critter News

JANUARY 30, 2009

Wildlife conservationists say the freeze will delay and possibly prevent the removal of gray wolves from the federal endangered species list in Montana, Idaho, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, and also in portions of Washington, Oregon, Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.

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Wolves Obama South Dakota North Dakota 100

10,000 Birds

MAY 26, 2011

I imagine these explorers had the same reaction as the Lewis and Clark expedition as they moved from the tallgrass prairies of North Dakota and Montana into the northern Rockies of western Montana. Views like this offer specialty niches for many high-altitude species. This species is an athletic and patient one.

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Colorado North Dakota Montana Owls 134

10,000 Birds

MARCH 2, 2012

It was the most of either species I can remember seeing in one place, and they were hyped about the berries that the mountain ash still bore. I haven’t lived in Montana long enough to feel jaded about Bohemian Waxwings, so I concentrated on them at first. Definitely not spring. I was told there’d be worms.

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Downers Montana Fish Wildlife 168

10,000 Birds

AUGUST 16, 2011

Female White-browed Shortwing ( Brachypteryx montana ) at nest with two nestlings. Heading down to a lower region of Doi Inthanon, we took a forest track in the hope of turning up a parrotbill that had been seen in the area that morning (one of my target species).

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Thailand Montana Birds Africa 179

10,000 Birds

JULY 1, 2011

Moreover, at the time I had no inkling that I’d be moving to Montana in two and a half years – in fact, it would be nearly a year before I decided to go to grad school and entertained the notion of leaving New York at all. In Central Park , to be exact. It was exciting — to a degree. And every time, it was exciting.

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New York Montana Breeding Fish 164

10,000 Birds

DECEMBER 21, 2012

Wednesday morning I woke up late, as I had been showing some Montana guests the highlights of the East Village bar scene on Tuesday night. From the futon I detected the strains of Vangelis. How odd, I thought. That seems out of character for my friends’ ring tones.

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Eagles Psychology Primates Montana 134

10,000 Birds

APRIL 13, 2012

Last week was spring break at the University of Montana, and so, for me, a chance for a brief flying visit back east. Yesterday, there were none. Today, Tree Swallows are here, flashing light and dark above the river. Now, let’s back up. Though spring migration is only just starting to ramp up there, of course I had to visit the Ramble.

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Chicago Litter Louisiana Montana 169

10,000 Birds

JULY 4, 2018

Since he first started walking his property, he’s located a slew of species so exciting that birders are starting to turn up at his doorstep. Nonetheless, a birder’s initial experience in Honduras sets him or her on an inexorable course towards the only species currently named for this gem of a country. MONTANA DE VIDA.

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Honduras Birds Farming America 126

10,000 Birds

DECEMBER 27, 2013

My best bird of the year is based on the sighting rather than the species. My best bird of the year was without a doubt the Montana Baikal Teal , a bird that combined rarity, beauty, and the good grace to stick around long enough for me to actually see it. Montana’s Baikal Teal by suneko. Rock Warbler by Clare Morton.

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2013 Costa Rica Birds India 167

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 15, 2013

In each instance they start with a striking anecdote — my particular favorite took place on the University of Montana campus, where in 1964 an American Crow learned to call and taunt stray dogs into causing perhaps the most adorable college riots of the decade.

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Humane Stray Dog Emotional Science 136

10,000 Birds

JUNE 15, 2012

On the first day, before the sun was even properly up, I already had one of my target species under my belt: the storied and spectacular White Stork. My travelling companion, also from the University of Montana creative writing program, was not a nature girl at all, but she could relate to birds that played a role in stories.

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Spain Europe Rodents France 166

10,000 Birds

FEBRUARY 20, 2015

I’ve only seen this handsome, copper-headed duck once before, years ago – being in Montana didn’t help on that front – and from all accounts this bird was showing well. Do I pursue the sporadic, maybe-not-really-a-species Common Teal ? Except when I looked for it the first time, and it didn’t show at all.

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Iceland Owls Ducks Montana 160

10,000 Birds

MARCH 11, 2011

With a hardiness that belies their delicate looks (but helps explain their phenomenal success), these pioneering pigeons are already sitting on eggs at at least one location in Montana. Hochachka noted that one had spent the winter “as far north as eastern Montana&#. Whatever they used to be, they are now a bird of Montana.

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Montana 2011 Bahamas Deer 131