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Today, along with teams in a few other parts of Costa Rica and elsewhere, I will be birding for a cause, watching birds to help one that only lives in Costa Rica, the Cabanis’s Ground-Sparrow. Around the size of a Song Sparrow or Chaffinch , maybe a bit bigger, this mini towhee forages near the ground in dense scrubby vegetation.
After all, it’s not like I’m going to see anything other than the White-throated Sparrows and Northern Cardinals flitting about the brush pile outside my window. And just because we all need a good giggle now and then (me, especially, these days), and who better to provide it than the folks at Sesame Workshop, this happened.
Having spent too much time in the field trying to figure out if I’m hearing a Pine Warbler or a Chipping Sparrow, I’ve been focusing on my trills skills. The Warbler Guide Song and Call Companion is a highly recommended purchase for birders and naturalists who have bought or intend to buy The Warbler Guide.
I recently heard from Chris Kirkby, the Managing Director and Principal Investigator at Asociacion Fauna Forever , a Peruvian not-for-profit organisation based in Lima and Puerto Maldonado, about a series of bird-banding workshops being held this June and November in the rainforests of Tambopata in south-eastern Peru.
We will establish a series of online workshops, trainings, and seminars for young women. I am only including them in this post to give you my real-life Kabul experience … Four species are the most easily seen in the few urban parks (into which women are not actually allowed to enter – I am not sure about female birds).
Once the digiscoping workshop had moved on to Cammann’s Pond Park, where we had a good time digiscoping some cooperative waterfowl, herons, and kingfishers, I received a call from Tom letting me know that he and Gail Benson, another amazing New York birder, had found some Vesper Sparrows at the Theodore Roosevelt Nature Center.
First, from 8 AM until noon will be the “Shorebird Workshop for Advanced Birders” which will be led by Kevin Karlson, a co-author of The Shorebird Guide. Join me at Viera and we should see something as cool… On Friday, 23 January, I’ll be co-leading two trips.
The series of birding workshops and meetings continued across the map, through Ulcinj, Montenegro, then Samobor, Croatia and Stip (described here ), North Macedonia, leading to Brussels, the unofficial capital of EU. Possibly for the first time since 1980s, birders from the whole of former Yugoslavia sat together at the same table.
This may make taxonomic fanatics faint, but it is useful for learning how to differentiate amongst birds that look alike but really aren’t, like sparrows and longspurs, hummingbirds and swifts. I love the charts, and I only wish Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish them as PDFs that can be printed out and carried in the field.
Even more than warbler, shorebird, and sparrow identification, this is a field that tests our endurance (gull watching is too often done in bitter cold, windy conditions), patience (even getting one good photo can take hours as you try to separate the ‘interesting gull’ from the flock), observational skills (so many plumages!)
There are charismatic birds like Barrow’s Goldeneye, Evening Grosbeak, Red and White-winged Crossbills; mysterious seabirds like Leach’s Storm-Petrel; ‘little brown jobs’ like Winter Wren and Nelson’s Sparrow; a treasury of warbler species, 27 in all, many state breeders.
I read as much as I could, accumulating a fairly large library of field guides and ornithology texts, listened to recorded songs, and participated in a number of workshops in Cape May. The Harris’s Sparrow in Dryden. In the three years before my big year I birded in eight states, Puerto Rico, Canada, England and Japan.
In The Warbler Guide , Tom Stephenson and Scott Whittle drew on science to create sonograms, visual depictions of bird song that showed just how a Pine Warbler trill really was different from a Chipping Sparrow trill. And, while my initial reaction to that buffy-yellow Grasshopper Sparrow’s breast was “too yellow!”,
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