Snow in the Mountains
I had no sooner posted last week’s piece about David and Elizabeth Lack in the Pyrenees when there were barn swallows everywhere in the Biros Valley. Until then I had …
Grandeur and Novelty
How do small land birds migrate past high mountain ranges? This is not a question that has often been asked in the Americas because most of the big mountain ranges …
What’s in a (Bird’s) Name?
My old friend and mentor Jim Baillie [1] used to delight in the fact that many of the birds we’d see in our birding trips around southern Ontario would say …
Gone Birds
Last Friday, September 1st, was the anniversary of the death of Martha, the last Passenger Pigeon–a species that was, for centuries, the most abundant bird in North America. Martha was …
Birds and Revolutions
This month [see footnote 1] marks the anniversary of the famous 1858 Darwin-Wallace publication on natural selection published in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, …
Tools for Studying Birds
I bought a new pair of binos last week, from the incomparable Pelee Wings Nature Store near Point Pelee (the subject of a recent blog post) in Ontario. This is …
Great Lakes Ornithological Club
One of the pictures on the poster I displayed at the AOS booth at the conference last week showed 5 men who called themselves the Great Lakes Ornithological Club. The …