查看更多>>摘要：Peregrine Falcons show the value of our south-most hawk count. I gained the second floor of the campground bath-and-shower building with a minimum of huff and only a trace of puff. Back in my day, I was known to double-time it up to the North Lookoutat Hawk Mountain, so it's hard to admit that a mere flight of stairs (taken hurriedly) is now enough to make me winded. "Hello," I said to the back of Rafael Antonio Galvez, hawk counter at Curry Hammock State Park. "You made it," he said, smiling. Immediately, a question from another visitor and the spotting scope-torturing efforts of Boy Scout Troop 914, who were, likewise, in attendance, quickly claimed the thirty-something-year-old's attention.
查看更多>>摘要：You are unlikely to forget your first encounter with a Burrowing Owl. Mine came on a September afternoon on the outskirts of Wildhorse Golf Club in Davis, California. I had learned that the course was managed to provide habitat for the owls, but I didn't quite know how to find them, so I decided to make my way toward a black plastic tube protruding from a mound of earth. As I approached, a pair of bright yellow eyes appeared inside. Then a brown owl popped out into full view, like a little footballon stilts. Curious about the sound of my clicking camera, the owl tilted its head so far to one side I thought it might lose its balance. I'll never forget it.
查看更多>>摘要：I can think of no better way to start off the new year than to walk out the front door in the pre-dawn darkness and hear two different owl species calling. That is what happened to me on January 1,2009, at my home in Phoenix. In the distance, I heardthe faint bouncing ball-like call of a Western Screech-Owl, a small owl occasionally found in urban areas around the city. From the opposite direction came the low hooting call of a Great Horned Owl, a fairly common resident of our neighborhood. I sometimes hear the pair, but I rarely hear both at the same time, as I did that morning.
查看更多>>摘要：Used to be, you had to talk to someone to hear a good birding story. Or read a book, magazine, or newsletter. These days, real-life tales from fellow birdwatchers are available seven days a week, 24 hours a day, via the internet and your computer. Tojoin in the fun, all you need is an email account and a subscription to what the digital cognoscenti know as a listserv — a high-tech computer programmed to perform a low-tech function: to receive the emails that subscribers send to it and then re-emailthem immediately to every other subscriber. More than 100 bird-related English-language listservs are in operation in North America, and for the last year or so, I have subscribed to every one. The experience filled just about all my non-birding hours.I read as birdwatchers shared sightings, asked questions, gave directions, discussed bird identification, told jokes, and announced birdwalks, lectures, and festivals.
查看更多>>摘要：Some ID topics are too complex to be covered in five photos and a few hundred words. Among large gulls, for example, it would take more than a dozen photos to show important plumages of just one species and dozens more to compare similar species. So in this column we focus on tips, hoping to shed light on specific points seen in the field. California Gull is a common nesting bird in the interior of the western United States and western Canada, wintering mainly on the Pacific coast. East of the plains, it is always a rare find but always possible, so birders everywhere in North America have reason to be aware of it.
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